Stop Thinking as an Editor ...
Posted on Wednesday, May 30, 2012 at 10:09 AM
...start thinking as a reader.
By Jan V. White
Words
are what you think with. Everything you value is verbal. Of course it
is. You can take it for granted that your story starts with a headline
of some kind because you are trained to think that way. For you, the
words are what matters and if you have a picture or diagram or visual of
some kind, it is merely a secondary "illustrative" element. It may well
enrich your story, but words always come first, because our culture
assumes the primacy of the Word. (See Genesis 1.1.)
You
are absolutely right -- in the context of a self-contained "story,"
letter, report, essay, poem, article, whatever. With deepest
professional empathy and sympathy, I submit to you that you're getting
it bass-ackwards if that verbal effort you are concerned with is merely
a segment of a concatenation of such pieces such as a magazine.
Trouble
is that doing a superb writing job ain't nuthin' if you forget that you
gotta sell the durned thing to the durned reader. Like it or not, selling
your story is vital in our regrettably non-intellectual world.
Not
worth mentioning?
This selling-process is so simple and
obvious that it is never even mentioned in polite editorial society.
Here's how it works:
1. The somewhat interested looker is
flipping pages, glancing and searching for interesting stuff. Hurry! 2.
All those grey words, words, words and even their interrupting boldfaced
display. They demand cogitation, thinking. Hey, that's work. The reader
will skip it. 3. Picture! Immediate emotional reaction, curiosity,
finding answers, getting involved. Sure! Is this a bit oversimplified?
Are there indeed stories that people want to read as text? Well, of
course there are. Nevertheless, the undisputed fact is that readers look
at pictures first.
Therefore, it follows that the pictures
should come first in the vital attention-getting sequence of a story.
Any story that has pictures. Yes!
Examples
Let me
illustrate my point with two simple examples, one before, one after.
Before
The
editor's habitual presentation:
1. hed
2. txt
3. cut
4.
cutline or legend
____________________
How
am I supposed to know?
This following bit of text is
"dummy type," but there might be something in there worth bothering to
read. Heads are often assumed to be irresistible as a question. Maybe.
Here I used a question because I want to compare this "before" to the
"after" that follows. Yes, the vast majority of potential readers start
at the top of the page, normally with a provocative headline first. A
beguiling first sentence draws the reader into the story, then the rest
of the guff follows below it. Then, way down below, comes a photo as a
sort of added footnote. Why a "footnote"? Because it is at the bottom,
and therefore it is in an unimportant place. Any stuff at the top is
important, but stuff below it is less important. Stuff at the very
bottom is the least important and a pathetic footnote. Yet the legend
(or cutline), the most important wording on the page because it answers
the question that the photo has raised, is downplayed down there. What a
waste. What is the result of the piece? Just the normal report-like
story, just like any other wordy essay. Yes, with a bit of a visual
surprise down below, because the photo is supposed to make you smile.
(In truth, it makes me depressed because I look so old, but ignore
that.) The article depends 100 percent on the excitement of the
questioning words at the top.
Who
he? Some guy. Who cares? Not important. Forget it.
¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯
After
The
canny editor's presentation:
1. cut
2. cutline or legend
(optional?)
3. hed
4. txt
____________________
How
am I supposed to know?
That's
the guy who was credited to have invented that great new doohickey --
didn't he? This is a much more magnetic presentation, because the
headline is also the caption to the photo. The two elements work
together so that one plus one equals three. That gets you fast,
immediate explanation, which will draw attention to your story. How?
First comes the puzzling image that creates the reaction of curiosity.
That curiosity is encouraged by the questioning image itself. The second
of the one-two punch is the questioning headline explaining it (while it
also acts as a sort of tickler-file). It acts as a cutline because the
two elements (i.e., the picture and its headline) are a melded unit of
thinking. The third element that flows out of the whole story is the
irresistible answer to all that questioning, i.e., the article itself
that you are reading right now, despite the fact that I've repeated the
thinking because I want to make this dummy type a bit longer. The first
sentence could start flowing out of the questions in some way, as
perhaps, "Well, he says he doesn't know, but he has a pretty good idea
... blah blah blah.
¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯
Here's
the Point...
... put cut at top instead!
Jan
White lectures worldwide on the relationship of editing to design. He
tries to persuade word people to think visually and visual people to
think verbally. He is the author of Editing by Design, 3rd Ed,
and a dozen books on publishing techniques. Contact him at janvw2@aol.com.
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