Part 39: Mumbling in Style

Encouraged by , I set out to find a news organization that would let me do an internship.

Since I had accumulated so many credit hours and fulfilled all my other requirements, all I needed to take for my degree at UMBC was the core emergency health services curriculum. Every semester I had to find internship or electives to fill up my schedule to full-time status in order to remain eligible for financial aid.

It wasn’t just idle interest. I needed an internship.

I flipped open the phone book, turned to the yellow pages and looked at the listings under News and Media. The first listing was for Associated Press.

I called the Baltimore AP bureau and asked if they used interns. Sure we use interns, the bureau chief told me. Unpaid. Come in Saturday morning.

For the semester, I had emergency health services classes—management, budgeting, planning—during the weekdays. Every Saturday I spent at the AP offices downtown on St. Paul Street, overlooking Preston Gardens.

My first day there was a blustery frosted winter morning. I found the third-floor office and introduced myself to the only person there, David Wallace. Teletype machines lined one wall of the office, some of them clattering intermittently.

“I’m your intern,” I said to Wallace.

“Great,” he said. “Are you an English major or journalism?”

“Neither,” I said. “Emergency health services.”

Wallace shrugged and gestured to cluttered desk. He was the weekend editor, and was used to working alone in the offices. He handed me some torn sheets of teletype paper and told me look through for stories that were relevant to Baltimore and rewrite them. I was there all of five minutes, and already writing.

I struggled with the first story for a while, typing it on an electric typewriter, and handed it to Wallace when finished. He hunched over while reading it, making marks with a pencil. He showed me a few things I did wrong. Numbers are spelled out if they’re between one and ten, but above ten you use the digits, he said.

“Do you have a copy the AP style book?” Wallace asked.

“The what?”

Wallace handed me a blue spiral-bound softcover book. The AP style book is the bible of journalism, with all the rules for abbreviations, titles, capitalization and other matters of style.

Over the subsequent weeks that we worked together, Wallace taught me a lot of things--the inverted pyramid format of a news story, the active voice, how to write for broadcast, etc. Because Saturdays were slow at AP, we had the leisure to talk about these things. In a busier newsroom, nobody would have had the time for my stupid questions.

Mostly the experience at AP taught me how to write on demand. Up until then, all of my writing had sprung from my own mind. Whatever captured my interest. It’s very different when somebody else chooses the subject and sets the standard. I had to work on whatever stories came across the desk—politics, business, sports, crime—and do it to AP standards.

Wallace also let me do some original reporting, dispatching me to Baltimore National Cemetery on Frederick Road to cover a Civil War memorial. Somewhere tucked away in a file folder is a faded sheet of teletype paper with my first wire story.

Wallace’s most significant impact on me was probably unintentional. That first day I spent at the AP bureau, I noticed that he tended to mutter to himself as he wrote. At times I thought he was speaking to me, but whenever looked over he was staring intently at his monitor screen.

The mumbling got to me. Finally I asked what that was about.

He explained that he was reading his work aloud as he wrote. It’s the best way to make sure your writing is natural and flows smoothly. When you read aloud, awkward constructions and wordy phrases stand out like a sore thumb. If you stumble over something while reading aloud, it won’t appear right to readers either.

“Imagine you’re having a conversation with the reader,” Wallace said.

I’ve since learned that this is known as the oratorical approach to writing, and it’s the style I’ve adopted for most of my work ever since.