Tag: inverted pyramid

The technically correct strapline

(Re)Stumbled upon this article, by Ed Yong in The Atlantic, July 2016, this morning. As usual, it is rivetingly packaged. The strapline in particular caught my eye:

Biology textbooks tell us that lichens are alliances between two organisms—a fungus and an alga. They are wrong.

Makes you go “Wow”, doesn’t it? But then you read the article and realise the strap is not entirely right. Lichens are still symbiotic unions of fungi and algae; the new finding is that there are two types of fungi involved, not one. You realise it’s the sort of blurb that only a pedantic biologist might be able to defend, or the sort of blurb most readers could be expected to gloss over because the article’s author is Ed Yong.

I would never have used this strapline to describe the story. Instead, here’s the one we did use for Nandita Jayaraj’s story on the same topic:

Lichens are the most famous and successful examples of symbiosis on Earth, but an unexpected discovery of a third player in this composite organism has given their study a much needed jolt.

As R. Prasad, the science editor of The Hindu, says,

… the strapline (or deck) together with the headline makes the sales pitch to the reader for her time. The headline is often the sole bit of metadata that will be most visible on platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and is the one that’ll be most commonly shared (my guess). This way, the headline makes the all-important elevator pitch to bring the reader off of her platform and onto our site. Once she’s here, the strapline makes a more extended pitch to get her to start reading the body.

For curiosity gap headlines, the strapline often heightens the curiosity instead of fulfilling it. This is also true in the Ed Yong article: the headline makes you wonder what bit of biology was overturned; the strapline takes over from there, focuses your imagination into the niche, and still keeps you wondering (not necessarily about the same thing). The question here to me is whether it’s okay to be only technically right in the strapline because it’s still part of the inverted pyramid, where you can get away with making generalisations at the top as you funnel the reader’s curiosity into more specific niches below.

As a prolific consumer of science writing both fab and crap, The Atlantic‘s strap is not good enough for me; it’s a letdown. While Yong does a typically good job of dramatising the reveal, it pales in comparison to what the strap seemed to suggest. Such a description would be par for the course on, say, the Times of India, but I would expect much better from The Atlantic. It often feels like the smaller publishers are held to higher standards than the bigger ones, and in this sense The Atlantic certainly towers over The Wire.

Featured image credit: Free-Photos/pixabay.

The downward/laterward style in science writing

One of the first lessons in journalism 101 is the inverted pyramid, a style of writing where the journalist presents the more important information higher up the piece. This way, the copy sort of tapers down in importance the longer it runs. The idea was that such writing served two purposes:

  1. Allowing editors looking to shorten the copy to make it fit in print to make cuts easily – they’d just have to snip whatever they wanted off the bottom, knowing that the meat was on the top.
  2. Readers would get the most important information without having to read too much through the copy – allowing them to decide earlier if they want to read the whole thing or move on to something else.

As a science writer, I don’t like the inverted pyramid. Agreed, it makes for pithy writing and imposes the kind of restriction on the writer that does a good job of forcing her to preclude her indulgence from the writing process. But if the writer was intent on indulging herself, I think she’d do it inverted pyramid or not. My point is that the threat of self-indulgence shouldn’t disallow other, possibly more engaging, forms of writing.

To wit: my favourite style is the pyramid. It starts with a slowly building trickle of information at the top with the best stuff coming at the bottom. I like this style because it closely mimics the process of discovery, of the brain receiving new information and then accommodating it within an existing paradigm. To me, it also allows for a more logical, linear construction of the narrative. In fact, I prefer the descriptor ‘downward/laterward’ because, relative to the conventional inverted pyramid style, the pyramid postpones the punchline.

However, two caveats.

  1. The downward/laterward doesn’t make anything easier for the editors, but that again – like self-indulgence – is to me a separate issue. In the pursuit of constructing wholesome pieces, it’d be an insult to me if I had an editor who wasn’t interested in reading my whole piece and then deciding how to edit it. Similarly, in return for the stylistic choices it affords, the downward/laterward compels the writer to write even better to keep the reader from losing interest.
  2. I usually write explainers (rather, end up having tried to write one). Explainers in the context of my interests typically focus on the science behind an object or an event, and they’re usually about high-energy astronomy/physics. Scientific advancements in these subjects usually require a lot of background, pre-existing information. So the pyramid style affords me the convenience of presenting such information as a build toward the conclusion – which is likely the advancement in question.
    However, I’m sure I’m in the minority. Most writers whose articles I enjoy are also writers gunning to describe the human emotions at play behind significant scientific findings. And their articles are typically about drama. So it might be that the drama builds downward/laterward while the science itself is presented in the inverted-pyramid way (and I just end up noticing the science).

Looking back, I think most of my recent pieces (2011-onward) have been written in the downward/laterward style. And the only reason I decided to reflect on the process now is because of this fantastic piece in The Atlantic that talks about how astronomers hunt for the oldest stars in the universe. Great stuff.