I have a habit of seeing something that MIGHT be of further interest on Facebook and quickly hitting SAVE. I always promise myself that I will get right back to that item when I get a spare minute.
But I get caught up with something else and many times don't get back to my list of saved items for days.
There is something satisfying about cruising through those saved Facebook links and UNSAVING the majority. This is akin to the feeling we get when we can cross out items from our to-do lists.
But here is an excerpt from a link to a post by one of my favorite writing experts, Roy Peter Clark, and it relates to something I have mentioned before about "getting the name of the dog" when reporting on an event. The entire post by RPC is here.
"...All this is prologue to a recent and quite startling example of this strategy from Michael Hardy, a Houston-based journalist writing for nymag.com. The headline of the Intelligencer column reads: “Ted Cruz abandons millions of freezing Texans and his poodle, Snowflake”
The column chronicles his drive to Cruz’s “uber-rich” neighborhood and his approach to the senator’s “white, Colonial Revival-style mansion.” He sees what appears to be in a window pane of the front door a white dog, apparently left behind after the senator went “jaunting off to Cancun with his family.”
The point of the advice about getting the name of the dog is that facts and details are important, and you never quite know how they might add something to a story or report. But read the entire post to see the wider implications and to encounter a limitation RPC found in the story as it was published.
I can't quite shake the image of poor Snowflake, shivering in a chilly house, forlornly waiting for the family to return to play with him/her.
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