LESSON PLAN3

Louise Kiernan, award-winning Chicago Tribune reporter:

Kiernan wrote the 2001 Pulitzer Prize Winning piece on the weakness in the nation’s air travel industry. She began the article like this:

The air smells like stale hamburgers and unbrushed teeth.

It smells like cold coffee, like sour beer. It smells like exhaustion.

The air smells as if it has been inhaled and exhaled by too many people for far too long and they are breathing it still, snoring and snuffling, sighing and murmuring as they sprawl about O'Hare International Airport like refugees from some invisible war.

In December, Kiernan was a guest at the weekly meeting of the Columbia Links Reporting Academy. She emphasized that good writing starts with good reporting.

The process: She assigned each student a sense, i.e. touch, taste, smell, sight and sound. She then sent them to a local restaurant and told them to spend five minutes honing in on that sense and writing adjectives that described it. The students headed off to the local Panera Bread. The student assigned to taste, for example, didn’t buy a Danish. Instead, she described the look on people’s faces as they ate. Sweet. Satisfied.

Why? Using description makes an article more interesting. It help paints a picture for readers. In print articles, it makes stories more three-dimensional. The lesson here is not to rely on memory, but rather to think about the five senses when they are in the field reporting. They should take notes about it. This way with confidence they can use description in their articles.