Dr. Spaulding

On the importance of simple writing from William Zinsser’s On Writing Well: Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon. … The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, [...]

Your first story is due next week. Here are a few stories that you can use as models for your own work. News story: Problems abound for vacant homes’ neighbors. I know we read this one before, but I think it’s worth another look. I like the use of specific facts and the variety of [...]

Here are a few of the books on my Baltimore reading list: Marshall Law: The Life & Times of a Baltimore Black Panther by Marshall “Eddie” Conway This is the story of a Baltimore man who has been imprisoned 40 years for a crime he says he did not commit. He describes growing up in [...]

The Baltimore Brew calls this article “the ultimate Schaefer profile, the piece that–depending on your point of view–either captured the mythic Schaefer or created him.” Written in 1984 by Richard Ben Cramer, the story opens with these paragraphs: How will they ever make a statue of him? They’ll have to, you know. He saved the [...]

Hope you’ve got some time to spare this week. There’s some good journalism on the web that deserves your attention. Pulitzers announced This year’s Pulitzer Prize winners were announced April 18. They included: The Los Angeles Times (public service) for its exposure of City Hall corruption in the city of Bell, Calif. The Sarasota Herald-Tribune [...]

Washington Post Associate Editor Steve Luxenberg will visit MCOM 409 Thursday evening to discuss his book Annie’s Ghosts. The book is the story of his search for a family secret: an aunt he never knew who spent the majority of her life institutionalized in Michigan’s mental health hospitals. It’s a compelling read, delicately and compassionately [...]

Tonight in literary journalism we’re discussing In Cold Blood, which also gives us a chance to talk about Truman Capote’s disastrous visit to Towson University in November 1977. Capote was drunk when he arrived, took a barbiturate before the reading and gave a performance that was so incoherent he was escorted off the stage. The [...]

That’s a quote from Ben Hecht, who wrote “The Pig,” one of the readings we discussed in Literary Journalism tonight. For my students in that class, if you enjoyed the story you must check out one of Hecht’s most famous screenplays, The Front Page. Here’s the trailer from the 1974 version of the film starring [...]

When Dr. Haller loaned me Mockingbird last Friday, I started it immediately after getting home from work. It was so engrossing that I spent the whole weekend with it, finishing at about 4 a.m. Monday morning. Now I’m feeling the same pull again after reading the prologue to The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. It’s [...]

One of the wonderful things about school breaks is having the time to read for pleasure. Here’s three books I read that might be of interest to you: The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman. This is the history of a fictional English-language newspaper in Rome from the 1950s to the present day. It reads like a [...]