This post marks the debut of an occasional series I’m introducing on WordCount called Back to Basics, short explainers of various nuts and bolts of writing.

Speaking of nuts, we’ll kick things off looking at a little nut with a big impact.

I’m of course talking about the nut graph.

The nut graph is so important, you’d think writers would lavish as much attention on it as they do a story’s lead, opening quote or conclusion.

And yet, nut graphs remain tough nuts to crack, pun definitely intended.

A story without a nut graph is like a walk in the woods without a path: you know you’re going someplace, you’re just not sure where.

The nut graph supplies that direction. It tells readers, ‘This is what this story is about, this is why you should care, this is why you should keep reading.’

Writers’ overall deficiency in this area hit home recently as I’ve been doing more editing work and reading first drafts of stories that lack anything approximating a nut graph.

It’s not just me. A few weeks ago, an editor friend said she’d spent an entire day imagining herself the nut-graph queen – tiara and all – dispensing nut graphs with a tap of the wand and a click of the keyboard to every story that had entered her email inbox.

The nut graph – a term near and dear to the hearts of cranky old newspaper editors worldwide, and a lot of young ones too – is actually a misnomer. It could be an entire paragraph. Or it could be a simple sentence. Especially in short pieces – like blog posts – a nut graph could be a simple declarative sentence spelling out what the writer intends to do in the next 300 or 400 words.

Here’s an example. The big buzz this week is about new smartphones introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show, so here’s the 23-word lead of a 266-word Mashable story on a new Motorola phone. In this case, the lead also serves as the story’s nut graph:

Motorola has a new Android smartphone out, and judging by the looks of it, it’s going to be one of those love-it-or-hate-it devices.

After the lead, the story goes on to describe what the phone looks like and what features potential users might like or dislike.

Sometimes, lack of a nut graph signifies a bigger problem. If a writer has trouble figuring out what to say in a nut graph it could be because they haven’t figured out what the story they’re writing is about. A nice trick for solving that an editor once taught me: find someone unfamiliar with the piece you’re working on. Then explain to them, as concisely as you can, what the story is about and why they – or any other potential reader – should care. If you can summarize the piece in a sentence or two, you (a) have a good grasp of the idea and (b) should be able to turn what you just verbalized into a nut graph.

Writers also have trouble deciding where to put a nut graph in a story. In short stories, the lede and the nut graph could be one in the same. In a good old-fashioned inverted-pyramid news piece, the nut graph should follow the opening who, what, where, when and how information and serve as the story’s “why.”

In longer news, news features or feature stories, the nut graph could follow the lede by some distance, but not be buried so deep the reader gives up before figuring out what the heck he or she is reading about. The exact placement depends on the length of the story. In a feature of 1,000 or 1,500 words, the nut graph could follow the lead by five or six paragraphs or even less. But a 10,000-word New Yorker epic might lead with a 1,000-word introduction before the getting around explaining what the story is really about.

It’s fashionable to poo-poo the need to even have a nut graph in a story. Call me old-school, but I don’t buy it. With so much other information competing for a reader’s attention, it’s up to a writer to make it as easy as possible to figure out what’s happening and why they should care. In this way, it’s different from fiction, where the author can have fun confusing the hell out of the reader before slowly revealing what the story’s about.

Nut graph essentials: weave a reasonably concise explanation of why the story matters into the fabric of a piece up high enough to hook the reader into hanging in there through the rest of the piece.

What writing basics would you like to know more about? Share your request so I can include it in the Back to Basics series.

I’m still here.

I’m still looking at traffic stats.

I’m still reading comments, and sometimes even replying.

I’m still thinking of blog posts.

But that’s just it. I’ve been so busy lately with my editing day job the only thing related to this blog I’ve been doing is thinking.

I’m too pooped to post.

The editing job should settle down a bit over the Christmas holidays. When it does and I have some more time, here are the posts you’ll see from me:

• In praise of the nut graph – small, powerful, elusive and 100 percent unavoidable – why are you so hard to master?
• I love writers who… – a 180 from a post I wrote awhile back on the editors that writers love. Based on the last month, I have much to say on this subject.
• 2009: a freelance writing year in review – a horror story with a happy ending.
  
• Digital media trendsetters to watch in 2010 – The usual suspects, plus a few surprise picks.
• To incorporate or not to incorporate – That is the question to ask your accountant.
• A media incubator wish list – Portland freelance journalists are huddling this week to continue plans for a coworking space dedicated to indie writers. If you were going to design your dream shared newsroom, what would be in it? If you’re already working in such an environment, what do you love about it, and what do you hate?

Readers, which of those subjects should I tackle first? If there’s something else you’d like to read on WordCount in coming weeks let me know.

More and more these days, good writing is all about context. When news cycles are measured in minutes or hours rather than days, unless you’re the one doing those news stories, your work as a writer is putting what’s happening into context. That’s especially the case for many bloggers, whose raison d’etre is commenting on events in the political, business or pop culture landscape.

This hit home with me a few months back in when I was working on a pro bono project I do every year, a catalog for a local high school auction. When donations come in, it’s up to me to make them sound so appealing people will spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars to buy them. Some items have instant appeal: who wouldn’t want court-side seats to an NBA game, or a week’s stay at a private villa on the beach in Cabo San Lucas? Other donations take more finesse. For instance, why would someone pay $2,000 for a single bottle of old wine when they could go to Trader Joe’s and pick up a bottle of Two Buck Chuck for, well, $2? Maybe they would if they knew that “old wine” was a rare ‘67 Chateau d’Yquem Sauternes from a vineyard in southern Bordeaux in business since 1711 that had been frequented by Thomas Jefferson and in 2006 sold a 135-year vertical of every vintage from 1860 to 2003 for $1.5 million. See? That’s context.

Explaining “why” is what separates good writing from not so good writing. You’ve got people’s attention for the minute that it takes them to read a headline, deck and lead. But to get them to go any further, you’ve got to give them a reason to keep reading. That reason is why – as in, why is this important? Why should I care? Why does it affect me?

Sometimes you can build the answer to “why” into a nut graph, a paragraph that succinctly summarizes the ramifications of the issue you intend to address in the piece. If you’re doing a short piece, you need a short nut graph. If the article you’re writing is longer, giving readers that perspective could take a couple paragraphs. Since they’re some of the most important paragraphs of the story don’t bury them – they should be positioned fairly high in the piece. But don’t ignore them. if you do, it’ll be the first thing your editor points out when he or she emails your story back to you for revisions.

Over my career I’ve had a few extremely good editors drill this into me either consciously or subconsciously – thanks Mike Hewitt, Jonathan Weber and Robin Doussard – but I still have to make a concerted effort to write the “why” into the stories I do.

But if I can get someone to pay $2,000 for a bottle of wine on the strength of a 200-word catalog description, I figure I can explain just about anything.