Steve Jobs 1955-2011/Photo courtesy Mint Digital

To do great writing, read great writing. Here’s the great writing I’ve been reading this week.

If you’re like me, over the past few days you’ve probably spent some time – or a lot of time – reading about Steve Jobs. The Apple Computer founder and ex-CEO died of pancreatic cancer this week at 56. He’d retired in August after having been on a leave of absence since early this year from the company he and a friend started in his parents’ garage in 1976.

It’s been a time for reflecting on the mark that Jobs left, not just on the technology industry, but on how people communicate and connect, and where he stands in the pantheon of American inventors and innovators.

For writers, it’s also been an opportunity to study a basic but often bungled story type: the obituary.

Studying the Obituary

Obituaries are a journalism staple. Open to the back of any local newspaper and you’ll see them. These days, most of what you see are paid obituaries that families write themselves and buy by the column inch, since financially-challenged newspapers don’t have as much space to devote to them as they used to. What you see is usually terribly written.

During the semester I taught an intro to news writing class in a graduate journalism program, students were required to write an obit as part of the general curriculum. It was one of the harder exercises of the semester. Why? Writing a good obituary is more difficult than it looks. Most students structured their stories chronologically, starting with when the person was born, and moving through where they went to school and worked, who they married, when they died – just like those paid obits in the back pages of the paper.

But when someone dies, readers don’t want a laundry list of facts and dates. They want the most important stuff and they want it right away: who the person was, why what they did mattered and how they made a mark on their community or the world.

The Modern Obit

Today, obituaries can cover the basis but take many different forms, which is apparent if you look at what’s been written about Jobs. Besides the classic, straight narrative, obits or tributes can be a personal remembrance, photo montage, video, slideshow or compilation of quotes from the famous or not-so-famous. One company, Mint Digital, disassembled a MacBook Pro and using the parts to create a Steve Jobs portrait – that’s it at the top of this post.

Here are a handful of Jobs obituaries and other tributes that stuck with me for their context, emotion or originality:

Traditional Obituary – Straight forward obituaries from the New York Times and Washington Post, attempt to put the man behind the Mac, iPod and iPhone in perspective, as a 21st century entrepreneur, tech visionary and marketer with a prickly, secretive side that made him a difficult subject to interview or photograph.

Personal Remembrance – Long-time Wall Street Journal tech columnist and All Things D cofounder Walter Mossberg shared stories about a side of Jobs most people, including reporters, never saw. After returning to Apple in 1997, Jobs called Mossberg Sunday evenings for some off-the-record shop talk. Later when he was sick, Jobs invited Mossberg to visit him at home and the two went for a walk:

He explained that he walked each day, and that each day he set a farther goal for himself, and that, today, the neighborhood park was his goal. As we were walking and talking, he suddenly stopped, not looking well. I begged him to return to the house, noting that I didn’t know CPR and could visualize the headline: “Helpless reporter lets Steve Jobs die on the sidewalk.”

But he laughed, and refused, and, after a pause, kept heading for the park. We sat on a bench there, talking about life, our families, and our respective illnesses. (I had had a heart attack some years earlier.) He lectured me about staying healthy. And then we walked back.

Apology – Brian Lam used Jobs’ passing to write a long apologia and explain what happened while he was editor at Gizmodo during the infamous iPhone 4 leak in 2010. After an Apple employee lost a phototype of the phone and it ended up in the hands of a Gizmodo reporter who wrote about it, Lam exchanged numerous telephone calls with an increasingly more frustrated Jobs, who wanted the device back but didn’t want to publicly confirm what it was. Lam held out and got confirmation in writing, but later regretted it. “I thought about the dilemma every day for about a year and half,” he writes in The Atlantic. “It caused me a lot of grief, and I stopped writing almost entirely. It made my spirit weak. Three weeks ago, I felt like I had had enough. I wrote my apology letter to Steve.”

Website - For a day after Jobs died, tech site BoingBoing temporarily rebooted its design to mimick the then-revolutionary (and still very black and white) graphical user interface of the original 1984 Macintosh computer.

Slideshow – As part of its coverage of Jobs’ passing, the New York Times asked readers to send in thoughts and photos, which the paper assembled into a “Reader Memories” slideshow. One family of a grandmother in Chile who recently died of cancer sent in a picture of her in bed with a MacBook Pro on her lap making a last video-phone call to a granddaughter in Belgium.

Video – For its homage, social media new site Mashable compiled a video of Jobs’ 10 most “magical” moments, including introducing the first Macintosh and launching the iPod, iPhone and iPad. In place of the photographs of Bob Dylan, Pablo Picasso, Maria Calas and other square pegs originally featured in the classic “Think Different” commercial Gizmodo’s Jesus Diaz substituted photos and videos of Jobs during his various stints at Apple, granting him star status through association.

Cartoon – Hugh McLeod, the Gaping Void cartoonist, used the copy from the same  ”Think Different” commercial as the basis for a text-only cartoon that he posted on his website and offered free to anyone who wanted to download it (I ran it here yesterday).

Have you seen creative obituaries of Steve jobs or someone else? If so, please share by leaving a comment with the headline, link and a brief description.

A WordCount reader wrote recently after reading a post on making editors fall in love with your work that included advice to always submit headlines and decks when you turn in stories.

What, he asked, is a deck?

Good question. A deck is old newspaper lingo for the short article summary that accompanies a headline. It could be a phrase, a sentence or even two if they’re very short.

Back before search engine optimization and online news, newspaper and magazine headlines were often written more to entertain than enlighten, so the deck had to do the heavy lifting of explaining what a story was about.

These days, it’s more common for headlines to be optimized to be picked up by search engines so aren’t so pun-filled or cutesy. But decks still serve the purpose of informing readers – hopefully so they’ll want to continue reading the story.

If you blog but haven’t ever written for any other type of publication, think of a deck as a blog post’s short article summary or meta description – it briefly sums up what the story is about.

Writing decks is a learned skill, just like writing headlines, leads and photo captions.

Here are some examples of decks from several online news publishers:

1. NPR – The decks that the public radio broadcaster runs on its front page give readers a bit more information on what each story is about, so they can quickly scan and get the gist of what’s happening, even if they don’t click through to read the whole piece.

2. New York Times – Decks on the Technology page of the paper’s website add details to the headline, but also repeat keywords, good for SEO purposes. They also vary in length depending on the column size, but as these examples show, generally run from 16 to 22 words long and could be one sentence or two.

3. SecondAct.com – This front page of SecondAct.com, a spin off of Entrepreneur Magazine for people over 40, includes three posts I wrote for the site, each with headlines and decks that came from me: Launching Your Green Job Search, Herschel Walker: From Football to MMA, and Hot Topics: January Jobs, Boomer Headlines, Farrah Fawcett’s Swimsuit. Each one serves a slightly different purpose. The deck on “Green Job Search” lets readers know it’s an author interview. The “Herschel Walker” deck explains what “MMA” stands for. The deck on “Hot Topics,” which is the site’s weekly news roundup, goes into more detail on the top news story, which in this case was the January unemployment numbers.

4. GettheInsideEdge.com – Here’s what heads and decks look like on Inside Edge, the website for CFOs that I work on as a contract editor. One glance at the decks on these stories and you can tell the site’s aimed at mid-sized companies (actually, looking at these all together, we may have used the phrase “mid-sized” a little too often). But since that focus sets the site apart from other websites covering finance, it’s something we want to hammer home every chance we get, including in headlines and decks.

Now that you’ve seen some examples, what are the keys to writing good decks?

1. Summarize what a story is about.
2. Indicate the type of story a reader will see: a Q&A, review, analysis, etc.
3. Spell out acronyms or abbreviations.
4. Provide additional detail.
5. Be concise.
6. Use active language.
7. Use colorful verbs.
8. Match a story’s voice or tone.
9. Foreshadow details in the story without giving away any surprises you’ve saved for the ending.
10. Incorporate SEO as needed.

Have your own secrets for writing good decks? Please share by leaving a comment.

But if you look it up in the dictionary and you’ll find the word has other meanings.

One is: “the careful, thrifty management of resources.”

Another: “an orderly, functional arrangement of parts.”

And another: “efficient, sparing or conservative use.”

When it comes to writing, economy is a good thing.

Just like cash-strapped families cut back during the recession, writers should economize when it comes to the words they use.

Less really is more.

I’ve come to this conclusion after a spending most of the last year editing. If my experience is close to the norm, and based on what I hear from other editors I think it is, I now know why editors are famously cranky. They spend way too much time whittling down wasted words, changing passive voice to active and finding meaning buried in jargon.

So I’m on the stump for a new economic stimulus plan – getting writers to use fewer words.

The best practice for developing an economic writing style is being forced to fit a complex topic into as few words as possible, something news wire reporters and headline writers have down to a science.

Though most freelancers probably don’t perform that kind of work, we still have to write to a word count, making it imperative that we practice economy of scale in our writing.

Cutting out needless words and phrases and paring stories down to the bone isn’t the most fun part of an assignment. But if you can get past the emotion of killing your words, you can end up with writing that is, as they say in the news business, light, tight and bright.

And that’s the kind of writing that brings editors back for more.

Here are 10 suggestions for economizing:

1. Don’t use the same word more than once in a sentence.

2. Use active voice – your writing will be livelier, and you’ll use less words in the process. If you don’t understand the difference between active and passive voice, here’s a concise explanation, courtesy of good old Strunk and White.

3. Don’t use 10 words to describe something when five will do.

4. Include only the most relevant details. Save the rest for something else, such as a reporter’s notebook, your blog, a tweet, another story.

5. Read your story out loud to discover awkward phrasing that can be rewritten to be shorter, clearer or better sounding.

6. Finish a story the day before it’s due so you can sleep on it and come back in the morning with a fresh eye for what can be cut without changing the meaning.

7. Ask a writer you respect to read your manuscript for sections that are confusing, rambling or just plain boring.

8. Don’t quote when you can paraphrase. Save space for only the best quotes – they’re the spice in the stew.

9. Don’t feel obliged to quote everyone you interviewed for a story. It’s OK to paraphrase (see above) or use sources as background for consensus viewpoints expressed in the piece.

10. Unless the story, situation or publication requires it, there’s no need to include people’s full titles on first reference in a story, especially if they’re extremely long, ambiguous or full of jargon. The same goes for company divisions, or association chapters. Use a short-hand description first and then include a more complete description on second reference if necessary.

The editing work I’ve done this year has made it clear how common a struggle this is. Time and again writers turn in stories with too many quotes or quotes that ramble, aren’t relevant to the subject or restate what they’ve already written.

There’s a good reason to go after good quotes.

Dull quotes make dull stories.

But good quotes make good stories even better.

Quotes are to stories what spices are to food. Carefully selected and placed, they can add flavor and character to an otherwise pedestrian effort.

Getting good quotes is a multi-step process. It starts with finding the right people to talk to and asking the right questions – without those, you won’t have the right kind of material to work with.

The raw material is just the beginning. Once you’ve got a source’s words down, you’ve got to cut out the extraneous stuff, while remaining true to their meaning, so only the best remains.

Sometimes you get lucky and run into a quote machine, the way Roger Ebert did when he interviewed Lee Marvin in 1970 for this Esquire piece that the magazine re-published online after Chris Jones’  February 2010 profile of Ebert went viral. If you read Ebert’s Marvin piece you’ll see it’s a seemingly stream of consciousness monologue, essentially one long quote. But slowly details emerge. Ebert turned his tape recorder on and left it on, picking up all sorts of little gems. But he also used his reporter’s training to describe, as the magazine describes it, ” a beer-addled, expletive-laden day with the actor.”

You may know in advance if someone you’re schedule to interview is known for their bon mots, in which case make sure you’ve got plenty of batteries for your recorder or smartphone.

Sadly, there aren’t many Lee Marvins around, and most of the time, getting good quotes involves a lot more hard work than just turning on a recorder.

When it comes to quotes, here are some recommendations gleaned from my years on the job:

Ask the right questions. You won’t get information worth quoting if you don’t ask the right questions. You can’t ask the right questions if you don’t prep for an interview. First, make sure you’re talking to the right person – a media relations, publicist or public information officer will do in a pinch, but the CEO, inventor, mother of the murder victim, officer involved or Army general are always the preferred choice. Next, read everything you can about the person or situation. The more you know going in, the better, more probing questions you can ask.

Take detailed notes. It doesn’t matter if you take shorthand, type on a laptop or record everything and use a transcription service – one way or another, you’ve got to take down verbatim what the person says.

Organize the story. Some stories don’t materialize until you’ve done enough reporting to know what the subject really is. But for other pieces, you know the outcome going in, either because it’s simple, short, a Q&A or you’re writing based on your own pitch. If you know how you’re going to shape your story from the get go, you’ll know what questions to ask and the kinds of quotes you need. When that’s the case, don’t leave the interview without what you came for, even if it means asking and re-asking a question until you get an answer.

Be selective. Once you’re in writing mode, use only what you need to. Chances are you’ll have a lot more than you can use in a story. Regardless of how tempting it is to stick all of them in the piece, use only the very best – or if you’re doing a short piece – the best of the best. I learned this the hard way. In my first job after journalism grad school as a health care trade magazine reporter, I loved filling stories with quotes – so much so my editor said I wasn’t writing as much copying the contents of my notebook. Ouch. That taught me to be more sparing with my words, and quotes.

Paraphrase instead. Writers think they have to quote someone to share what the person has to say. But paraphrasing is another way to do that, especially if the story you’re writing is short and you’ve got to make every word count. People tend to ramble, so paraphrasing a concept they took 45 words to state in a more succinct and understandable 10, 15 or 20 is doing everybody a favor: your source, your readers and yourself. When paraphrasing, however, take care not to changing the speaker’s meaning, and always include an attribution so your audience know whose thoughts they’re reading.

Double check the material. If you’re working with sensitive material of any kind, and even if you aren’t, make sure the words you’re attributing to another person are accurate. Double or triple check everything, including the spelling of a source’s name.

Want to learn more about the proper care and handling of quotes? My all-time favorite resource is William E. Blundell’s classic writing guide, The Art and Craft of Feature Writing. If you can find a copy, look at Chapter 6, “Handling Key Story Elements,” especially at a section entitled “Handling People and Quotes.” Blundell is of the less-is-more camp. In the section he discusses a Wall Street Journal story he wrote about cowboys that he interviewed 35 people for but quoted only four.

Got your own secrets for getting good quotes? Please share.

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.