I was recently contacted by Anna Tims, a reporter with The Guardian newspaper in the U.K. She was writing about improving written communications and had come across a Yahoo blog post by Marci Alboher that offered tricks to business writers eager to craft wicked good memos.

The list of tricks varied slightly in Marci’s post and Anna’s article, and I’d be curious to hear which you find most useful. In the meantime, though, I wanted to share Anna’s questions, which probed whether email and texting are degrading the art of letters, and my answers, which have been slightly expanded from the original email exchange.

Anna Tims: Are writing skills getting generally poorer today, and does text short-hand/email informality partly account for any diminishing standards?

Connie Hale: It’s so hard to generalize! There are those who just text to their heart’s delight, not caring about quality, there are those who write for work who care but are untutored, and there are those who have spent years reading, studying, and working at writing. Then there are those who just have awesome talent. (I hate those genetic oddities.)

Some new studies show that many kids adept at texting are also “communicatively adept.” My fast-fingered nieces certainly get the difference between the vernacular of MySpace and more eloquent English. Aren’t we all capable of literary bilingualism? Think of how we adults express ourselves in jargon and out of jargon.

What has surely happened, though, with mass literacy and easier access to computers and cell phones, is that more and more people are writing and publishing on their own. So the mediocre middle has expanded exponentially, giving us a lot of ho-hum prose. At the same time, technology has placed a premium on the brief and the informal, which is a good thing. People who learned in school to write stiff, academic stuff are finding that email allows them to write more authentically, with natural verve and voice. I would bet that if you looked at really fine writing a century ago and fine writing today, you’d find that the amount and degree hasn’t changed that much. It’s hard to say writing skills are on the wane when we can find fiction by Cormac McCarthy and Lorrie Moore, pulp nonfiction by David Grann, TV shows by David Milch and David Simon, or Tweets by Susan Orlean.

AT: What are the most common errors in people’s writing today—bad spelling? limited vocabulary? inappropriate tone?

CH: The biggest failure of much business writing is a lack of imagination (all those clichés!). But you may be asking about more basic errors. Most people would benefit from simplifying sentences into a subject, a verb, and an object. Short, clear sentences trump overloaded ones jammed with information. I’m not sure if the mechanical mistakes are the same in the U.S. and the U.K., but the most common thing I see is the inability to distinguish between *it’s* and *its* and the use of *they* or *their* when a singular pronoun is required.

AT: Is fine writing, even in the form of a memo, appreciated in the world of work or are we all so slipshod that few of us notice? Why, in other words, is it worth learning good writing skills?

CH: In a story in The New York Times, page A-1, Adam Liptak writes about how the current U.S. Supreme Court is defining itself by long and flabby and opaque opinions. Lower-court judges are struggling to interpret these opinions. So, are writing skills noticed? I would say so.

Most people don’t write well—it’s hard work!—and when someone has the knack it is usually recognized. I have an aunt who writes outrageously funny Christmas letters, and friends and family all comment on them. On several occasions, and from different quarters, Facebook friends have told me they welcome posts that are well crafted and maybe even meaningful. People in all walks of life appreciate recognize writing that has depth and style.

What was it about dinner last night (quiches, green salad, cheap wine) that made us think about PowerPoint? My husband and I visited the temporary quarters of journalist-friends who’ve just moved to San Francisco from New York. Bloomberg is putting them up in a sprawling apartment painted very white, with assertive black furniture. An executive apartment that screams Pottery Barn. But through the stark plate-glass windows, headlights undulated over moist streets and a million city lights beckoned through a gauze of fog.

The digs were a cliché, the view anything but.

As is our habit, though, we soon lost sight of the view, our conversation zigging and zagging from California politics to home renovations to copy editors we have known. (This prompted by my attempt to explain my research on verbs.) Pete remembered a New York Times rewrite guy who sent clouds “porpoising” through the sky. I recalled an LA Times lede that described a crashing DC-10 as a “cartwheeling fireball,” and a San Francisco Examiner headline that announced the resumption of capital punishment in California by relying on one verb, in the much-maligned passive voice: “Executed.”

Traveling the mysterious byways of true conversation, we then riffed on the evils of PowerPoint, noting how a Microsoft sensibility has invaded the nation’s newsmagazines—or what’s left of them. More and more stories seem to be conceived in bullet points. That tool of boardroom presentations and professional-development seminars is pushing storytelling out of lectures. It’s turning raconteurs into recounters. We noted that even travel editors—who once expected odysseyan journeys—now want “chunklets” and “charticles.” Web editors want links and search-engine optimization.

This conversation comes in a week when I’ve been struggling with an assignment from a favorite editor. He wants an essay in which I tell 1500 years of California history in 1500 words. How tempting it is to write a “roundup,” that glossy newspaper version of the bulleted list. I’ve been told to write a “capsule history”; how can I find the “story” and leave capsules to the medicine chest?

From swells crashing into the Big Sur coast, I develop the metaphor of waves of people shaping California. I found a couple of irresistible characters, and do my best to animate the story through voice. We’ll see what my editor thinks of my attempt.

Writing—no matter the length, no matter the venue—should always be a struggle. It takes time to synthesize a lot of information and find a narrative arc, and more time to let every sentence tell a small piece of a big story.

I’ve just posted an essay on literary nonfiction that attempts to help us think beyond PowerPoint. The ideas come from the three years I spent teaching writing and running conferences at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism.

We all have a tendency to grab for the easy structure—or, returning to the images of last night’s dinner party, to accept the neat corners of uninspired architecture and the easy certitudes of black and white. But how we need to gaze out the window, to contemplate the mysteries of the city at night.

Constance Hale defines the literature of fact

I’ve taught narrative journalism at Harvard, organized conferences on the subject, written criticism about it, and practiced it for more than 20 years.

Yet the term “narrative journalism” makes me cringe.

It’s the word narrative that bugs me, because the term represents everything that this form of writing is not supposed to be. For starters, narrative smacks of academia. It’s abstract. No one knows what it means! It’s an example of people choosing a high-falutin word when a more straightforward one exists (storytelling).

But we seem to need a some name for articles and books that tell true stories. Other critics have come up with literary journalism, immersion journalism, creative nonfiction, literary nonfiction, and the literature of fact.

Does the name matter? I think it does. For starters, when we label a work “journalism,” we acknowledge that the writers are reporting on people and events outside themselves, and that they subscribe to certain ethical ideas (not making up quotes, being present at a scene they are sketching, confirming facts with multiple sources). Journalism suggests a paramount concern with factual truth.

Nonfiction is a broader category. It includes memoir and first-person essays and think pieces and arts reviews and Op-Eds and travelogues. The experience or opinion of the narrator is central. The pieces are as concerned with emotional truth as they are with factual truth.

Both narrative journalism and literary nonfiction borrow liberally from the traditions of poetry and fiction. In fact, that’s a good starting point for a definition: narrative journalism takes the techniques of fiction and applies them to reportage.

What does that mean? For starters, it means conceiving an article as a story, not as an inverted pyramid. (The classic structure of news journalism tells the reader in the first paragraph who, what, when, where, and maybe why, and then organizes the evidence in descending order of importance). A story is a graceful line rather than an inverted pyramid, it has an arc, a beginning-middle-end, a spine with limbs attached in just the right places.

Without a central storyline, there is no story. But many other literary techniques are involved in narrative journalism:

• precisely painted scenes, to put the reader into the story;
• fleshed-out characters to make the reader care about the story;
• plot, or a series of actions that unfold over time and lead the reader toward an endpoint or realization;
• paradox, to give the story twists and turns;
• suspense, or techniques to keep the story taut and thrilling;
• dramatic conflict (between characters, cultural forces, or communities);
• artful language—shapely sentences to pull the reader through paragraphs and inventive metaphors to surprise him or her;
• the presence of a narrator, what many call voice;
• some sense of relationship to the reader, viewer, or listener, so that there is a connection between storyteller and audience.

But there’s more to narrative journalism than just these devices. From the get-go, it requires extensive reporting so that the writer can pull from many different sources and anecdotes to develop the various layers of a story. It requires a kind of authorial confidence (born of that reporting) that comes across as an assured voice. And it requires time—time to dig deep and time to think deep and time to rewrite and time to deliberate with an editor over choices. It also requires the alacrity that comes with experience, because all of this must be done on deadline.

More and more, literary journalism also involves thinking creatively about medium. Is this a story best told in plain text or in elegant type? Is it best told in print, where a reader can enter the current of the story and be swept along, or online, where the words can be married with graphics in thoughtful ways? Is it best told accompanied by sound and moving images?

Here are some recent works of literary journalism that impressed me:

“Soldiers Face Neglect, Frustration At Army’s Top Medical Facility,” published in the Washington Post on February 18, 2007. Dana Priest and Anne Hull paint a vivid picture of the neglect at Walter Reed Army Medical Center starting in the very first paragraph.

“The Peekaboo Paradox,” Washington Post, January 22, 2006.  Gene Weingarten is a character sketcher par excellence;  his story spirals ever deeper into one person’s story.

“In a City Under Strain, Ladling Out Fortification,” New York Times, April 26, 2009. Dan Barry finds in the making of soup a clever way to let action unfold over time, and to give the full flavor of a mill town in decline.

“Trial by Fire,” The New Yorker, September 7, 2009. David Grann brings the thrill of pulp fiction to investigative journalism.

“After Life,” New York Times Magazine, September 25, 2005. The mistress of style, Joan Didion, shows how carefully chosen language and carefully crafted sentences enhance the power of a story. (This is an excerpt from Didion’s book The Year of Magical Thinking.)

“Waiting for Death, Alone and Unafraid,” Los Angeles Times, April 3, 2009. Thomas Curwen artfully lets his print story be complemented by an audio slideshow. When the subject’s voice can be broadcast on the Web, the need for direct quotations diminishes, freeing the writer to craft an elegy.

“Killer Blue—Baptized by Fire,” the Associated Press, 2008. Produced by Evan Vucci, this joint effort by reporters, photographers, and videographers shows multimedia at its best.

If you’re interested in sampling some longer work, try any one of the great reads listed in Online & On the Shelf.

—Constance Hale