If you went through the exercise above, you no doubt noticed this pattern:
The first line of all Tip articles is a quote from an expert. (For example, “Hit the shark in the eyes and gills,” says Sarah Waries, the chief executive of Shark Spotters, an organization in Cape Town that employs 30 specialists to scan the city’s beaches with binoculars from the cliffs and sound the alarm when they see one in the water.”)
That same expert gives background and advice throughout the piece. (“It’s critical to stop the bleeding,” Waries says.)
The expert also usually gets the last word in the form of a final, fitting quote. (“Sharks are everywhere,” Waries says. “They’re in all the oceans.”)
Below are three STEM-focused articles from this column that we have chosen as mentors. We’ve excerpted the first paragraph of each, but please read them all in full.
“It’s easier to appreciate snowflakes when you don’t have a shovel in your hand,” says Kenneth G. Libbrecht, a professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., who studies snowflake morphology by growing ice crystals in his laboratory. Go out in the snow with dark clothing on and let a few flakes fall on your coat. Peer at them through a magnifying glass. Don’t assume you’ll see the archetypal, branching-star type called stellar dendrites, which require temperatures around minus 15 degrees Celsius. To see those in the wild, Libbrecht travels to a small town in northeastern Ontario. “The people there think I’m crazy,” he says.
“How to Hold a Venomous Snake”:
‘‘The snake will defecate on you,’’ says Jim Harrison, who extracts venom from approximately 1,000 snakes every week for use in drug research and development. Learn to ignore the stink. Collecting venom requires pinching a snake firmly behind its skull until it clamps its fangs over a sterile collection vial; snakes will squirt excreta in an effort to escape. ‘‘When I’m done extracting the cobras, I’m covered in feces and my wife won’t come close to me,’’ Harrison says.
“How to Fast”:
“Fasting is mental over physical, just like basketball and most other stuff in life,” says Enes Kanter, the 6-foot-11 center for the Portland Trail Blazers. Raised in Turkey, Kanter, 27, is a Muslim who has fasted from sunrise to sunset during the month of Ramadan since he was 8. This season, Ramadan aligned with the N.B.A. playoffs, so Kanter fasted through seven playoff games. During the year he forgoes food and water a day or two a week. “Don’t be scared to try it,” he says.
Now, answer these questions:
Whom does the writer quote in each of these columns? Why do you think the author chose them? Do you think they were good sources of information?
Look closely at when the author chooses to quote the experts and when she paraphrases the information they gave her. What is the difference? Why do you think she chose to quote the lines she did? Give some examples from the pieces to explain your reasoning.
What do you notice about how she works in quotations? How does she introduce them so they make sense and add a little color? For instance, the second paragraph of “How to Hold a Venomous Snake” begins this way: “Unless you’re a trained venom extractor, don’t pick up a snake with your hands. Even zookeepers and herpetologists keep out of striking distance by scooping specimens up with a pole called a snake hook. ‘Everybody thinks they know what they’re doing because they saw it on YouTube,’ Harrison says.” How do the first two sentences give practical information that leads us into the YouTube quote? How does that quote add a bit of humor to the piece?
Finally, look closely at the quotes that begin and end each piece. How would you describe the differences? Would the quotes work if they were flipped? What about any quotes you find in the middle paragraphs of these pieces? What observations can you make in general about the structure of a Tip column and how quotations work to build that structure?
Before you go, one last thing to notice. You may have been taught in school to cite your sources by using footnotes, or by putting them in parentheses after you’ve referenced the information. That’s not how journalists do it, yet they still make their sources clear.
If the article is online-only, sources are sometimes linked. For pieces like Tip, which appear both online and in print, sources are referenced in the reporting. For example, direct quotes, like “It’s critical to stop the bleeding,” from the shark piece, above, will have a “[name of person] says” somewhere in the sentence (“Waries says”). Paraphrases often start with a lead-in like, “According to …” or “Studies have found …” The Tip column quotes only one expert each week, so there is no need to keep adding “According to,” but, to continue our shark theme, notice the ways this paragraph from an Aug. 2019 article, “How Sharks Glow to Each Other Deep in the Ocean,” acknowledges its source:
In a study published Thursday in iScience, researchers reveal the secret behind this magical transformation: Molecules inside their scales transform how shark skin interacts with light, bringing in blue photons, and sending out green. This improved understanding of these sharks’ luminous illusions may lead to improvements in scientific imaging, as the study of biofluorescence in other marine life already has.
How does the first sentence make clear that the information comes from a particular study? How does the use of a colon help?
