A long time ago, mainstream writing and journalistic writing said goodbye to each other, and English has been poorer ever since. Each has much to learn from the other, but I maintain that mainstream writers can learn more from journalistic writing than the other way around. I am after all a journalist who came late to the academic world and continues to try to straddle the gap.

Many English teachers seem to believe writing skills can be learned by osmosis, with no reference to how the language actually works. They refuse to address the mechanics of the language.

Maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps I only think journalists are the only ones who fail to see the king’s new clothes. Maybe we truly are the grubs among butterflies. But we journalists wonder if the gap between the literary and journalistic approaches to “good” writing isn’t getting wider. I for one am trying my best to prevent the spread.

Journalistic training provides bedrock skills for any kind of writing, from novels to poetry to ad copy to office memos to computer manuals. It’s worth noting that of the seven American Nobel laureates, four brought a journalistic background to their writing. (I’m not counting Isaac Bashevis Singer, who immigrated to the United States after plying Yiddish journalism in Poland, nor T.S. Eliot, who moved from the United States to England without pursuing anything journalistic that I know of.)

College composition courses tend to be taught in the spirit of “write what you feel.” Gratifying experiences; good for the ego. But that attitude isn’t quite enough.

Journalistic writing emphasizes skill.

Skill. Such a quaint term to many who teach English, who would have their students learn by analyzing, and often emulating, what successful writers wrote. Such an approach does have some value, but its effect is limited if it disregards the structure and flow of the language.

When we journalists use “skill” in the same sentence as “writing,” we’re letting ourselves in for ridicule from those who equate journalistic writing with Fun with Dick and Jane. Granted, much journalistic writing is abysmal. But when it’s good it sings.

All right, what are these skills? Well, one skill common to both types of good writing is the use of active voice. If students learned nothing else in a composition or journalism class, their prose would be 50 percent better.

Other skills do find their way into both forms of writing, among them:

• the use of action verbs,
• being specific; illuminating with color and doing so by describing in detail.
• using strong nouns and verbs at the expense of adjectives and adverbs,
• avoiding clichés,
• moving the story (or essay or narrative or poem) along. (If the fact. concept or idea just lies there, it only adds weight, so surgically remove it.)
• using word economy; avoiding unneeded words, phrases, clauses and sentences, and
• the use of word precision, finding the word that says precisely what the writer wants to say, with the exact nuance the writer intends.

It sounds simple and easy, I know. It is simple, but it isn’t simplistic. And it doesn’t get easy until it’s practiced and practiced and practiced, preferably on deadline. The catch: If it ever does feel easy, all that means is that your skills have grown to become merely the components of the glib.

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Robert M. Knight is author of Journalistic Writing: Building the Skills, Honing the Craft, to be released this spring by Marion Street Press. As a freelancer, Knight has written for more than 40 publications and news services. He began his career at United Press International and is a former senior editor and broadcast editor of the City News Bureau of Chicago and a former adjunct professor at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania and Northwestern University in Chicago and Evanston, Illinois.