2022-04-12 | Blog 010

Today I attended a lecture by the author Gary Younge on how to write engaging material. Without giving away the content of lecture, here are two interesting points:

·         The "nutgraph": This is a concept from American newspapers. Stories on the cover would never be printed in full, so the reader has to turn to page x. The nutgraph is the paragraph which gives the article in a nutshell, usually around paragraph 4 or 5. This lets the reader know what they are investing their time into, and hopefully convinces them to keep reading.

·         Out of an audience of circa 60 people, I was one of about 5 men. This really strikes me as odd and I've been wondering why attendance was so imbalanced. I don't think there were any barriers to male participation; the invite email was circulated to all students at all levels, the lecture itself was on campus at 1100 on a Tuesday. Perhaps the lecture content fitted better the Humanities subjects, which skew more female. A large part of the event description was centred around developing your own "voice", perhaps the difference in engagement reflects a difference in experiences of the sexes. From anecdotal evidence that woman in Engineering get challenged disproportionately. I can't help but think this would result in a more generic writing voice.

I thoroughly enjoyed the lecture and took away plenty to (hopefully) help improve my writing. An example of Younge's writing can be found here.