finding the basic principle

What about teachers? Were there teachers who were pretty important to you?

Nora Ephron: Yes. I had a couple of great, great teachers. The teacher who changed my life was my journalism teacher, whose name was Charles Simms. I always tell this story. I love it. I had already decided that I was going to be a journalist. I didn't know why exactly, except that I had seen a lot of Superman comics. Lois Lane and all of those major literary characters like that, but Mr. Simms got up the first day of class, and he went to the blackboard, and he wrote "Who, what, where, why, when, and how," which are the six things that have to be in the lead of any newspaper story. Then he did what most journalism teachers do, which is that he dictated a set of facts to us, and then we were all meant to write the lead that was supposed to have "who, what, where, why, when, and how" in it.

He dictated a set of facts that went something like, "The principal of Beverly Hills High School announced today that the faculty of the high school will travel to Sacramento, Thursday, for a colloquium in new teaching methods. Speaking there will be Margaret Mead, the anthropologist, and two other people." So we all sat down at our typewriters, and we all kind of inverted that and wrote, "Margaret Mead and X and Y will address the faculty in Sacramento, Thursday, at a colloquium on new teaching methods, the principal announced today." Something like that. We were very proud of ourselves, and we gave it to Mr. Simms, and he just riffled through them and tore them into tiny bits and threw them in the trash, and he said, "The lead to this story is: There will be no school Thursday!" and it was this great epiphany moment for me. It was this, "Oh my God, it is about the point! It is about figuring out what the point is." And I just fell in love with journalism at that moment.

I just fell in love with the idea that underneath, if you sifted through enough facts, you could get to the point, and you had to get to the point. You could not miss the point. That would be bad. So he really kind of gave that little shift of mind a major push. I just fell in love with solving the puzzle, figuring out what it was, what was the story, what was the truth of the story.

interview, Nora Ephron

Ed told me that when his first wife was learning to do radio journalism her boss kept telling her she was "backing into the story." Ed remembers being fascinated by that: backing into the story.

Print journalists call it burying the lede.

She would go into the radio booth and read the text she'd written; then the guy would tear it apart.

Temple has a wonderful way of talking about not backing into stories and not burying the lede and such. She calls what she learned to do in college find the basic principle. Temple figured this out on her own. She would have a mass of facts, figures, and concepts she had to master for a course and her working memory was too limited to hold more than a couple of them at the time, so she had to find a work-around.

Her workaround was to find the basic principle, the one idea from which all the other ideas flowed logically. Then that one idea would work as a cue, helping her to remember all the other ideas.

Of course, everyone's working memory is severely limited. The idea used to be that working memory could hold "the magical number 7 plus or minus 2" items. But these days people are saying the magical number is closer to 3 or 4.

I don't think Temple's working memory is any more limited than a typical person's; I think the real problem is that her working memory is slower. She told me once that the reason she can't do mental math is that if she's adding 12 to 29, say, by the time she's able to close the 9+2 "window" in her mind's eye (another term for working memory), she's forgotten 10+20. If she does manage to retrieve 10 + 20, she's forgotten 2+9, carry 1.

I back into my story all the time. Then some editor will tell me to fix it and I do. This has happened enough times that these days, after finishing a draft, I try to figure out how much introductory stuff has to go. It's not easy.

It's gotten easier since I discovered William J. Kerrigan's Writing to the Point. Which reminds me. I have to scan some more of Kerrigan's book and get it posted.

Judging by the essay Concerned Parent's 9-year old daughter just wrote, I'd say Hake's Grammar and Writing the closest thing we've got in print to Kerrigan. Hake wrote the Saxon Math books 5/4 through 8/7, then decided to write a "Saxon Grammar," too.



The Magical Number 4 in Short Term Memory: A Reconsideration of Mental Storage Capacity
by Nelson Cowan, 2001

William J. Kerrigan and Allan A. Metcalf
Paperback: 192 pages
Publisher: Harcourt; 4th Ed edition (January 1987)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 015598313X
ISBN-13: 978-0155983137