Dartblog

You needn’t be smart or able to think in order to have a newspaper column. All you need is a one-inch square black and white photo of your head and the ability to end sentences with homey, down-to-Earthisms like, “capisce?”. Then you can follow a special formula and churn out a weekly column without so much as a corpuscle of sweat. The Seattle Times’ Nicole Brodeur is good—and by ‘good’ I mean ‘bad’—at using the formula. Her column of today presents a good lesson.

Step One: Take an obscure metaphor, analogy, anecdote, or phraseology and start your column with it. Nicole chose “My fingernails are bleeding. I had pretzel nuggets for breakfast. Must be getting close to the Alito confirmation.” This will make you look creative and knowing, like a literary nudge-and-wink. Your readers enjoy being nudged.

Step Two: Insert 300 words of filler material using breezy colloquialisms and direct quotes from die-hards on your side. Do not worry about cogency; a series of fifteen two or one-sentence paragraphs is fine, because you’ll sound casual. None of the paragraphs has to make sense, even insularly. And they can also be unrelated to the topic at hand. Nicole, for example, is writing about a Supreme Court nominee. So one of her paragraphs is: “Just as Alito got the blessing of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Republicans on Tuesday, the Bush administration took heat for allowing pesticide testing on children and pregnant women.” Whenever you are outraged, underline or italicize the most outragey part. This shows your readers that you are outraged, and helps them to become outraged, too.

Step Three: End your column with a restatement of your obscure metaphor, analogy, anecdote, or phraseology. This will make it appear as if your piece was thought out in advance and, if you do it well enough, will create the illusion of a logically sequential argument. Nicole ends with, “Is it any wonder we keep chewing nails and nuggets?” Suddenly, she gets a flood of “I never thought of it that way! It is no wonder!” e-mails, and she can call it a day.

Now, dear reader, away to the nearest bald, bespectacled, and suspendered editor. Remind him that his newspaper has no “strong and independent female voice” on its editorial page. (You needn’t actually be female; the minority market value of men with female voices is even higher, in fact, than women.) Within moments you’ll be in a cube mulling over your very first obscure metaphor, analogy, anecdote, or phraseology.