Not a single thing a sportswriter will do satisfies a reader’s appetite more than a piece that captures — to borrow a phrase from “The Wide World of Sports” — “the thrill of victory … and the agony of defeat.”

Ask any person who has written sports stories, and he will tell you the game story is the calling card of his profession. It’s always been that way, too – long before the icons of this journalistic era ever wrote a word.

It’s the news, stupid!

As Bruce Garrison, a journalism professor, wrote in his book Sports Reporting, “Game coverage has never been the only aspect of sportswriting, but it continues to be the foundation of most sports sections.”

I’ve quoted Garrison here simply to reiterate my point. Yet as fundamental to sports journalism as the “gamer” is, why do so many young sportswriters handle the task poorly? Why do so few journalism programs not bother to teach the fine art of the gamer?

I can find no acceptable answer for the latter question. As for the former, my view is that sportswriters today look at the game story as easy, and they don’t stress it the way they stress and fret the feature story. I also think young sportswriters – and some old ones, too — don’t show up at an event with a plan of attack or with much research behind them.

Broadly speaking, sportswriters don’t know what the game story is supposed to accomplish, which is a gigantic mistake that all but dooms their work to mediocrity.

And what is a gamer?

Well, the gamer is not a blow-by-blow account of what led to victory – or defeat. If anything, it’s an analysis or a think piece.

That’s essentially the philosophy that Thomas Boswell, a gifted baseball writer for The Washington Post, espouses. In an essay for Professor Melvin Mencher’s News Reporting and Writing, Boswell advises young sportswriters that the best way – or right way — to see a game is to look at it from a player’s perspective.

Here’s what Boswell says specifically about the art of writing the baseball gamer (his perspective, however, applies to any type of game story):

Judge slowly: “Never judge a player over a unit of time shorter than a month … you must see a player hot, cold, and in between before you can put the whole package together.”

Assume everybody is trying reasonably hard: “ … giving 110 percent … would be counterproductive for most players. … Usually something on the order of 80 percent effort is about right.

Forgive even the most grotesque physical error: “It’s assumed that every player is physically capable of performing every task asked of him. If he doesn’t, it’s never his fault. His mistake is simply regarded as part of a professional’s natural margin of error.”

Judge mental mistakes harshly: “The distinction as to whether a mistake has been made ‘from the neck up or neck down’ is always drawn.”

Pay more attention to the mundane than the spectacular: “The necessity for consistency usually outweighs the need for the inspired.”

Pay more attention to the theory of the game than to the outcome of the game: Don’t let your evaluation be swayed too greatly by the final score. “If a team loses a game but has used its resources properly … then that team is often able to ignore defeat utterly. Players say, ‘We did everything right but win.’ “

Keep in mind that players always know best how they’re playing: “At the technical level, they seldom fool themselves – the stakes are too high.”

Stay ahead of the action, not behind it or even neck and neck with it: “Remember that the immediate past is almost always a prelude.”

I find no reason to quarrel with Boswell’s perspective. His viewpoints speak well to how a sports journalist ought to approach the writing life in the press box, which can be a pressure-packed place to produce high art.

Yet stylish prose can be crafted from a seat in the press box, particularly when writers have a solid understanding of the ins and outs of their sport.

In my opinion, I also think it’s helpful if sportswriters understood their audience well. While I don’t believe any sportswriter is writing for the readers (a point William Zinsser’s stress in his book On Writing Well), I do believe he (or she) must understand whom those readers tend to be.

At MLB.com, for example, the site’s audience is a mix of casual fans, closet historians and seam-heads, and that mix presents a challenge for beat writers in terms of writing gamers.

Overall, the approach to gamers at MLB.com calls for more of a second-day story or, to use a more familiar term, a feature lead. The world of baseball moves too swiftly to saddle finicky readers with play-by-play and a sprinkling of mundane quotes in game stories.

If that’s all MLB.com can give its readers, they will stop coming back to the site because they know they can get this nuts-and-bolts stuff on the ESPNews ticker or elsewhere.

One of the senior editors at MLB.com put it this way: “We have to write gamers that put our finger on the pulse of the team and keeps it there. Our gamers need to tell diverse readership: What’s going on with this particular team? How did this single game affect the journey it’s on through this long, grinding six-month trek?

“Moreover, what is the goal of the season in the broader, deeper journey of a franchise? For a team, say, like the Kansas City Royals, the season’s about development, not wins and losses, and identifying key pieces around whom you can build a championship team. For a team like the Milwaukee Brewers and Cleveland Indians, the season’s about putting it together after years of rebuilding and breaking through to the postseason. For a team like the Detroit Tigers or Chicago White Sox or St. Louis Cardinals, it’s playoffs or bust.”

The editor went on to say that writers at MLB.com should — in fact, have to — reflect those deeper journeys in their game coverage. The play-by-play/how they scored stuff is information the readers likely already have. A writer only needs enough play-by-play in his or her story for readers to get the gist of what decided the game’s outcome. And beyond that, the writer has to give the readers much, much more insight.

Otherwise, what the writer does is nothing more than what readers can get from an AP story or some other wire service. They have no reason to visit MLB.com regularly if it can offer no more than the pedestrian prose found in an Associated Press story.

More than a decade ago, I ran across a handout that Dan Jenkins, a respected sportswriter and the author of “Fast Copy,” wrote about covering games. After reading his handout, I was struck by what he had to say. Here’s part of what Jenkins wrote:

“In any sports event, there is always a key moment, a big play which turns the tide. Seize on that moment. Hammer it. Kick it to death. It is worth sacrificing some play-by-play to do this and add ‘depth’ to your story.”

He is right, of course. Essentially, he’s talking about analyzing the game. Take the turning point and make that your story’s angle. Get comments to back up your view of what happened on the field, and, above all, keep your copy clutter-free.

So as you can see, writing the gamer is more than what many most sportswriters think it is, and it uses many of the same principles that J-schools teach for writing news stories, says Karen Brown Dunlap, director of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies.

“The major difference is that sportswriters must stress interpretation, how and why, more than in basic news stories,” Brown Dunlap says in Carol Rich’s Writing and Reporting News. “Good sportswriters try to do that by setting the tone and developing their stories with a theme.”

Peter King didn’t particularly want to write a weekly online column and he certainly wasn’t interested in Twitter. He had a full-time job covering the NFL for Sports Illustrated, thank you, and that was quite enough.

Today, I will reach 50,000 followers on Twitter. I’m obviously honored, but the truth is the reason I’ve been able to grow so much in the space in the last year is because of you, my blog readers and my followers. You have told me what you want from me, whether it’s a salary stat or the numbers behind a certain sponsorship. You have given me information for me to tweet out to the masses and you have even proven me wrong. For that, I thank you. As we begin to think about 2011, I think about social media and Twitter in particular and how I can only see a big future for how sports fans will use the site in the coming year. I don’t consider myself the ultimate expert on this topic of course, but I thought I’d try to come up with a list of the most important things I’ve learned about Twitter in the past year. There will be many sports references in here because that’s the area I play in, but this advice is obviously pretty generic. If you don’t follow me on Twitter, you can find me@darrenrovell.

1. You don’t have a 140 characters, you have 120 at the most

Remember, Twitter is not a monologue, it is a dialogue. You want people to engage with you, you want people to retweet you. If you use all 140 characters, the only choice they have is to click the retweet button, which means they can’t comment on it. I’ve found that my ideal tweets are about 100 characters. Including my 12-letter name, an RT, a space and the @ symbol, that’s 116 characters. My followers then have 24 characters to say what they want. Your number of characters are precious, so use link shortening sites like bit.ly or is.gd to reduce the amount of letters in your tweet.

2. This Isn’t A Popularity Contest

Twitter isn’t Facebook. It’s not a contest to collect as many friends as possible (I’ll follow you, if you follow me). If you genuinely use Twitter to follow others, you don’t want to clog your timeline with useless banter. Some people collect followers in order to grow their following. Don’t be in this business. If you are to use Twitter effectively, it’s not a popularity contest. I have found that if you truly are interested in using your Twitter feed, you can follow up to about 700 people. After that, a Twitter feed isn’t going to be an effective tool for you. Pare down your list every month so that you will be able to keep up with your changing interests and people who you realize aren’t providing you with useful information. If you pique interest, people will follow you. Trust me.

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Wherein we examine the condition of the mother tongue. Is its demise imminent? Decidedly not. Is it in distress? No doubt. . . .

People who care about the language are worried. They’re worried that the United States is becoming a nation of illiterates – non‐readers and non‐thinkers. They say that the words of even the leaders and the educators are shoddy and imprecise.

And they have good evidence. A former vice president of the United States says: “The loss of life will be irreplaceable.” A Congressman accuses a colleague of being “myoptic.” A mayor says she hopes a certain effort will be “fruitworthy.” A governor declares that we must identify people’s “skill capabilities.”

Politicians can be laughable, and we do laugh. But listen to this professor at a leading private university discuss an exhibit of icons. The images, she says, “elicit a sense of emotive response.” A university dean says: “This is between you and I” (instead of the grammatical “between you and me”).

We’d expect those pretensions and errors from the students, but in fact we get worse: A college student writes that he needs a “change of paste,” and another that she spent the weekend knitting an African (instead of Afghan). A third says a restaurant has a delightful “hemisphere.”

Some of those students, in turn, become the media’s professional wordsmiths – from whom we hope for grace and accuracy. Instead, many seem not even to know what words mean. A newspaper reporter writes that a committee is “closeted away behind closed doors.” Another says the plane crash occurred during a “pelting drizzle.” A radio reporter comments that merchants are “reticent” to use Canada’s dollar coins, while a story on Indian art in Santa Fe reports that everyone is making money “hand over foot.” A stock market commentator says: “We have a fairly newsy week, economic‐wise.” And a television anchor shows that his math is as lamentable as his language when he describes someone as “half English, half German and half Irish.”

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By  advice to journalism students starts with this: B-L-O-G.

That doesn’t mean you have to blog about journalism, or build a rabid political audience, or chronicle every step the Googles and Twitters and Apples of the world take.

It just means that you maintain a Web site where you write on a somewhat regular basis.

And by “maintain,” I mean you have the opportunity to learn as much as you’d like to learn about basic formatting for the Web. HTML, CSS, and if you’re a step more curious or industrious, blog software that mirrors (or exceeds) the functionality you’ll find in the content management systems at most professional news organizations.

That’s how I got started in this business. In fact, to be more precise, I think the first bits of code I touched had to do with making the title of my first Blogspot-hosted blog bigger, and changing its font and colors.

From there I switched to a hosted WordPress blog, learned a lot more about HTML and CSS, then decided I wanted to do more, bought my own domain and hosting (shouldn’t cost more than $10/month) and taught myself much, much more about making WordPress and similar content management systems dance.

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On the Internet, form IS content. HOW you write changes the very substance of WHAT you write, because it changes the way readers process and understand your work.

If you want to make a splash, you have to deliver your message in the right kind of style.

And if you want to do that, you have to play by the rules.

Think about the way you read Web content compared to the way you read a novel, or even a magazine article. If you’re like most people, your eyes move much more quickly in an online setting. Internet readers are looking for information they can digest in a short amount of time and with a minimal amount of effort—and it’s your job as a writer to give them what they want.

The bottom line: Keep it simple, even if it means sacrificing a little rhetorical flair.

Concision and clarity are paramount. Long blocks of text and convoluted grammatical forms turn readers off. Short sentences and short paragraphs keep them engaged. To borrow a passage from the Bleacher Report Editor’s Tips…

If a sentence makes a particularly important point within the article (or can be modified to do so), set it off as its own paragraph. This strategy makes a piece more readable by making its argument easier to follow.

Remember, most Internet readers read very quickly. To catch and hold their attention, it’s important to create visual and rhetorical breaks (e.g. paragraph breaks and single-sentence anchor paragraphs) within the course of the text.

Like this.

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You get report cards, and so should your teachers. You don’t need a great writing teacher, or even a good one, to become a good writer yourself — but it sure helps. And becoming a good writer will help you be a better student, a better worker, a better citizen and a better person.

So what does a good writing teacher look like? If you talk to the experts, they are likely to tell you that you have a better chance of landing a good writing teacher in elementary school, less of a chance in middle school, even less in high school and least in colleges and universities (and don’t get me started on graduate and professional schools).

Don’t take it from me. Listen to Derek Bok, former president of Harvard University, in his recent study “Our Underachieving Colleges.”

“Real proficiency,” writes Bok, “requires sustained practice … . Undergraduates will never learn to write with clarity, precision, and grace unless they have repeated opportunities to keep on writing and get prompt feedback from the faculty.”

While some college writing programs are outstanding, writes Bok, “the field as a whole suffers from widespread neglect.”

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Earlier this week, we announced a new offering on Storyboard – an Editors’ Roundtable, in which a stellar group of editors will collectively analyze a piece of narrative journalism. We invited Storyboard readers to submit links to the best true story they had read recently. Submissions are open indefinitely, so please continue to forward material at any time – stories you wrote, stories from someone you know, or just pieces you’d like to see discussed. They have to have already been published, be available in their entirety online, and be strong enough to make their dissection useful for Storyboard readers. Once a month, the group will explore how a given story works, addressing what makes the writing stand out while sometimes pointing out what could have been done differently.

Today, we’re pleased to announce the members of the roundtable. You’ll see them in action at the beginning of February. In the meantime, you can read a little more about what kind of experience they’ll bring to bear on some of today’s most intriguing and impressive stories.

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Gone are the lonely hours of plodding away at typewriters. Over is the bittersweet sharing of work with relatives. Lessened is the tension of reading out loud to a bunch of strangers. Writer workshops have gone online!

Writers of varying experience and publishing levels are joining online critique groups in droves. Eager to gain objective feedback, helpful hints and wide-flung research resources, writers are committing themselves to helping each other climb the rickety ladder to publishing success.

But are online workshops, and specifically, critique groups, suitable for everyone? Many new writers are often concerned with their ability to provide a good critique. Good critiquing skills generally come from experience, but if you’re lacking in experience how do you learn the Fine Art of the Critique?

Let’s start with a few pointers:

1. Positive Encouragement

New to critiquing or not, it’s always a good point to remember to be positive. Even if you feel like you’re pointing out mistakes every few words, do it in a positive manner and it’s likely the author won’t be offended. Positive encouragement does not mean gushing praise that is not earned. The author can get “gushing” from the relatives. What you need to look for and remember to point out is the word usage that you feel really works, descriptions that you [as reader] really connect to, the good hook at the end that leaves you wanting to read more straight away.

The bits that need work can also be pointed out in a positive way. For example, a sentence may be overly long and wordy, but the basis or concept is very good. Suggest ways that the sentence can be improved to bring out the pearls using positive words: “do” instead of “don’t”, “look at tightening the structure” instead of “this is complete crap, rewrite it!”. A good way to word your suggestions is to think how you would like such comments to be given to you on your own work.

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From my table in front of the class, I frequently look into the audience and wonder who is going to leave the narrative seminars I lead for SPJ and find a real story when they return to their newsrooms.

It’s always fun to get e-mail from reporters who made the leap. I want to share one with you. Even if you can’t make it to a seminar — two more are scheduled for this spring — there’s a lesson here.

Rodger Nichols is a reporter at The Dalles Chronicle, a 5,500-circulation daily in The Dalles, Ore. His managing editor, who also attended the seminar, described her paper this way: a pressure cooker, a six-person staff with lots of stories that need to be turned around in a short time.

Sound familiar?

“Before I came to the seminar, I was what I would call a standard reporter,” Nichols told me. “I tried to do feature stories from time to time, but mostly I was slogging through the standard stuff.”

When he returned home, though, he vowed to find stories that people would remember.

One day a woman came into the paper to drop off a letter to the editor. Nichols has known her since he moved to The Dalles more than 36 years ago. And then it hit him: She is one of those people who make the community vibrant. He was going to tell her story as a narrative, something he’d never done.

“It was sitting right there in front of me,” Nichols said. “But for the first time I saw the story.”

Managing Editor Kathy Ursprung told him to “go for it. I told him I’d edit it with my ‘A’ game,” she told me. “It turned out to be a story with a lot of collaboration. We talked about it and looked for any weakness. Working together was fun.”

Here is how Nichols opened his piece:

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