Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in On Writing Well, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Human Element
Simplicity vs. Clutter
Process and Organization
The Gift of Writing
Summary
Analysis
Every sport has a specialized lingo—for instance, baseball writers call pitchers “southpaws,” “portsiders,” and “hurlers.” These overused terms make for terrible writing. Good sportswriters, like Red Smith, avoid these words and develop an original style instead. But most sportswriters try to sound original by replacing basic terms with synonyms and clichés. For instance, one college sportswriter replaces tennis players’ names with epithets like “the Memphis native” and “the Yankee,” which makes it impossible to know who he’s talking about. Most sportswriters also focus too much on statistics—Zinsser quotes one article that quickly turns into a list of numbers and season records.
Sportswriters and travel writers make many of the same mistakes because they work in fields where most stories don’t automatically have a unique hook or appeal. This makes it much harder to find an original angle—but also much more important. Instead, many sportswriters confuse clichés for style and try to dazzle the reader with fancy language. But Zinsser thinks they should take on the hard work of finding an interesting story to tell. Just as interviewers should worry more about finding interesting quotes than replacing “he said” with more colorful synonyms, sports writers should spend their creative energy telling interesting storis, not just replacing a player’s name with a confusing epithet.
Themes
Many excellent writers have found rich, inspiring stories in sports by focusing on the players’ humanity. For instance, John Updike connected baseball player Ted Williams’s lonely temperament to his sport’s place in American life. In his biographies, Robert Creamer depicts sports legends as real people, with their own weaknesses and complexities. Writers can also connect sports to important social issues, like drug abuse, minority rights, and economic inequality.
The human element is just as important in sports as in travel, science, memoir, and business writing. Updike and Creamer write about sports figures, but unlike the articles Zinsser quoted above, their work isn’t only about games, scores, and season records. Rather, they tell interesting human stories. Just like effective science writers connect discoveries to their readers’ lives, effective sportswriters use sports as a lens to address broader social and cultural questions.
Themes
As athletes are now highly-paid celebrities, many sportswriters wrongly focus on money, fame, and scandal rather than actual sports. Some sportswriters try to stand out by starting their articles with long, irrelevant anecdotes, while others try to psychoanalyze athletes or mock the losing side. But readers don’t want this fluff—they want to know what happened in the game. As Red Smith explained, readers used to play sports in their childhood, and they’re thinking about how it felt.
Zinsser has just finished arguing that sportswriters should emphasize human interest stories and broader social problems, but here, he tells them to cut out the fluff and focus on the game. To understand this paradox, readers should keep two distinctions in mind. First, writers have much more liberty in books and long-form articles—like the biographies Zinsser mentioned above—than they do in ordinary newspaper columns. Second, fluff isn’t the same as interesting personal stories. Celebrity scandal, pointless anecdotes, and scathing criticism are useless because, even if they grab the reader’s attention, they don’t make any lasting connection with them or speak to the underlying reasons for their interest in sports.
Themes
In fact, many sportswriters focus on what it feels like to be a top athlete. For instance, Lesley Hazleton writes about the extraordinary physical pressures that Formula One drivers confront during a race. Other writers use advancement in sports to illustrate social progress. For example, Janice Kaplan writes about how women’s marathon times improved much faster than men’s in the 1970s, which reflected (and helped overturn) cultural biases. In another article about the “Battle of the Sexes” between tennis players Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, Kaplan shows how sports help determine what gender equality really means in the contemporary U.S.
Hazelton connects with her readers by helping them imagine driving a Formula One racecar, while Kaplan connects with hers by showing them how women’s sports connect to equity issues that affect them. But both of them make sports relevant to life without distorting either. In contrast, shabbier sportswriters tend to focus entirely on the game—without making it relevant to readers’ lives—or pander to their readers with stories that don’t actually capture what’s meaningful about sports.
Themes
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In general, the best sportswriters connect sports to the culture at large. For instance, in Life on the Run, Bill Bradley writes about how star athletes struggle after passing their prime because of greedy managers and a cultural obsession with winning. Like any other topic, sport is primarily interesting because of the people, places, and cultural changes associated with it. Great sports writing focuses on those themes.
Bradley uses sports to illuminate culture and culture to illuminate sports. For Zinsser, this balancing act is the key to writing well: writers have to explain some topic’s personal, social, or cultural significance to readers in a way that enriches the reader’s knowledge of both the topic and the people, places, and cultures it connects to.
Themes
