Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2021 August 19

= August 19 =

is it a coincidence or not that all the u.s. presidents who skipped their successor's inauguration were one-term presidents
49.149.140.24 (talk) 02:43, 19 August 2021 (UTC)


 * See this comic to understand that such patterns don't really mean much. Short answer, probably a coincidence. HighInBC Need help? Just ask. 02:45, 19 August 2021 (UTC)


 * It's also useful to understand why they didn't. And since two-termers were customarily and eventually constitutionally restricted from running for a third term, they would have no particular reason to skip the inauguration. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 03:16, 19 August 2021 (UTC)


 * It's simple human nature. Losers tend to not like attending the celebrations of their defeat. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 07:46, 19 August 2021 (UTC)
 * that does not explain others like carter or h.w. 49.149.140.24 (talk) 08:06, 19 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Explain what? That they didn't snub the incoming president? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 08:37, 19 August 2021 (UTC)
 * There are many things it does not explain, like that Lincoln, McKinley and FDR did not attend their successors' inaugurations. It is in fact rather common that an explanation for one observed phenomenon does not cover all other observed phenomena. --Lambiam 09:13, 19 August 2021 (UTC)
 * They were there in spirit. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 22:35, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

Journalism writing style
If you read enough medium-length journalism, you start to notice a very common style of writing, where the article is broken into pieces and the pieces switch tone between drama and background detail. Like, the first paragraph would be "Matt logged in to his Wikipedia account on January 8th to correct a typo. It was the last correction he ever made." While the second would be something like "Matt first joined Wikipedia in 2005 where he found enjoyment in building something for the larger community. We first met on the reference desk and hit it off right away." Then - boom - back to the melodrama: "Matt's wife waited at home, nervously watching the clock, growing ever more anxious as the minutes ticked by." And so on, until near the end when there's some kind of resolution tying the two together. Sometimes it's done well and the transitions are either subtle enough to not be jarring or interesting enough to keep you hooked - and then sometimes it's just tiresome to read, like you're swapping between film noir and a documentary. Is there a name for this style of writing? Is there a specific proponent of it that popularized it? Matt Deres (talk) 19:33, 19 August 2021 (UTC)


 * Not specifically what you are asking, but see FROM WHAT TO WHY: THE CHANGING STYLE OF NEWSWRITING. Alansplodge (talk) 23:13, 19 August 2021 (UTC)
 * A bit more specifically, see Inverted pyramid (journalism). Alansplodge (talk) 23:17, 19 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Don't forget the dialogue between Matt and Mrs. Matt. 2601:648:8202:350:0:0:0:2B99 (talk) 04:14, 20 August 2021 (UTC)


 * Not an answer, but an observation. The sections that you characterize as "drama" tend to form a narrative arc. Not only does the narrative introduce human interest, but if done right it also instills a desire in the reader to find out how the story ends, so they will keep reading. It is kind of a "sandwich formula" to make the reader consume the background stuff without bailing out. I suppose journalists found out kind of experimentally that the formula works. With today's onslaught of the 24/7 news cycle, the inverted pyramid stopped working except for short pieces; the lead already satisfies the TL;DR need and creates no curiosity gap.  --Lambiam 07:25, 20 August 2021 (UTC)

I remember noticing a trope ages ago of beginning a news story with a near-irrelevant slice-of-life beginning with a person's name, like in Matt's example. We have tvtropes.org so maybe we need one for journalistic tropes too. 2601:648:8202:350:0:0:0:2B99 (talk) 11:05, 20 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Maybe that's New Journalism? Alansplodge (talk) 12:55, 20 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Maybe a bit, though New Journalism had a more profound impact on nonfiction writing than journalism-as-a-profession. New Journalism was a movement that favored the narrative, subjective experiences of the participants, etc. etc.  and you can see some of that in this style of writing, though the examples above feel like their trying to paste in little bits of New Journalism style of writing rather than commit to it whole-hog.  New Journalism really flourished outside of traditional news reporting outlets; you saw it in The New Yorker not in the New York Times, for example, and it really flourished in book form, with stories like The Right Stuff, Paper Lion, In Cold Blood, and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 among others as paragons of the style.  -- Jayron 32 14:17, 20 August 2021 (UTC)


 * See also News_style and Nut graph, more often seen in the type of feature writing of your example, which was prepared ahead of time, rather than straight-up, written-on-a-60-minute-deadline reporting. 70.67.193.176 (talk) 14:42, 20 August 2021 (UTC)

Thank you to the respondents so far. What I'm talking about is almost the antithesis of Inverted pyramid (journalism). I see the inverted pyramid a lot in sports writing, there the first bit is about some new record or game result or whatever, the second bit provides details or context, and then the article kind of drags on into less and less interesting information. The style I'm referring to is a narrative arc interspersed with nut graphs. I don't know enough about New Journalism to say if it applies or not, but there are some similarities. As I mentioned in the OP, I see this in what I would classify as medium-length journalism (so, not breaking news stories, but more considered essays). Matt Deres (talk) 15:29, 20 August 2021 (UTC)


 * How about narrative journalism, narrative time ? This thesis contains some discussion of narrative time and temporal immersion in narrative journalism: . This paper talks about "viewpoint shift" and "viewpoint transfer" (with the linguistic markers that signal them). --Amble (talk) 16:45, 20 August 2021 (UTC)