100 ways to improve your writing - Gary Provost 2019

Don’t hide behind your words
Twelve ways to avoid making your reader hate you

You should be willing to put yourself into what you write. That doesn’t mean you should write everything in the first person, or that you should meticulously insert your feelings and observations into every memo. What it does mean is you should not be afraid to climb onto the page when your presence will strengthen what you have written.

Let’s say there’s a disastrous hotel fire in Providence, Rhode Island, and you were staying in the hotel at the time. It would be unthinkable to leave yourself out of the story. You, after all, are an eyewitness. You felt the heat, you saw the people leap from windows, you heard the lower floors cave in beneath you. Your experience, your feelings at the time, can bring the reader right into an article like nothing else:

At noon on August 3, I was in Room 1104 of the Westcott Hotel, just five floors above a flame that would eventually consume the entire hotel and take 118 lives.

But if you were in Amarillo, Texas, at the time of the Providence fire and were assigned three months later to write a story about it, your experience at the time is of no relevance to your article, and so it would be foolish to write the following:

At the time of the Providence hotel fire I was in Amarillo, Texas, swilling down piña coladas with William F. Buckley.

If you decide it is best to put yourself into a story, do so with confidence and enthusiasm. Don’t creep shyly in with some absurd device like “This reporter witnessed the events,” or the pretentious “We” when you mean “I.”

In other words, don’t be coy about involving yourself in what you write.