Roy Peter Clark


Roy Peter Clark is an American writer, editor, and teacher of writing who has become a writing coach to an international community of students, journalists, and writers. He is also senior scholar and vice president of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, a journalism think-tank in St. Petersburg, Florida, and is the founder of the National Writers Workshop. Clark has appeared on several radio and television talk shows, speaking about ethics in journalism and other writing issues.

Life and career

Clark is a native of the Lower East Side of New York City, and was raised on Long Island. His mother was of half-Italian and half-Jewish ancestry. Clark earned a degree in English from Providence College, Rhode Island, where he was editor of ', a literary journal, and managing editor of the student-run newspaper, '. From there, Clark earned a Ph.D. in English, specializing in medieval literature, from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
In 1974, Clark accepted a position teaching English at Auburn University at Montgomery, Alabama. Newspaper columns he wrote during that time attracted the attention of Eugene Patterson, editor of the St. Petersburg Times. Patterson hired Clark in 1977 as a reporter and to work with the newspaper’s staff as a writing coach.
In 1979, Clark became a faculty member at, and has spent more than thirty years working in various positions with the Poynter Institute, the non-profit organization that now owns Times Publishing Company, which publishes the St. Petersburg Times. Clark is listed as one of the Directors and Officers of Andrea Pitzer, writing for the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, has called Clark “one of narrative journalism’s hardest working midwives.”
The publication of his three most recent books, Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer and The Glamour of Grammar: A Guide to the Magic and Mystery of Practical English, and Help! For Writers: 210 Solutions to the Problems Every Writer Faces brings Clark’s work into the mainstream audience of readers, writers, and lovers of language.
Clark and his wife, Karen, have three daughters.

Works

Academic Works

Clark, a product of Catholic schools and the Dominican-run Providence College, wrote several articles based on Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, some of which were published in The Chaucer Review and in which he discusses Chaucer's parodying of Church teachings and rituals. His Ph.D. dissertation was titled "Chaucer and Medieval Scatology."

Journalism

Clark's journalistic writings include works written as a journalist and works written about journalism. As a journalist, Clark revitalized the serial article form when, in 1996, he wrote a 29-part serial narrative piece called which chronicled the story of one family's experience with AIDS. The article generated more than 8,000 phone calls to the newspaper.
Clark writes about journalism through his online articles written for the Poynter Institute. In an updated look at serial reporting, for instance, Clark discussed how tweeting, social media, and other forms of 21st century culture are being used to write mini serial narratives.
Clark has also written and edited a number of books about journalism, some of which are used as textbooks in college journalism courses, including Coaching Writers: Editors and Reporters Working Together, the second edition of which was titled Coaching Writers: Editors and Reporters Working Together across Media Platforms, and Journalism: The Democratic Craft.

On Writing

Clark has taught writing to professional journalists, scholastic journalists, and elementary school students.
In his book, Free to Write: A Journalist Teaches Young Writers, and in other writing, Clark advocates putting the responsibility for correcting written work on the student rather than on the teacher.
Clark's more recent books are useful to writers of all genres and of all ages and discuss the power of language as well as how to wield that power.
Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer grew out of a series of columns written for Poynter. Clark discusses the 50 tools, including the "clarity and narrative energy" that comes with using right-branching sentences, in , which, according to Poynter, have been "downloaded more than a million times."
In The Glamour of Grammar: A Guide to the Magic and Mystery of Practical English, Clark traces the words 'glamour' and 'grammar' back to their common roots.
Clark also reports on how other writers write, as he did in a 2002 Poynter column about radio script writing, which he wrote after listening to a lecture by NPR reporter John Burnett.

Radio and Television Appearances

Clark has been a guest on several radio and television programs.
Most notably, Clark participated in a discussion on the January 26, 2006, episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show, "." Clark, along with then ' columnist Frank Rich and ' columnist Richard Cohen discussed the veracity of James Frey's memoir, A Million Little Pieces, which had been exposed by The Smoking Gun as being at least partially fictionalized.
Clark appeared on the October 12, 2006, episode of Oprah, ";" on the October 15, 2006, episode, "," Oprah referred to Clark's seven ways to develop a healthy skepticism, which included suggestions about reading political blogs from various perspectives, understanding the difference between "vigorous discussion" and shouting matches, valuing middle ground, experiencing life directly and not indirectly through TV and other media, and which concluded with this distinction between skepticism and cynicism: "Be a skeptic, but not a cynic. A skeptic doubts knowledge. A cynic doubts moral goodness. The cynic says, "All politicians are liars," or "all journalists have a secret bias." The skeptic says, "That doesn't sound right to me. Show me the evidence."
The list above is a shorter version of another list Clark discussed in his Poynter.org post "Skepticism: The Antidote to 'Truthiness' in American Government and Media."
Clark appeared on for two episodes, one abridged, and one longer.

Selected bibliography

Books