A little feedback please

[Mark Schafer]

http://therockyriver.com/fine-tuning-the-right-angle-presentation/  A good friend of mine put this piece together for a local site, he’s interested in some feedback on it be it positive or otherwise.

[dave hosler]

After reading the article, I kinda wish he would have explained his indicator a little more.

[Mark Schafer]

Dave, I think a future article is how to build the mop indicator

[Zach Matthews]

Hey Mark –

Constructive criticism; I am not going to dog a guy for getting out and trying to create something and give back to the sport.

(1) Horizontal indicator nymphing or whatever you want to call it is a very basic technique.  You see this a whole lot in articles in print.  In my experience, an editor will typically ask for a section like this in a destination article.  The idea is that your reader needs to know something about how to fish a given location, even though the location is the actual story.  I have a more or less standard couple paragraphs on this kind of fishing that I plug in to most of my tailwater articles because it applies just about anywhere.  So, my advice would be to have your buddy try to condense what he is saying into no more than about 600 words.  That will arm him for writing a destination piece, and concision is almost always good writing.

(2) The indicator itself is the more interesting subject because it is new.  While personally I am not a big fan of that bulky an indicator, I did have to fish one just like that a while back in Arkansas when I ran out of balloons, and I got a number of wild slashes on it.  I think it looks a bit like a big caddisfly.  I’d be interested in that indicator primarily *if it had a hook in it*, which is something your buddy might consider trying.

(3) As another writing tip, your buddy needs to appreciate the difference between a “how to” piece (which is what this is), a “destination” piece, and a “me n Joe” piece.  Those are three distinct genres of writing in the outdoor world that all have some similarities; you can plug and play their components into each other but you need to be careful not to overkill.  If I were editing this piece I would probably cut the first few paragraphs (which are “me n Joe” writing), and I would encourage your buddy to move to the meat of the subject a bit faster.  I’ve had editors call that kind of lengthy warm up “wheel spinning.”  It doesn’t advance the story and it eats up word count.  Words are precious; in print because there’s limited space, and online because there’s limited attention span.  Further, “me n Joe” blow-by-blow writing that recounts every little detail of a day on the water does not make for especially scintillating reading, *unless something unusual happens.*  You can structure a piece as “same old-same old” then throw the reader for a loop with a big surprise (like, say, a plane crash or a sudden storm).  But if you just follow up with nothing, the reader thinks “I do all that too; what was the point.”  Never build dramatic tension without paying it off.

Good luck to your friend.  I think he is on the right track and doing a good thing here.

Zach

[Neal Osborn]

An article on technique with no photographs of the actual technique or at least a fluffy bobber in water shot?

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