Telling True Stories by Mark Kramer
Published 2007 · 103,451 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Journalism & Reportage
How hard is Telling True Stories to read?
Telling True Stories scores 31 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 35 out of 100
- Contributors write in standard journalistic prose aimed at aspiring writers, not specialists. Craft terms like 'lede,' 'nutgraf,' and 'immersion reporting' appear throughout, but these are self-explanatory in context. No archaic vocabulary, invented language, or domain-specific jargon that would challenge a general reader.
- Sentence structure: 32 out of 100
- Sentences run short to medium length in direct, anecdotal style—this is journalism prose, built to be read fast. The anthology includes 50+ contributors, and virtually all write in the clear declarative mode of newspaper narrative. Nora Ephron on screenwriting and Phillip Lopate on the personal essay are perhaps the most rhetorically elaborate, but nothing approaches the hypotaxis of James or Proust.
- Abstraction: 42 out of 100
- The book oscillates between concrete anecdote (Debra Dickerson at her nephew's bedside writing 'Who Shot Johnny?'; Sonia Nazario riding freight trains through Mexico) and abstract craft principles (the ethics of composite characters, narrative distance, the epistemology of memory). Most chapters ground every generalization in a specific story from a specific newsroom.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- More than fifty contributors each compress years of practice into essays of two to five pages, packing in named works, specific techniques, ethical dilemmas, and field anecdotes. Readers must track discrete craft concepts across wildly different subgenres—profiles, travel writing, investigative journalism, public radio—in rapid succession. The density rivals a textbook, though the prose never reads like one.
How Telling True Stories is regarded
Telling True Stories holds a literary regard score of 49 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.