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a girl who wore an engagement ring" (Serrin 30), wrote Shepherd, whose inclusion of the detail that the corpse wore an engagement ring deepens the sense of loss his audience feels.
Some stories, on the other hand, suffer the absence of the telling detail because of the passage of time and the absence of an eyewitness's recounting. For example, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study made headlines when it was reported, and it affected necessary political change, but Jean Heller's reporting of the study, decades after its launch, lacks the power of the previous examples. It is a tragic story, and the reporter did not fail to properly convey its atrocity, but had there been included some telling details, readers would perhaps have reacted to it more viscerally. Several of the study's intentionally uninformed participants were still alive in 1972 when the story went to press, and it may have served Heller well to interview them and include some of their disturbing experiences and memories.

The typical avid reader can recall the moment in his life when he first realized why he loves to read, and chances are good that moment came when he encountered a particularly memorable phrase, crafted so elegantly that he was struck by its simple beauty. As often as not, that phrase was devoted to a visually descriptive detail that may not have been essential to the story, but without which the story would have been less compelling an observation of a moment in time that is unique to the event being related. Such, in journalism, is the telling detail. It can make the difference between knowing an event and merely knowing about it.

Works Cited
Serrin, Judith and William Serrin. Muckraking: The Journalism that Changed America. The New Press, 2002.

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