Ranting is healthy and sometimes entertaining or distracting from more upsetting ruminations. It is purposeful in that it clears the way for doing stuff.

But according the Leader Conference last night on Radio 4 a lot of my “rants” my not be rants at all.

Bronwen Maddox (Editor of Prospect Magazine, former Leader writer for the TImes & Financial Times) was asked what distinguishes a leader from a rant – in response she said

It needs to say something that goes beyond “they would say that wouldn’t they” or worse “something must be done” and it needs reasons which a rant doesnt have.

She went on to set out the structure to a leader that she had been taught at the FT :

• Proposition
• Supporting evidence
• Dismissal of counterargument (if space permits)
• Conclusion
• And then if you can top and tail it with a joke or reference to literature the more to the good

As I was listening I thought “well that’s what I do when I blog”. I may not always achieve that structure and I don’t have the discipline of an editor to require me to keep on track, so I have the luxury of wandering off into genuine rant mode if I so choose (I can certainly think of a few “something must be done” blog posts (I think of them as my “Why, oh why oh why?” blog posts) but perhaps I have mistaken strength of feeling / opinion for rantiness.

Anyway, I am more and more struck by the similarities between law and journalism the longer I dabble in both (I wrote about that a bit before here). To illustrate, one might say that Bronwen Maddox’ leader structure is not a bad recipe for closing submissions (although go easy on the jokes, they can backfire). Perhaps in some alternate universe I am leader writer for a broadsheet newspaper, but in this one we should probably both stick to our day jobs….