Naming the people in your reporting, carefully

There's a particular kind of sentence that shows up in early drafts more often than writers realize: the source introduced by their function rather than their person. "A fisherman said," "a mother of three explained." Useful shorthand for a first pass, but if it survives to publication, the piece has quietly decided that this person matters less than the ones given full names and titles.

The asymmetry writers don't notice

Officials and experts in a piece tend to arrive with names, titles, and sometimes a small biographical detail. People affected by the story — the ones the reporting is often actually about — arrive as categories. This isn't usually deliberate. It happens because officials give interviews on the record as a matter of course, while ordinary sources are approached more cautiously, and caution can slide into under-description.

The fix isn't always to press for a full name; sometimes anonymity is the right and necessary choice. The fix is noticing when a source has been reduced to their circumstance, and asking whether one more sentence of texture would let the reader see them as a person making choices, not just an example of a problem.

• Read back through your draft and count how many named sources are officials versus ordinary people.
• Ask each source how they'd like to be described, not just what they're willing to say.
• Where anonymity is necessary, still give the person a detail beyond their hardship.

Small corrections, larger trust

None of this requires rewriting a piece's structure. It usually means going back through and asking, sentence by sentence, whether a person has been given enough specificity to exist as themselves rather than as an illustration. Readers notice the difference even when they can't name why a piece feels more trustworthy — and so, often, do the sources themselves, the next time a reporter comes asking.