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Writing tips
What about writing style?
Style and Style Books
The best advice is to make what you write brief, neat and plain. Could any instruction be simpler? Or harder to achieve?
Show me how
Writing for newspapers can be learned. A few simple rules are all you need.
Put the main part of the story at the beginning, in the intro (= introductory paragraph). Succeeding pars explain and amplify. Each successive par contains progressively less important information.
Answer the questions Who, When, Why, What, Where and How - in any order - in the first two or three sentences.
Example:
The Mayor of Tadwich (Who) planted a tree (What) on Tuesday (When) at St. John's School (Where) to commemorate a brave pupil who died saving a classmate from drowning (Why).
The next few pars - most papers these days paragraph each sentence - will tell the reader who the brave pupil was, when where and how s/he died, who was saved.
A good reporter will include some comment from the dead person's family early on.
Then the story might tail off with details of who else was at the ceremony, other events planned, and so on.
Examining published reports can help develop your newspaper writing style. Try counting how many facts are in the intro, how many in the next par, and so on.
What did you discover?
A little exercise
Take a short (four to eight paragraphs) news report from any newspaper.
Cover the final par and read it again. It should still make sense.
Cover what is now the last par and read it again; does it still make sense? It should.
Carry on taking out the bottom par and re-reading until you are left with only the intro (= first par).
It should make sense at every stage, though it eventually becomes only a NIB or News In Brief item.
Why is this? Because that's the way reporters are trained to write. With good reason. In the hurly-burly of newspaper production nobody has time to re-write a story that is a shade too long for the space available.
They simply cut off the last par, and again if necessary until it fits, knowing they safely can because that's the way news reports are written.
By the way, this technique applies whatever the length of the story; I suggested you use a short report only to save time and tedium.
All rules have exceptions. There's a technique called the "delayed drop" story which keeps the reader intrigued until the final par reveals all. Such stories must be clearly marked "Do Not Cut".
Resist the temptation to write like this for at least the first two years.
