Elements of a Story
The most important element of a story is clarity. Tell the reader, in simple and plain language, what happened, when, where, and why. Tell them who is responsible.
You should also include, very high in the story, a paragraph telling the reader why he should care and why he should bother to keep reading.
Include lower in the story enough details and context to support your lead and allow the reader to make sense of the story.
The Lead:
This is perhaps the most important paragraph in the entire story. If you write a lousy lead, readers will stop there and the rest of your work will be wasted. If your lead does not accurately reflect the content of the rest of your story, readers will be confused and sometimes even angry.
In most cases, a lead should reflect exactly what happened and when. You can usually leave other details for later paragraphs. For example:
The Cal Poly women's soccer team advanced to the finals this week with a 3-2 win over Cal Poly San Luis Obispo;
Or
University officials are proposing a 25 percent increase in student activity fees, saying costs have risen dramatically in the past year.
Keep your leads short and to the point. Do not feel compelled to cram every fact and figure into the lead. Also, avoid using the passive voice and avoid introductory dependent clauses. Both may sound good in your head, but they look awful in print:
Saying costs have risen in the last year, university officials are proposing a 25 percent hike in student activity fees;
Or
Student activity fees will be raised 25 percent next year.
The first sentence, using a dependent clause, is not a terrible lead, but it is not as fluid as the more active version. The second sentence is stilted and avoids pinning the responsibility where it belongs, on university officials.
Do not give into the temptation to be needlessly cute or creative in your leads. It may sound good in your head, but chances are a trick lead will come out unclear and could confuse the reader. Worse yet, a long “creative” lead can try the patience of the reader and cause him to quit reading before he gets to the key information.
Here is a common example of the “creative” lead I see, again using the hypothetical example of the student activity fee hike:
Students are in for a big surprise when they return to Cal Poly next year.
Not a bad sentence, of course, but why waste the time and ink on the extra sentence? Why not just say what's going to happen and get on with it? Your reader will love you for it.
There are cases where a creative lead is appropriate and even helpful, of course, but I have found newer writers have trouble pulling it off effectively. Once you learn the more direct approach thoroughly, it is easier to begin to play with more interesting and unusual leads. If you want to try an unusual lead, discuss it first with me or your editors.
The Anecdotal Lead:
There is one exception to the straightforward lead that newer writers can often pull off effectively. It is the anecdotal lead: a lead that tells a personal story or starts with a scene. For example:
Bob Smith is worried that he won't be able to return to college next year, ending his dream of becoming an aerospace engineer.
The Cal Poly sophomore says a proposed hike in student activity fees will strain his already limited budget and force him out of school.
Or:
The sun had barely broken the horizon as Bob Smith started his long commute from Santa Ana to his second job as a bagel baker in Pomona.
The Cal Poly sophomore is taking a second job to pay for a proposed hike in student activity fees, a hike he fears will be so expensive that it will force him to drop out of school.
This is sometimes an effective way of introducing a complicated or dry topic with a compelling human story.
Notice that the above examples each required two sentences to complete. Anecdotal leads are often several paragraphs long just to set up the vignette and connect it with the main theme of the story. Be sure, therefore, to get an interesting or unusual example and be as brief as possible. If your opening anecdote runs on too long, readers will lose interest.
The Nut Graph:
The story should include a paragraph, known usually as a “nut graph,” that gives a brief summary of the situation or other context that will tell the reader why we bothered to write the story. They usually look something like this:
This is the first time the president has made such a statement...
She is the youngest student ever to graduate from Cal Poly...
He is the first Cal Poly student to receive such an award...
Alternatively, the nut graph may give a key detail, usually not included in the lead, which tells the reader why the story is important. For example:
The proposal would hike student parking fees 150 percent, from $36 per quarter to $90, as early as next winter.
Or
The increase in the county budget means a hike of $150 in property taxes and fees for the average family of four, according to the Board of Supervisors' figures.
Paragraphs
Unlike most forms of writing, news writing calls for very short paragraphs, sometimes as short as a single sentence.
The reason for this short-paragraph style is quite mundane: long paragraphs look really gray and imposing when compressed into a standard newspaper column, which is 12 picas (or two inches) wide. A single sentence might come out four or five lines, or about one inch, in such a tight space. A five or ten sentence paragraph, which would look quite normal on a full sheet in a book, would be five or even ten inches long when compressed into a single column. Readers might turn away in dismay.
Passive Voice
This is probably the most difficult habit for new writers to break, but doing so will make an astonishing difference in your writing,
Briefly, here it is:
Always say what happened in an active and direct way:
The teacher kicked the trashcan can because he was angry.
Do not say, The trashcan was kicked because the teacher was angry. It is boring and unclear. And who kicked the can? There are several ways to read that sentence.
Bureaucrats, politicians and assorted evildoers love to use the passive voice, in part because it gives a false sense of sophistication, but mostly because it is a lovely way to obscure the responsibility for an action.
Remember the famous line from the Nixon Administration: “mistakes were made.” Do not succumb to the spin. Don’t let a public relations flack talk you into telling readers “fees will be raised.” The reader really needs to know WHO is raising his fees and WHY. The passive voice obscures the responsibility and gives the action a false sense of inevitability, like it is a scientific law rather than a political proposal.
Quotes
Quotes are immensely powerful tools. They add life and variety to a story. They break up the monotony of your writing by adding other voices to the story. They draw readers in by including a cast of characters who influence or witness the essential actions in your story.
You should try to include quotes up high, ideally in the second paragraph if you have a good quote that supports your lead. You should sprinkle quotes liberally throughout the story. (Don't, however, make a quote your lead; that very rarely works. Trust me).
But quotes are often misused, abused, or flat-out wasted.
Don't bother to include quotes that are obvious or boring:
“We are open on Thursdays and Fridays,” she said; or “Half our members are men, the other half are women,” he said.
Don't include quotes that have dubious statistics that you cannot independently verify:
“A third of all gay teenagers attempt suicide,” she said;
or
“The administration is diverting money from teaching salaries,” he said.
Just because someone said it doesn't make it true and doesn't give us license to repeat a dubious or false fact.
One of the most common mistakes by writers is to step on a good quote by repeating the same information in a setup sentence. For example:
The campus was evacuated after a bomb threat Thursday.
"A bomb threat caused us to evacuate," the president told students.
Instead, use a setup sentence to give some additional detail or set the scene:
The president quickly came out to address a crowd of jittery students, who had not been told why they were ordered out of the buildings.
“A bomb threat caused us to evacuate,” the president told students.
Remember all quotes within quotation marks must be exact; the speaker must have said just what you claim (there are some minor exceptions: sometimes it just doesn't matter whether he said that or which, for example. If you are unsure about the exact wording and need to wing it a little bit, make very sure you understand what the speaker meant and do not change his meaning in any way).
You may use some devices to clarify or clean up a quote. You may add text by including it in brackets. You may use ellipses to remove irrelevant words and phrases or string together two clearly related thoughts that he said at different times. You may also remove small sounds and phrases that clutter up the speech (“um” and “you know” are common examples, although there is wide debate in journalism about how far you may go in cleaning up a quote).
You might have an interview, for example, where the speaker says, literally:
“The new budget which they are considering is, um, a good one. Would you pass me that coffee? Thanks. And I am, um, I will support it.”
Obviously this is not useable in a story. It is, however, acceptable to use it this way:
“The new budget which [the university regents] are considering is a good one … and I will support it.”
You may also use indirect quotes, without quotation marks, or even mix direct and indirect quotes:
The president said the budget the Regents are considering is “a good one” and he will support it.
Don't bother to attribute boring or obvious information in indirect quotes.
You should say: The man then shot the girl four times, police said. That is an important detail that is open to debate and we need to convey that uncertainty.
You don't need to say: The store is open Thursdays and Fridays, he said. It either is open those days or it isn't. The fact that he said it is totally unimportant and it makes us look like we are too lazy to confirm a simple fact.
There are many words in the English language that mean “said”: stated, claimed, chuckled, cried, yelled, croaked, gurgled, gushed, wheezed, coughed joked, laughed, added, quipped. There is even the venerable “according to...”
Don’t use these words when quoting someone. Just say he '"said" something. I know it sounds boring to say “said” a dozen times in a story, but it is an important rule and almost all professional editors will stick to it religiously. These other words are imprecise and laden with judgment that we should keep out of our stories. “Said” is a nicely neutral word: he either did or did not say it; there is no level of opinion on our part.
“According to” is acceptable in official situations: “according to police” or “according to University officials,” for example. But in other cases, it implies that there is a degree of doubt or that we somehow don't believe the person we interviewed. Don't use “according to” unless you mean to cast doubt on the speaker.
You may use “says,” but only when you are indicating some ongoing action: “the letter says” is perfectly acceptable since the letter will continue to say the same thing every time you read it for as long as it exists. In rare cases, you may say that a person “says” something: “he says he will never go back to fishing with live bait after trying the special lures,” is acceptable, for example, but it better be something this man has said often and will repeat to anybody who listens. If he just said it one time to a reporter, use “said” to indicate that it was just this one case.
You can use some more emotionally laden words in rare cases, but only in indirect quotes or regular text. You may, for example, say that someone “insisted that he was not involved,” but he better have made that statement repeatedly and emphatically.
The word “states” or “stated” should simply be banned from newspaper writing. It is pretentious and awkward in print. The only time “states” is even remotely appropriate is when used in a legal sort of context, where there is a degree of commandment and profundity: “the law states” or “the Bible states” are both acceptable, although they are slightly pretentious and you'd be better off saying “says” or “said” in both cases.
Editorial Comment
Don't give opinions in a story unless they are backed up by clear facts or attributed to a specific person other than the writer.
Don't say: The event was a great success or a good time was had by all. It's not our job to inject our opinion like that.
You may say: The event was a great success, drawing in almost $10,000 more than organizers had expected. In that case, we give the readers some basis to judge for themselves whether it was a success and we implicitly credit the opinion to the organizers.
Ignore the Spin
It is not our job to give away ad space. Don't bother to put in a lot of details that will boost a commercial enterprise: “The shirts cost $10 and are available at…”
Let them buy an ad.
Generally, don't put in website addresses, store hours, prices, or even phone numbers unless they are vitally important to the story. If it is really that important, such as the phone number of a battered women's shelter in a story about domestic abuse or a drop-off location for donations to a charity we are profiling, we can include that in a small graphic along with the story. Leave that to the discretion of the editors.
Also, don't just fall for the hype that spokesmen, business people, lawyers and politicians give you.
Don't say: The business has grown tremendously or the event was very successful. Make the organizers tell you why or how and include specific information in the story to let the reader judge for himself. Just because someone says it, doesn't mean it is true and we must repeat it without proof.
And never, ever, use exclamation points in print. Not only does it convey an inappropriate level of enthusiasm, it looks goofy and amateurish (!).
Questions? Comments? Contact Me: SPScully@seanibus.com