Newspapers provide the best examples of clear, concise, factual writing you can find anywhere. Journalists not only write superbly well, they do so extremely concise. When a news event occurs, they don’t have the luxury of spending several days to put together their text. At best, they may have a few hours.
Learning how journalists work can help you write better. Journalist use an ingenious technique called the “inverted pyramid”.Before seeing how it works, it would be useful to see where it came from.
A couple of centuries ago, poor literacy and primitive printing techniques meant that newspapers had few readers, few pages, and were published infrequently (once a week or even once a month). As literacy and printing techniques improved, the number of readers increased, the number of pages increased. And so did frequency. Most newspapers were published at least once a week, some 2 - 3 times a week. Many even became dailies.
This accelerating pace of production created a serious technical problem. In more leisurely days, if a story was too long for the space assigned to it, there was always plenty of time to either rewrite it or redesign the page. However, when newspapers became dailies, with large circulations this was no longer possible.
What newspapers needed were stories that they could cut off from the bottom. In this way, instead of laboring to revise a story at the last minute, they could simply remove the last few sentences or paragraphs, and the job was done.
In order to do this, stories had to be written in a very special way. It is of no value simply to cut from the bottom if the lost information is crucial for the reader to understand what the story is all about. Consequently, stories had to be written “top down”. All key information had to be concentrated at the beginning and all secondary information presented in declining order of importance. In this way text could be deleted from the bottom and no one would know that it had ever been there.
This story structure became known as the inverted pyramid. It worked extremely well because it not only solved the mechanical problem of overly long texts, it also turned out to be how people prefer to get their information, particularly when they are in a hurry.
With today’s computer technology, the mechanical problem that gave rise to the inverted pyramid is no longer relevant. However, because it constitutes the very basis of good writing, the inverted pyramid is still held widely used.
Imagine an upside-down pyramid, or rather a triangle, i.e. with its point at the bottom and the wide part at the top. The top, where all the key information is concentrated, is called the“lead”. The second part, which contains the secondary information (details), is called the “body. Try using this method and before you know it you too will start writing in a more concise manner and editing faster than you can imagine.
Reference
Philip Yaffe, In the “I” of the Storm: the Simple Secrets of Writing & Speaking (Almost) like a Professional.
I have to say, I love this blog! The content is very clear and easy to find. You have included extra articles and additional thoughts, opinions and insights about not online the course material but how it applies to your profession. The purpose is clear and leaves little room for anyone to have any doubt as to what it may be about. It seems as if you have a very good idea of who your audience is and what they will want to read about!
ReplyDeleteThe design of the blog is very neat and organized and the layout is very nice, in my opinion. I love how you included the background image of the columns. It really matches your profession, in particular, well.