David Hedley's Building Blocks of Powerful News Feature Writing

Ways to Shape and Layer Information for Greater Credibility and Emotional Impact

• Create movement -- Use the 'circle-around' structure repeatedly within a story. It consists of an introductory sentence, an exploratory walk-through of the evidence, and a concluding statement. 
• Strengthen emotional impact -- Try layering information as follows: Set down the facts, followed by a statement (quote or writer observation) showing how characters in the story feel about those facts. 
• Establish your authority -- Lay down the facts, followed by a statement interpreting those facts (quote, writer's own summary). 
• Sound excited -- Mix it up. Vary the length of your sentences. Convince your editor to allow multi-sentence paragraphs. The traditional writing form a new paragraph at the end of every sentence, unquestioned -- is a bad habit made unnecessary by pagination technology. 
• Strengthen the focus -- News features appear tedious to busy readers without a convincing, sustained theme statement near the top. Make it meaty. 
• Rewrite it. Ask your neighbor if it's coming through. 
• Be an original witness to a moving event -- Take your story 'live' by carefully writing all that you observed, drawing on all senses. Dispassionate summary may lead readers to the perimeter of a story, but they won't experience the story unless you take them there. 
• Write with ultimate credibility -- When space and resources allow, report and write a chronological narrative of a central event. Readers are well served by a story that transparently reconstructs 'how it happened.' 
• Write in blocks -- The inverted pyramid works in short bursts. But on longer stories, the mechanical listing of elements according to some calculation of newsworthiness is jarring for those less familiar with the story. After the lead paragraphs, organize the story into logical chunks. 
• Improve your anecdotal leads -- Common if not overused on news features, this approach often falls apart for two reasons. The anecdote doesn't perfectly reflect the story theme. Or the ensuing theme statement is too weak to capture the reader's attention. Master these two 'structures,' and you'll hook your reader every time. 

Dave Hedley is a senior copy editor at the Calgary Herald. He has led seminars for the CNA, including the National Copy Editors' Seminar, and has been an occasional lecturer at Wordstock, the annual day-long writing seminar for journalists.