Inverted pyramid news writing style

Good writing is so easy to achieve, but many people find it difficult because they don't know the basic rules. Writing stories for your newsletter or website should be simple because this type of writing conforms to a formula. You don't have to be a good writer to get your message across.

When writing news content for communications such as newsletters, bulletins, websites or fact sheets, the ‘inverted pyramid’ writing style is preferred. Imagine a pyramid standing on its point. This style enables readers to get the gist of 'what happened', if they don’t have time to read the entire story, by putting the news at the very top of the story.

Ideally, the most important information will be contained in the first paragraph and the least important information is contained in the last paragraph.

This enables an editor who needs to shorten a story, to remove sentences from the bottom of the story without cutting out any essential information. It also allows the reader to digest the information in the order of most importance.

The first sentence of a news story - called the ‘lead’ - should answer the two most important questions about the subject of your article: ‘who?’ and ‘what?’. The ‘who’ is who your article is about - be it a person, a program or a place - and the ‘what?’ is what happened to that person, program or place to make the information newsworthy. The ‘who?’ and ‘what?’ are not always obvious. They need to be carefully considered so the resulting story is about the most important subject.

Note: In news writing, a paragraph should be no longer than three sentences and sentences should be no longer than 30 words.

Give it a try and let me know how it goes.

Forward slashes - to space or not to space

I've been having trouble getting people interested in visiting my website from Twitter. My friend, who is an expert on all things social media, says it's because I need to be communicating about my area of expertise - I need to communicate about communication.

So I'm sharing something dear to my heart - my love of punctuation. Tragic I know.

I'm pretty good with most punctuation (don't use this blog to attest to that - this is my informal communications forum), but forward slashes have been frustrating me.

My feeling has been that they should conform to the conventions of other punctuation such as the full stop or the comma. That is, full stops and commas come directly after a word, but have a space after them. So my personal style preference has been to do this - word/ next word. Trouble is, my clients always go through my work and query why I have done this. Hence, I've decided to scrap this style in my editing.

So I wanted to find out the convention. Surprisingly, not many websites dedicated to punctuation tackle the use of the forward slash, but I did find quite a lot of online discussions on their use.

And the verdict is ...

If you are using a forward slash to separate two phrases, put a space before and after the forward slash (eg: pay by credit card / pay by money order). This rule also applies if you have a phrase on one side of the forward slash and a single word on the other side (eg: credit card / cash).

If you are using a forward slash to separate two short words, don't put a space on either side of of the forward slash (eg: credit/cash).

That leaves us with long words separated by a forward slash and for this, I am making up my own rule. I'm going to say, if both words separated by the forward slash have eight or more letters, a space is required on each side of the forward slash (eg: elephant / kangaroo). My reasoning for this is that a very long stretch of continuous text can look odd within a paragraph. I wonder if my new rule will catch on!

There are loads of other issues related to forward slashes such as long html addresses that fill more than one line of text and any use of a forward slash that requires the information after the forward slash to spill over onto the next line. I'll investigate this and get back to you.

Thanks for indulging me!

Loop hole

Yippee. There is a loop hole. Because I don't work full time, I'm allowed to do other work without getting permission from my CE. One less thing to worry about.

Recycled paper

I want to print my direct mail on recycled paper. Trouble is, it's not as good quality so it bleeds quite a bit. It can be tricky to be green and "professional looking". I've decided to include a PS in my letters stating: "Wondering why we haven't printed this letter on super-dooper glossy paper for a perfect finish? Wherever possible, we like to use recycled paper or paper sourced from sustainable forests.".