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.