Ready to Write? Now What?
Hey, Morningsiders! What’s new?
That’s the first question to ask yourself when writing for your neighborhood newsletter. And yes, you can write for it. Anyone who can read and watch the news, can write the news about their community.
Here are a few rules for doing it well.
1. Simple is best
You don’t need to know a lot of big words to write for your community newsletter. In fact, shorter words are better at helping people understand what you’re writing. Short sentences work better. Longer sentences, with lots of commas in them, can become really confusing for the reader, who doesn’t want to try to figure out what that long sentence is saying. Make it clear with a shorter sentence.
2. Name it; don’t claim it.
It’s cool to find some useful information readers need. But tell them where you got the information, so they know it’s legit and not something you’re just making up or trying to steal.
That means that if you’re copying something from someone or somewhere else, say where you got it. Otherwise it looks like you’re claiming it as your own. If you’re repeating what someone else said in your article, make sure the audience knows you’re doing that: Put quotation marks around words spoken by anybody who isn’t you, or it will look like you said it.
Ask for permission to use something that somebody else took a picture of or drew, and then let readers know who gave you the permission.
3. Find the right beginning.
There is a wrong beginning to a story; it’s the one that someone reading or hearing the story doesn’t care about.
Here’s what I mean: Imagine that a house exploded on your childhood street. You hear about it on the way to work.
No details yet, but you wonder if the burning house is the one you used to live in. Then you get a call from your family’s former neighbor, a science teacher living across from you back in the day. She’s retired now and always home, so you’re thinking you can finally find out what happened.
One the phone, your neighbor finally catches her breath. She pulls herself together, and starts explaining…the math, physics and chemistry involved in a natural gas explosion. Then she gossips about the family living in the house that exploded. She describes the family before them, and before them, until she gets to the family she knew really well — your next-door neighbors from back in the day.
All you wanted to know from her was whose house blew up. That other stuff should have come after, so you wouldn’t have to go through all that background information to get to the information you wanted. But out of respect, you listened to her whole story, anyway.
Readers don’t have to do that. They might stop reading the story halfway through. Or, if they don’t see the newest information at the top, they could assume nothing new is happening and skip your article.
4. Do what reporters do.
When your favorite TV news people start off their newscasts, the first thing they say is something like, “New at 11,” or “Breaking news tonight,” or “New this morning.” It’s to let you know that what they’re about to say is new and recent information.
They start with what’s going on now, or what has been going on most recently. Then they get into how or why it started going on and any other information they’ve found.
Write your articles the same way.