 A student from Charters school in Berkshire making online news |
The key to making sure your audience reads your words is to be clear, concise and correct - the three Cs of journalism. On a web page, there are three main things to think about: • Words • Pictures • Layout You should be clear, concise and correct with all of them. Here are some tips. Gathering words Use a notebook with a margin. When you're taking notes during an interview, put a star in the margin next to the best bits. That way you'll be able to find easily when it comes to writing them up. Clear words  Students telling their news stories to each other |
Tell the story to someone else before you start writing. That way you can check whether they understand you. It also means you can change it in your head before putting pen to paper, which saves time. If you're not very good at telling stories from memory, make notes to refer to rather than full sentences. Leave space If you're writing the first draft of your report on paper, write on every other line. This gives you space to cross out and add words and sentences in the right place. Writer's block? If you don't know how to start, leave the opening of the report for the time being. Start by writing what happened in the order it occurred. With a few tweaks, you can use this for the middle part of your report. Once your pen is flowing, you'll recognise the key facts. Now you can incorporate them in a sentence at the beginning. Add a final sentence about what is likely to happen next, and the first draft of your report's done. Concise report Try and tell your story in five short sentences. Keep the most important bits above the bottom of the screen so your audience doesn't have to scroll down to find them. It's called the fold-line because it's roughly the same place a broadsheet newspaper is folded over, obscuring the bottom half of the front-page story. Concise paragraphs Make each sentence a paragraph. Leave a line between each paragraph. That way, you'll be able to see if your paragraphs are too long. Read out loud  Huw Edwards presents the 5 O'clock News on the News Channel and the Ten O'clock News on BBC1 |
Pretend you're a presenter reading your report on TV or radio. If you're somewhere like a library, learn to "read the words aloud in your head." Getting tongue-tied is a sign you need swap the complicated words for simple ones. Correct facts Be correct. Double check your facts. If you're not sure about something you've written, ask. If you're still in doubt, take it out. The last thing you want to do is give people the wrong information. Correct spelling Use a dictionary or spell checker and make sure you've used the correct spelling of people's names. Did you interview Philip with one l or two? Photographs  | NEWS IN PICTURES |
Well selected pictures help tell the story. If you've taken a series of really good photographs, you could tell the story in a photo gallery or journal, which is a series of pictures with captions. Have a look at the examples on the BBC News and Newsround websites: Crossheads Divide your work with crossheads which are one-word sub-headings in the story. At a glance, they summarise a bit of the story like chapter headings in a book. Layout features Use other features such as bullet points, bold text, maps and graphs to make the meaning of your words clear. Comparisons Use 'like'. If you're describing something complicated, compare it to something your audience will know - X is like Y. Many Year 8 students might not know how laws are passed in the Houses of Parliament but they will know how a rule gets made at a school council meeting. Alternative expressions Find different ways of saying the same thing. If you're writing a report about Mars, you could end up writing Mars several times. Instead, you could use "the red planet" to avoid repetition. A thesaurus will help you with this. Careful layout Check which stories and pictures sit next to each other. What would happen if you wrote about your local football club and put a picture of the manager next to a DIFFERENT story with the headline "Jailed for robbery"? The manager would have every right to be upset and he might sue you for lots of money. Be careful with your layout.
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