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Timeline Topics **Journalistic Style of Writing** Among the larger and more respected newspapers, fairness and balance is a major factor in presenting information. Commentary is usually confined to a separate section, though each paper may have a different overall slant. Editorial policy dictates the use of adjectives, euphemisms, and idioms. Papers with an international audience, for example, usually use a more formal style of writing.

Journalistic prose is explicit and precise, and tries not to rely on jargon. As a rule, journalists will not use a long word when a short one will do. They use subject-verb-object construction and vivid, active prose. They offer anecdotes, examples and metaphors, and they rarely depend on colorless generalizations or abstract ideas. News writers try to avoid using the same word more than once in a paragraph (sometimes called an "echo" or "word mirror").
 * Terms and structure **

Main article: Headline The headline, heading, head or title of a story; "hed" in journalists' jargon. Rarely a complete sentence (e.g. "Pilot Flies Below Bridges to Save Divers").
 * Headline **

A phrase, sentence or several sentences near the title of an article or story, a quick blurb or article teaser.
 * Subhead **

The most important structural element of a story is the lead (or "intro" in the UK) — the story's first, or leading, sentence. An effective lead is a brief, sharp statement of the story's essential facts. The lead is usually the first sentence, or in some cases the first two sentences, and is ideally 20-25 words in length. The top-loading principle (putting the most important information first - see inverted pyramid section below) applies especially to leads, but the unreadability of long sentences constrains the lead's size. This makes writing a lead an optimization problem, in which the goal is to articulate the most encompassing and interesting statement that a writer can make in one sentence, given the material with which he or she has to work. While a rule of thumb says the lead should answer most or all of the five Ws, few leads can fit all of these. To "bury the lead" in news style refers to beginning a description with details of secondary importance to the readers, forcing them to read more deeply into an article than they should have to in order to discover the essential point(s). Article leads are sometimes categorized into hard leads and soft leads. A hard lead aims to provide a comprehensive thesis which tells the reader what the article will cover. A soft lead introduces the topic in a more creative, attention-seeking fashion, and is usually followed by a nut graph (a brief summary of facts).[6] Example Lead-and-Summary Design NASA is proposing another space project. The agency's budget request, announced today, included a plan to send another person to the moon. This time the agency hopes to establish a long-term facility as a jumping-off point for other space adventures. The budget requests approximately ten trillion dollars for the project. ...
 * Lead or Intro **

Example Soft-Lead Design Humans will be going to the moon again. The NASA announcement came as the agency requested ten trillion dollars of appropriations for the project. ...

Main article: Inverted pyramid Journalists usually describe the organization or structure of a news story as an inverted pyramid. The essential and most interesting elements of a story is put at the beginning, with supporting information following in order of diminishing importance. This structure enables readers to stop reading at any point and still come away with the essence of a story. It allows people to explore a topic to only the depth that their curiosity takes them, and without the imposition of details or nuances that they could consider irrelevant, but still making that information available to more interested readers. The inverted pyramid structure also enables articles to be trimmed to any arbitrary length during layout, to fit in the space available. Writers are often admonished "Don't bury the lead!" to ensure that they present the most important facts first, rather than requiring the reader to go through several paragraphs to find them. Some writers start their stories with the "1-2-3 lead", yet there are many kinds of lead available. This format invariably starts with a "Five Ws" opening paragraph (as described above), followed by an indirect quote that serves to support a major element of the first paragraph, and then a direct quote to support the indirect quote.
 * Inverted pyramid structure **

Basic Journalism Questions that your article must answer.


 * Who ** is it about?


 * What ** happened?


 * Where ** did it take place?


 * When ** did it take place?


 * Why ** did it happen?


 * How ** did it happen?