Up to this point in the course, we have tried to emphasize and apply some of the basic tenets of good writing and to discuss what it means to write in a professional environment. This week, we begin to learn the various forms of writing for the mass media.

We teach newswriting for print for the following reasons:

• It is a basic form, the form from which many other types of writing are derived.
  
• Much of media writing is newswriting; that includes public relations and advertising copy writing as well as broadcasting and print.
  
• We assume that if you can learn to write news in the inverted pyramid form, you can learn to write in any other form that we teach. (Check out the inverted pyramid checklist in this section.)

Newswriting is an important function for society. The newswriter has the job of telling society about itself. Even if you work for the in-house newsletter of a company or organization, it is important that the employees, customers or constituents know about the company and have the latest information to deal with.

For instance, if the University changed registration procedures or raised tuition rates, you would want to know about it. A news writer would have to tell you.

More lecture notes, etc.

The major points of this week's lecture are:

• Newswriting for print -- particularly the inverted pyramid form for news -- is one of the basic forms of writing for many parts of the mass media, not just newspapers.
  
• News is an important concept to understand for all media writers
  
• News values -- things such as conflict, currency, impact, prominence, etc. -- are ways in which we judge whether or not an event is newsworthy.
  
• Use the following questions to help judge the relative importance of the information you have:
  Were people killed or injured?
  Was property damaged?
  How many people were involved?
  How much money was involved?
  
• The inverted pyramid form demands that you put information in an order of importance and that you present that information from most important to least important.
  
• Lead paragraphs in inverted pyramid stories should be one sentence, and have a maximum of 30 to 35 words. They should also contain who, what, when and where.
  
• For your midterm, you will be asked to write an inverted pyramid news story.

Readings

Read Chapters 4 and 5 of Writing for the Mass Media. Make sure you understand all of the concepts and practices discussed there.

Additionally . . .

Read. Analyze. Emulate. Those are the steps you need to take in learning to write in the inverted pyramid form. The examples page contains three short inverted pyramid news story for you to read, analyze and emulate.

More words? Should a media writer try to build a large vocabulary?One of the things we tell you in MC102 is to use simple, familiar words -- words that mass audiences will understand. Does that mean all those hours spent in high school learning words like “egregious”1 were a waste of time? As a budding professional writer, should you stop trying to learn new words? Is something like A Word A Day, a daily e-mail service about words, useless? Read on.

1egregious (i-gree-juhs, -jee-uhs) adjective: Conspicuously bad or offensive. [From Latin egregius, outstanding : e-, ex- + grex, greg-, herd.]Source: A Word A Day

Accuracy: It doesn’t always happen. One of the four tenants of media writing is accuracy (the other three being completeness, precision and efficiency), and we say that accuracy is chief among these. But accuracy is a goal that sometimes we don’t achieve. And inaccuracies can arise in some places where we least expect it. Read more, including links to Brill’s Content magazine and its three articles on inaccuracies in books.