In many of your stories, I highlighted logical places where paragraph breaks should have been places. These are the L-shaped symbols I have marked at the start of some sentences.
In general, you should limit grafs to ONE main point OR just ONE supporting fact per graf. Generally, that will mean many paragraphs will consist of just a single sentence.
For example, let's look at this passage:
Jacob Stevens, an East Lansing High School senior and now former member of their field hockey team told the school board he doesn’t think this is fair. “Not every guy wants to play football, basketball, or baseball,” Stevens said. “If we can’t play with girls, we wouldn’t be able to play.” Though field hockey is a popular sport for both men and women in other countries, Stevens says there are just not enough boys interested in the area to create their own team.
Really, this is better broken up along these lines:
Jacob Stevens, an East Lansing High School senior and now former member of their field hockey team told the school board he doesn’t think this is fair.
“Not every guy wants to play football, basketball, or baseball,” Stevens said. “If we can’t play with girls, we wouldn’t be able to play.”
Though field hockey is a popular sport for both men and women in other countries, Stevens says there are just not enough boys interested in the area to create their own team.
That might look weird to you, but it's okay. The structure is so that it's easy for readers to identify single points or solitary pieces of evidence. And it makes it much easier for editors to edit your story on deadline -- all they need to do is pull a graf here and move a graf there to touch up your story, as opposed to having to rewrite passages altogether.
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