This one was:
"Let us not make this year, the year they robbed the kids of Halloween," Izzo said. "For their sake and our own, let us keep Halloween sane, safe -- and sober."
Telling quote. It really got to the point of what many of you hooked your stories upon.
Then why did so many of you use it late in your stories?
The better a quote and the more it directly supports your central premise of key premises of your story, the more prominent and higher up that quote should be.
Many of you ended your stories with a great quote, like this one. I get the feeling that you're trying to create what in writing is called a satisfying ending; one that offers a conclusion.
In traditional English composition, such a conclusion is necessary. In journalism, since we start with the conclusion it is not. On most regular straight news stories, it's completely fine to simply let the story trail off, even if it seems like the ending is abrupt.
If you're writing in inverted pyramid style, you rank information in the order of importance, so your story should essentially trail off. If you're writing a chronology, you can stop writing just short of the conclusion since your reader will already know how things ended; they learned that in the lede.
The notable exception would be if you were writing some sort of feature narrative, which we really don't get into in this class. So, nyah.
No comments:
Post a Comment