Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Ledes: Don't Forget Your Articles!

I don't mean stories. A mean a grammatical article, like a, an, the.

Like here: Local victim of lightning strike sues city for growing financial, physical and mental problems.


It should be, The local victim of a lightning strike sues the city for growing financial, physical and mental problems.

When it comes to writing for news, what messes us up regarding articles are newspaper headlines, which usually drop articles in favor of brevity. While that is true of headlines, that is not true of the actual stories under the headlines. Articles need articles.

If you're not sure if you have articles, read your story out loud and ask yourself if it sounds like you've formed complete sentences. If not, it's usually because you're missing an article.

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