THE ABCs OF JOURNALISM

Some principles of newswriting you must apply every time you attempt to put words on paper include accuracy, brevity, clarity, coherence, emphasis, objectivity and unity.

ACCURACY

If a writer has to pick one principle that should never be violated, this should be the one. To fall down in this area is to discredit your entire writing effort. As a JO, you will be working with facts. These facts will involve persons, places and things. They will involve names,

ages, titles, rank or ratings, addresses and descriptions. You will work with facts that are both familiar and unfamiliar to you.

You cannot afford to be casual in your approach to facts. Your readers will often judge the Navy on what you say and how you say it. An easy way to lose the public's respect and cofidence is by being careless in your handling of facts. When you send a story to a newspaper, the editor depends on you for accuracy in every fact.

The Navy news release heading that appears on every story you distribute means the information it contains is reliable and has been approved officially by the Navy. A mistake in a news story implies that the Navy is careless and undependable. Datelines tell when and where the story is written and should appear on all stories written for release. In the text of the story, when and where may refer to the dateline.

Attribution relates to accuracy. It means that you name the person who makes any statement that may be challenged. Good quotations liven a story, give it color and aid in development of coherence. Attribution also ensures that the reader does not get the impression the statement is the writer's personal opinion. However, attribution should never be used in a story merely to flatter a person by publicizing his or her name.

BREVITY

The question is often asked, "Should I be brief in my writing or complete?" By all means, be brief, but not at the expense of completeness. The key is to boil down your writing and eliminate garbage. A compact piece of writing is frequently much stronger than a lengthy story. An example is Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. This speech has outlived a flock of long harangues by later statesmen. One of the reasons for its survival is its brevity.

CLARITY

Nothing is more discouraging than reading an article and then realizing that you do not know what you read. A similar frustration arises when you are trying to follow directions on assembling a toy, particularly when the instructions read, "...even a 5-year-old can assemble this toy," and you cannot do it, because the directions read as if they were written in a foreign language. Assume that if there is any chance of misunderstanding, readers will misunderstand. Reread what you have written looking for points that could lead to readers' misunderstanding.

COHERENCE

An article that skips illogically from topic to topic and back again in a jumbled, befuddled manner lacks coherence. Coherence means sticking together, and that is what stories and articles should do. Facts should follow facts in some kind of reasonable order. It may be logical order, chronological order, place order or order of importance, depending on the subject, but order of one kind or another is vital. Outlining will often help.

EMPHASIS

Make sure your writing emphasizes what you want it to. You assure this in newswriting by putting the most important fact first (the lead, discussed later). There are other types of arrangements for emphasis that are used in feature stories or in.editorials. More information will be presented on this later in this chapter.

OBJECTIVITY

To report news accurately, you must keep yourself detached from the happenings and present an impersonal, unbiased, unprejudiced story. This is why you never see a good reporter at an accident running around saying, "Isn't this horrible? I feel so sorry for the family. Why, just the other day I was talking to ol' Jed, and now he is dead." These may very well be your feelings, but you must attempt to keep aloof in order to give an objective report. It is not your job to influence people directly, but rather to tell them what is going on. You direct their thinking only to the limited extent that you make them think for themselves by an unbiased presentation of the facts.

UNITY

A news story should deal with one basic topic. There may be many facts and ins and outs to the story, but it is still one story. If you set out to write a story on the services and activities available at the enlisted club, and end up with a biography of the club manager, the story lacks unity. The simple solution frequently is to write two stories, rather than trying to combine a mass of information into one.