Part 6
6. _Temporal Clause._--A feature may often be brought to the beginning of the lead by a simple transposition of clauses. Should the time be important a subordinate _when_ or _while_ clause may precede the principal clause of the sentence; i.e., "When the snowstorm was at its height early this morning, a three-story brick building burned, etc.," or "While 15,000 people watched from the street below, 250 girls escaped from the burning building at, etc."
7. _Causal Clause._--Should the cause of an action or an occurrence be attractive enough for the first line, a _for_ or a _because_ clause may begin the lead. "Because a tinsmith upset a pot of molten solder on the roof of pier No. 19, two steamers were burned, etc."
* * * * *
This does not exhaust the list of possible beginnings. There are a dozen possible constructions for the beginning of any story; these are merely the commonest ones. Anything unusual or of doubtful grammar should be avoided because of the many possible alternatives that present themselves. And in every lead correct grammar should be considered above all else. If a lead is ungrammatical no clever arrangement of details can make it effective or other than ludicrous. For instance, this lead, taken from a newspaper, illustrates an unfortunate attempt to crowd too many details into a short lead:
| Bitten by a rattlesnake, Myrtle Olson's| |leg was slashed with a table knife, | |washed the wound with kerosene, then | |covered the incision with salt by her | |mother. Myrtle still lives. |
Another paper tried to arrange it more happily, thus:
| Bitten by a rattlesnake, Myrtle Olson's| |mother slashed her daughter's leg with a | |table knife, washed the wound with | |kerosene, then covered the incision with | |salt. Myrtle still lives. |
There is evidently something wrong in this. It would be a good exercise to try to express the idea grammatically.
* * * * *
Before we go on to the consideration of the body of this story a few _Don'ts_ in regard to writing leads may be in order.
Don't begin a lead with a person's name unless the person is well known. We are always interested in anything unusual that a man may do or anything unusual that he may suffer, but unless we know the man we are not at all interested in his name. Suppose that a man performs some thrilling act or suffers some unusual misfortune in a city of 100,000 people. Probably not more than one hundred people know him, and of that number only one or two will read the story. Then why begin with his name when his action is of greater interest to all but a few of our readers? And yet every reader wants to know whether the victim is one of his friends. Therefore the man's name must be mentioned in the lead, although it should not come at the beginning. On the other hand, if the man is prominent in the nation or the community and well known to all our readers, his name adds interest to the story and we begin with the name. There is a growing tendency among American newspapers to begin all of their stories with a name. The tendency appears to be the result of an attempt to break away from the conventional lead and to begin in a more natural way--also an easier way. But the name beginning is after all illogical, and any reporter is safe in following the logical course in the matter. If the name is not important begin with something that is important.
Don't waste the main verb of the sentence on a minor action while expressing the principal action in a subordinate clause. This is a violation of emphasis. For example, "Fatally burned by an explosion in his laundry, Hing Lee was taken to the hospital." Naturally he would be taken to the hospital, but why put the emphasis of the whole sentence on that point?
Don't resort to the expression "was the unusual experience of----" "was the fate of----" or any like them. Every word in the lead must count, and here are five words that say nothing at all. Use their place to tell what the unusual experience was. For instance, don't say "To stand in a driving snowstorm and watch their homes burn to the ground was the unusual experience of two families, living at, etc."; say instead, "Standing in a driving snowstorm two families watched their homes burn to the ground." The latter says the same thing more effectively in less space. The use of this expression--"was the unusual experience of"--is always the mark of a green reporter.
Don't overwork the expression "Fire broke out." All fires "break out," but usually we are more interested in the result of the fire than in its "breaking out." Try to use some expression that will give more definite information.
Don't be wordy. Editors are always calling for shorter and more concise leads. If you can say a thing in two words don't use half a dozen. For example, "Four members of the local fire department were rendered unconscious by the deadly fumes from bursting ammonia pipes." This takes three times as much space as "Four firemen were overcome by ammonia fumes," and it does not express the idea any more effectively.
Don't introduce minor details into the lead. If the reader wants the details he may read the rest of the story. Take the following lead as an example:
| Rushing back into his burning laundry, | |a one-story brick building, to rescue | |from the flames his savings, amounting to| |$437, with which he hoped to raise | |himself from the rank of laborer to that | |of a prosperous merchant, and which was | |hidden under the mattress of his bed in | |the back room of the laundry, Hing Lee, a| |Chinaman, who lives at 79 Nicollett | |avenue and has been in this country but | |three months, was overcome by smoke and | |so seriously burned that he had to be | |removed to the St. Mary Hospital and may | |not live, when his establishment was | |destroyed by a fire which, starting from | |the explosion of the tank of the gasolene| |stove on which he was cooking his dinner,| |gutted his laundry, entailing a loss of | |$1,000, shortly before noon to-day. |
It is entirely grammatical, but if the reader succeeds in wading through it there is nothing left to tell about the fire. Why not begin the story in this way and leave something for the rest of the story?
| Because he rushed back into his burning| |laundry to rescue his savings, Hing Lee, | |a Chinese laundryman, 79 Nicollett | |avenue, was seriously burned to-day. |
Don't waste the first line of the lead on meaningless generalities. Get down to the facts at once. For instance, "The presence of mind and bravery of Fireman David Mullen saved Mrs. Daniel Looker from being burned to death in her flat, etc." We are willing to grant his bravery and presence of mind, but we want to know at once what he did: "By sliding down an eighty-foot extension ladder through flames and smoke with an unconscious woman in his arms, Fireman David Mullen rescued Mrs. Daniel, etc." Equally useless is the beginning, "A daring rescue of an unconscious woman from the fourth story of a blazing flat building was made by Fireman David Mullen to-day, etc." Tell what the daring rescue was and let the reader manufacture a fitting eulogy.
Don't exaggerate the facts to make a feature. When a few persons are frightened don't turn it into a dreadful panic. Every little fire is not a holocaust and the burning of a small barn does not endanger the entire city, unless your imagination is strong enough to guess what might have happened had there been a high wind and no fire engines. A narrow escape from death does not always excuse the beginning, "Scores killed and injured would have been the result, _if_----" All beginnings of this kind give a false impression and do not tell the truth. If a story has no striking feature be satisfied to tell the truth about it without trying to make a world-wide disaster out of it for the sake of a place on the front page. Exaggeration for a feature is one of the bad elements of sensational journalism. For example, seven lives were lost in this fire, but this is the way the story was written, for the sake of a three-column scare-head:
| That 500 sleeping babes and 100 more | |who were kneeling in prayer in St. | |Malachi's Home, a Roman Catholic | |institution for the care of orphans at | |Rockaway Park, are alive to-day is due to| |the coolness of the nuns in charge and | |the children's remembrance of their | |teacher's fire drills. |
The suspense is built up in such a way that at the end of the lead we do not know what happened and read on with breathless interest to find that there was a small fire at the Home and seven children were burned.
=The Body of the Story.=--"A good beginning is half done," according to the proverb. In writing a news story a good beginning is more than half done--two-thirds at least. The lead is the beginning, and when that has been written we are ready to go on to the body of the story with a clear conscience.
Our lead has told the reader the main facts of the case and the most unusual feature. If he reads further he is looking for details. In giving him these we return to the ordinary rules of narration. We start at the very beginning of the story and tell it logically and in detail to the end. We tell it as if no lead preceded it and repeat in greater detail the incidents briefly outlined in the lead. Never should the body of the story depend upon the lead for clearness. If the feature of the story is a rescue and you have briefly described the rescue in the lead, ignore the lead and describe the rescue all over again in the body of the story in its proper place. The number of details that are to be introduced into the story is limited only by the space that the story seems to be worth. But no point should be mentioned in the story unless space permits of its being made clear.
The ordinary rules of English composition apply to the writing of the body of the story. The copy must be paragraphed, cut up into paragraphs that are rather shorter than ordinary literary paragraphs, since the narrowness of the newspaper column makes the paragraph seem longer. Heterogeneous details must not be piled together in the same paragraph, but the facts must be grouped and handled logically. No paragraph should be noticeably longer than the others, and it is decidedly bad to paragraph one sentence alone simply because it does not seem to go in with any other sentence. If the fact is important expand it into a paragraph by the introduction of further details; if it is unimportant either cut it out of the story altogether or attach it to the paragraph to which it seems most logically to belong.
One fact, already stated, must be borne in mind as the body of the story progresses. The report should be built up in such a way that the editor can slash off a paragraph or two at the end without injuring the story--without sacrificing any important facts. To do this the reporter should bring the important parts of the story as near the beginning as the logical order will permit. The interest of a perfect news story is like an inverted cone. The interest is abundant at the beginning and gradually dwindles out until there is nothing more to say when the end is reached. Just how far the dwindling should be carried depends upon the amount of space that the story seems to be worth in the paper.
This may seem difficult. It may be hard to see how a story can be told in its logical order while at the same time the most interesting facts are placed at the beginning, even if they logically belong near the end. For example, we may take the story of an unusual robbery. A well-dressed man goes into a grocery store to get some butter and tries to rob the grocer. In the ensuing scuffle the would-be robber escapes. A young woman who happens to be passing sees the end of the fight and pursues the robber down the street until he runs into a saloon. She calls a policeman who is standing on the corner and the officer rushes into the saloon, up three flights of stairs and finds the robber on the roof behind a chimney. The officer shouts to another policeman, and together they arrest the robber.
Now, what is the most interesting thing in the story? Probably the pursuit--a young woman chasing a robber down the street. Our lead might be written in this way:
| After being chased down Sixth street by| |a young woman, a robber, who had | |attempted to rob the grocery store of | |Charles Young, 1345 Sixth street, was | |arrested on the roof of a saloon at 835 | |Sixth street, at 7 o'clock last night. |
The lead might be arranged in a different way, but these are the facts that it would contain. Before we consider the arrangement of the body of the story it may be well to go back to the interviews by which we secured the story. In getting the facts we would probably talk to Young, the groceryman, and to the saloonkeeper into whose establishment the robber fled. We could probably interview the policeman who made the arrest, but let us suppose that the young woman could not be found. The groceryman would tell us about the attempted robbery and the escape, with the girl in pursuit. The saloonkeeper would tell us how the man fled into his saloon and ran up the stairs to the roof; then how two policemen came and made the arrest. The policeman could tell us how a young woman ran up to him and told him that a robber had fled into the saloon; then he would describe the arrest. None of these stories is told just as we want the newspaper story--each one tells us only a part of the story. If the finished story were written by a green reporter it would probably tell the story in the order in which it was obtained. That is if the reporter saw the policeman first, then the saloonkeeper, and lastly the groceryman; his story would tell in the first paragraph what the policeman said, in the second paragraph what the saloonkeeper said, and in the last paragraph what the grocer said. At least that is the way in which green reporters in the classroom attempted to write the story.
But, obviously, that is not the logical way to tell the story. The finished account should be written in the order in which it happened: i.e., first the robbery, then the pursuit, and lastly the arrest. This would be the ideal way to tell the story--according to the rules of English composition--if we could be sure that the entire story would be printed. But if it were written in this way and the editor decided to slash off the last paragraph, what would go? Obviously the arrest would not be printed; and the arrest was quite interesting. We must find some way to bring the arrest nearer to the beginning. This may be done by selecting the most interesting parts of the story--by picking out the high spots, as it were. In this story the high spots are the attempted robbery, the pursuit, and the arrest. The details that fill in between are interesting, but not so interesting as these high spots. Hence these high spots of interest must be pushed forward toward the beginning. After the lead the story would begin at the beginning and tell the affair briefly by high spots in their proper order. It might be something like this:
| As Charles Young was closing his | |grocery last evening a young man came in | |and asked for a pound of butter. Young | |turned to get it and his customer struck | |him over the head with a chair. The | |grocer grappled with his assailant and | |they fell through the front door. In the | |scramble, the robber broke away and ran | |down Sixth street. A young woman who was | |passing screamed and ran after him until | |he disappeared into a saloon. | | | |The young woman called Policeman Smith, | |who was standing nearby on Grand avenue, | |and the latter found the would-be robber | |on the roof of the saloon. After a | |struggle, Smith arrested the man, with | |the aid of another policeman. |
The above account tells us briefly the most interesting parts of the story. A copyreader might not find it perfect, for the assault is allotted too much space and the pursuit too little, but it tells the story in its baldest aspect. This, with the lead, could be run alone. However, perhaps the story is worth more space; at any rate, many interesting details have been omitted. If so, go back to the most interesting part of the story--the assault, perhaps, or the pursuit--and tell it with more details. Then retell some other part with more details. If your readers are interested enough to read beyond the first three paragraphs they want details and will not be so particular about the order--for they already know how the story is going to end.
This is one way of meeting the requirements of logical order and dwindling interest. This is a particularly hard story to arrange in the conventional way since we must have the whole story to be interested in any single part--it has too many striking incidents in it. On the other hand, a story which contains only one striking incident is much easier to handle. Suppose that we are reporting a fire which is interesting only for its cause or for a daring rescue in it. Our lead would suggest this interesting element and the first part of our story would be devoted entirely to the cause or to the rescue, as the case might be. But it is better to sketch briefly, immediately after or very close to the lead, the entire story, for our readers want to know how it ends before they can be interested in any particular part. If we sketch the whole story and show them that there is only one important thing in the story, they will be satisfied to read about the one striking incident without wondering if there is not something more interesting further on. If we leave the conclusion of the story to the end of our copy the editor may cut it off and leave our story dangling in midair. Every story must be treated in its own way, according to its own incidents and difficulties; no two stories are alike in substance or treatment. In every one our aim must be to keep to the logical order and at the same time to put the most interesting parts of the story near the beginning.
The construction of the body of a story may be illustrated more clearly by a fatal fire story--since fire stories are more uniform, and hence easier to write than other news stories. Let us suppose that the story is as follows: At four o'clock in the afternoon a fire started from some unknown cause in the basement of a four-story brick building at 383-385 Sixth Street, occupied by the Incandescent Light Company. Before the fire company arrived the flames had spread up through the building and into an adjoining three-story brick building at 381 Sixth Street, occupied by Isaac Schmidt's second-hand store and home on the first and second floors and by Mrs. Sarah Jones's boarding house on the third. The Schmidts were away and Mrs. Jones's lodgers escaped via the fire escapes. Her cook, Hilda Schultz, was overcome by smoke and had to be carried out by Jack Sweeney, a lodger. Mrs. Jones fell from the fire escape and was badly bruised. Meanwhile the firemen were at work on the roof of the burning four-story building. Blinded by the smoke, one of them, John MacBane, stepped through a skylight and fell to the fourth floor. His comrades tried to rescue him by lowering Fireman Henry Bond into the smoke by the heels; they were unsuccessful and Bond broke his arm in the attempt. The fire was confined to the lower floors of the two buildings and extinguished. In searching for MacBane, the firemen found him suffocated on the fourth floor where he had fallen.
The feature of the story is evidently the one death and the three injuries. Our lead might be written as follows:
| One fireman was suffocated and three | |other persons were injured in a fire in | |the Incandescent Light Company's plant, | |383-385 Sixth street, and an adjoining | |three-story building, late yesterday | |afternoon. |
This lead would suggest to the reader many interesting details to come in the body of the story, and evidently the details are not all of equal importance. The story could be told in its logical order, but, since the death is more interesting than the origin of the fire and the injuries are more significant than how the fire spread, it is obvious that it would not be best to tell the story in the order in which it is told above.
Disregarding the lead, we must cover the following details in the body of our story:
Description of buildings and occupants. Origin of fire. Discovery of fire. Spread of flames. Injury of Mrs. Jones. Rescue of Hilda Schultz. Death of MacBane. Injury of Bond. Fire extinguished.
This is the order in which things occurred at the fire. However, in our lead, we have drawn attention to our story by announcing that it concerns a fire in which a man was killed; the death therefore should have first place in the body of the story. Hence, in the second paragraph immediately after the lead, we must tell how MacBane fell through the skylight and was suffocated. Along with his death we may as well tell how Bond broke his arm trying to rescue MacBane. Our lead has also announced two other injuries and, hence, they must be included next--that is, our third paragraph must be devoted to the injury of Mrs. Jones and the rescue of the unconscious Hilda. But as yet our details are hanging in the air because we have not said anything about the buildings or the fire itself. In the next paragraph it would be well to describe the buildings and their occupants and to give a very brief account of the course of the fire--perhaps in this way:
| Flames were first discovered in the | |basement of the Incandescent building and| |before the fire department arrived had | |spread through the lower floors and into | |the adjoining three-story building. The | |absence of elevator shafts and air-shafts| |enabled the firemen to extinguish the | |blaze before it reached the upper floors.|
This tells the main course of the fire, but there are some interesting details to add: first, the origin of the fire; next, the discovery; then more about how the fire spread; and lastly, how the fire was extinguished. Our story by paragraphs would read as follows:
1st Paragraph--The lead.
2d Paragraph--Death of MacBane and injury of Bond.
3d Paragraph--Mrs. Jones's injury and Hilda's rescue.
4th Paragraph--Buildings, occupants, brief course of fire.
5th Paragraph--Detailed account of origin of the fire.
6th Paragraph--How the fire was discovered.
7th Paragraph--More about the spread and course of the fire.
8th Paragraph--How the fire was extinguished.
9th Paragraph--Loss, insurance, extent of damage.