Story Nuts and Bolts
This is the name for the first part of an article, and both spellings of this word are acceptable
What is the lead or the lede?
This two-word phrase, which is not hyphenated, refers to a number out of hundred, and is similar to pennies.
What is per cent?
Journalists do this when the source's quotes are boring.
What is paraphrase?
This is how you write double digit numbers.
What is with figures?
What are context and various perspectives? What are a broader focus or an individualized focus?
This section provides information about the topic you are writing; in a movie scene, this is often where the extras are
What is the background?
You find this number by dividing a number by the number of people in a school, team, city et cetera. It also sounds like the name of a hockey team in Washington.
What is per capita?
This is where you say who is speaking, and this typically happens after the first sentence of a quote.
What is attribution?
These five months are never abbreviated when a date is given in a sentence. Students often want the last three months in this list to last for longer.
This three-word phrase refers to information from a source that will not be included in a piece, but sources and journalists must negotiate this before the information is given.
What is "off-the-record"?
These let you hear directly from the sources themselves
What are quotes?
You find this number by adding up all the values (or numbers) in a set and dividing by the number of values in the list. You may want to do this with your grade points.
Journalists use quotes to add this to an article, like painters.
This is how to write formal titles, those that are almost an integral part of a person's identity, when they directly precede a name.
What is capitalization?
This is the typical style of a news article; the ancient Egyptians would have found it slightly puzzling.
What is "inverted pyramid"?
This part of the article, which usually occurs near the beginning, describes why you wrote the article. In other words, it explains "why you invited them to the party."
What is the nut graph?
This number is determined by sorting numbers in descending order and identifying the middle number for an odd number of values or, for even numbers, calculating the average of the two middle numbers.
What is the median?
In a quote that is longer than one paragraph, this is where the closing quotation mark ( " ) goes.
What is at the end of the quote?
This title is not given to most professors, even if they have a Ph.D.
What is "Dr."?
What should a journalist do with all of their information before they start writing?
What is write an outline?
What is evaluate your information and make sure you have enough?
What is have your basic information for sources?
This is the name for the final part of the story, not to be confused with a soccer or football player.
What is a kicker?
The following sentence is an example of this technique:
"The current Civic Hospital sits on 23 acres of land.
The new home will be twice as large - the
equivalent of about 1.5 Lansdowne Parks or two
Bayshore Shopping Centres."
What is visualization?
Also acceptable: comparisons, drawing an image
Canadian Affairs reporter and your class instructor Meagan Gillmore says this is one of her biggest pet peeves when reading quotes; the CP style book also tells journalists to avoid this "like the plague" when setting up a quote.
What is front-end loading?
This two-letter word, a preposition, is not used before a day or month unless it would come after a capitalized word.
What is "on"?
Journalists typically describe what they see. But descriptive writers aim to evoke these senses as well.
What are hearing, smell, taste and touch?