Yagoda Dos and Don’ts for Feature Writing

DOs

• Show, don’t tell. Well-chosen facts are always more effective in getting an idea across than adjectives, adverbs and characterizations. Reporting that someone kicked an injured person when down or stole money from a Salvation Army Santa is better than telling us that he is horrible, awful, horrid, despicable, or obnoxious.
• Become a mini-expert on the subject of any story you write. Read everything and talk to anyone you can find about it. Especially important: be aware of what has been written about it before and try to find a fresh.
• Be a storyteller. Imagine that the reader is a friend of yours, and you’re telling her about something really interesting that happened to you. That means you don’t want to waste her time with dull stuff; if you do, she’ll probably walk out the door. As a feature writer, your main goal is to hold the reader’s interest at all times. If you don’t, they’ll turn the page, turn on the computer or TV, take a nap.
• Make an outline for the structure of your story, either on paper or in your head, so that you know how every paragraph relates to the one before.
• Read every sentence out loud, either with your mouth or in your head. This will help you with the rhythm of your sentences, and to recognize wordiness, awkwardness and word repetition.
• Spend as much time on the ending as the lead—it’s just as important and a lot harder to get right.
• Use good and original similes and metaphors and figures of speech like alliteration and zeugma (look it up), when apt and appropriate.
• Have a thesaurus and dictionary (either paper or on-line) with you when you write. The thesaurus will help you find the right word; the dictionary will help you avoid the wrong one. When you think of it, consult the online Oxford English Dictionary at www.lib.udel.edu/db. Your tuition is paying for this incredible resource, so you might as well make use of it.
• Proofread your story carefully; their are lodes of mistakes spellcheck won’t catch, as it didn’t when a student referred to a “heroine attic.”
• Use understatement, which is helpful in being humorous, getting your point across and setting up quotes. For example, “Brown was furious about his team’s effort. ‘They played like a bunch of chumps,” he said” is less effective than, “Brown wasn’t exactly thrilled about his team’s effort. ‘They played like …’” Understatement often takes the form of litotes—e.g. “not thrilled,” “less than enthusiastic,” etc. Also: you want to be able to stand by every single sentence you write, and understatements are easier to back up than overstatements.
• When describing a person or a physical setting be (as Henry James said), “the kind of person on whom nothing is lost.” Pick the one or two or three most telling details to tell your readers.
• When appropriate, use colorful expressions that are in the current vocabulary, taken from pop culture, slang, or some occupational lexicon: e.g, “perp walk,” “spin doctor,” “senior moment.” Use sparingly, and be aware that after a while, they turn into clichés: as in, “mother of all…,” “show me the money,” and anything from “Seinfeld.”
• If you can give some information, convey an idea or tell an anecdote more effectively than your source, use your own words rather than the quote. You’re the storyteller, and that’s why they pay you the big bucks. Generally, be sparing with quotes. They are the seasoning, not the meat.
• Be concise. Trim from your story anything that isn’t important or interesting information, or that isn’t a good quote. Unlike Dickens, feature writers aren’t paid by the word.
• When two words mean the same thing, use the simpler one (unless you have a good reason not to): funny rather than humorous, happened rather than occurred, long rather than lengthy, persons rather than people, hard rather than difficult, etc.
• Read as much and as widely as you can—novels, non-fiction books, magazines, newspapers, shopping lists, whatever.

DON’Ts

Never:

• Use “this” constructions, e.g., “This Wilmington native likes to sing spirituals in her spare time.” Sounds like a beauty pageant.
• Tell the reader what to do, e.g., “So the next time you’re walking down Main Street, stop in at Bagel Junction.” Nobody likes to be ordered around.
• Use ellipses (…) in spoken quotes to indicate omitted words. They are necessary when omitting anything from written material, however.
• Start a sentence with the word “Well,....” Leave that to Ronald Reagan.
• Use single quotation marks (‘like this’), unless you are indicating a quote within a quote.
• Indulge in comma splices, e.g., “He is graduating in May, he doesn’t have a job yet.” One particular kind of comma splice happens when you incorrectly use “however” as a conjunction meaning the same thing as “but,” e.g., “He is graduating in May, however, he doesn’t have a job yet.” The correct way to do it would be, “He is graduating in May. However, he doesn’t have a job yet.” Or: “He is graduating in May. He does not, however, have a job yet.”
• Knowingly use a cliché.
• Useth “amongst” or “whilst.”
• Use the first-person singular (“I,” “me”) or plural (“we,” “us” “our”), unless it’s a first-person story. E.g., if you’re doing a profile of Harris Ross, don’t write, “He knows more about movies than anyone I’ve ever met,” even if it’s true.
• Use quotation marks to indicate a “funny” word or expression (as opposed to a quotation—something someone said).
• Use dialect in your own writin’.
• Commit dangling modifiers, e.g, “Being a journalism professor, McKay Jenkins’s life has had its share of surprises.” McKay Jenkins’s life is not a journalism professor.
• Invoke stereotypes about people of any age group, gender, race, religion, nationality, occupation, ethnic group, or hair color—even if you’re only bringing up the stereotype to prove it wrong. Your goal is to write about people as individuals, not as types. As a matter of fact, try to avoid stereotypes of every kind.
• Use parenthesis, exclamation points, colons (a dash works better) or semicolons in quotes.

Avoid (unless otherwise indicated, once per story, max):

• Parenthesis, exclamation points, colons (again, dashes are better) and semicolons in your own writing. Generally, when you do use exclamation points, do so to be ironic! (See Tom Wolfe.) For semicolons, you’re usually better off substituting a period.
• Direct address of reader, i.e., the word “you.”
• Puns or wordplay.
• The words “very,” “much” or “much more.” They’re usually unnecessary, or else a sign that you need to choose a much stronger adjective or adverb.
• Verbs of attribution other than “said” (exclaimed, stated, gasped, sighed, laughed, remarked, and especially not “claimed” or “admitted,” which imply you don’t believe the person). Exceptions are verbs that describe the type of statement the person is making, as in “recalled,” “asked” or “replied.” “Acknowledged” can be okay as a substitute for “admitted.”
• Rhetorical questions. Only use them when they really are rhetorical question (“John Williams doesn’t plan to register as a Democrat. Why should he? His parents, four grandparents and eight aunts and uncles are all Republicans.”) Don’t use them when you know the answer and are about to tell us. (“What’s all the commotion inside the Main Street storefront? Well, workmen are putting the finishing touches on a new Starbucks.”)
• “In common” ledes, as in “What do Lawrence Welk, knock-knock jokes and ‘in common’ ledes have in common?” They’re kind of corny.
• Repetitive structure, as in statement-quote, statement-quote, statement-quote. You can pick up on this by reading your story aloud.
• Word repetition. Specifically, try not to use the same word more than once in one paragraph. Even very common words like “she,” “the,” “and” and “is” can grate on the ear if used too much. Again, reading aloud can help you with this.
• The word “seems,” as in “It seems that floppy hats are the thing this year.” Your job is to say what is, or is not, the case, and if you’re not sure you probably shouldn’t say anything at all. (“Nay, it is. I know not ‘seems.’”—Hamlet.)
• “Everything from” constructions, as in, “He’s done everything from laying bricks to selling shoes at Wal-Mart.” It’s a cliché and a crutch.
• Dialect in quotes (e.g., “gonna”).
• One-sentence paragraphs. It’s okay to use more than one per story, but rarely two in a row and never three in a row.
• Sentence fragments. Like this.
• Brackets [] in quotes. They ruin the rhythm and effect of quotes. With a little work, there’s almost always a way to set up the quote so readers will understand what is meant.