Telling the rest of the story

We have so far used five of our key points in the first four paragraphs of our news story. The remaining two key points are facts about the cyclone itself - how it was spotted and how people were warned. There are clearly lots of details which can be given here.

It would be possible to write the rest of the story by choosing more key points from the information left, ranking them according to newsworthiness then writing them in order. This is, however, very complicated and may confuse your reader or listener. A much simpler alternative is to now go back to the beginning of the event and tell it in chronological order, as things happened.

Before we do this, we have tell our audience that we are going to change from the key points method of news writing to the chronological method, otherwise they might think that our next paragraph is our next key point (although our readers or listeners would not use that term). The easiest way of doing that is to provide a kind of summary to the first segment of our story with the paragraph:

The emergency services are still awaiting news from outlying districts but believe that Honiara has been the worst hit.

This sentence also tells the reader or listener that we have given the most important news. Our next paragraph tells them that we are going back to the beginning of the story:

Cyclone Victor was first detected at 2 a.m. yesterday by staff at the Nadi Weather Centre.
They plotted it travelling south-west across the Pacific towards the Solomon Islands.
An hour later, they contacted the Solomon Islands government to warn them of the cyclone's approach.
Government officials put emergency plans into operation. They radioed ships in the area and broadcast warnings to Solomon Islanders over the radio.
Police officers were sent out to warn people.
By 10 a.m., winds in the capital, Honiara, were blowing at more than 140 kilometres per hour.
Two hours later the centre of Cyclone Victor passed over Honiara before tracking into the Coral Sea, where it blew itself out.
Mopping-up operations have now started in Honiara.

Now we have told the story of the cyclone, at the same time bringing our audience up to date with latest developments.

Date: 2015-01-29; view: 808