Reporting Hints and Practice; Designed for Student-Reporters and Others Qualifying for Newspaper Work (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II. Paragraph Writing. One of the firs( departments of newspaper work in which the junior reporter will be called upon to exercise his skill, will probably be the contribution of paragraphs to the "local news" columns. The ability to write a paragraph well is quite as important a qualification for a reporter as to be a good note-taker, and from the frequency with which, in advertisements for pressmen, a "good paragraphist" or "smart paragraphist" is required, it would appear that proprietors, at least, are of opinion that all reporters are not, as a matter of course, good para- graphists. The skill to write (I0) acceptable paragraphs on the wide range of subjects touched on in our newspapers can, of course, only come with experience, but the novice should lose no time in acquiring sufficient ability to write good paragraphs on ordinary subjects, and the moderate amount of carefulness required to attain the skill for the satisfactory performance of this department of work will never be regretted by the young reporter. There is nothing more tiresome to editor, or sub-editor, than clumsily or fantastically written paragraphs, with a general want of conciseness, and failure to comply with the style observed by the particular newspaper (20). Cobbett has well said that "one of the greatest of all faults in writing and in speaking is this": the using of many words to say little," and the truth of the observation should always be remembered by the paragraph writer. Within the limits of a paragraph it is impossible to display a flowing or vivacious style, but paragraphs should nevertheless be written as attractively as possible. Concise they must of necessity be, but they should be something more than a bare record. Though a certain conventionality about the phraseology of newspaper ...