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Start by pressing the button below! Home Add Document Sign In Register. News Writing Home News Writing. Author: Anna McKane. DOWNLOAD PDF. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers. They may be printed, spoken, or placed on a computer screen, but first they have to be prepared, and that usually means written.
If they are boring, they will bore. If they are incomprehensible, they will not be understood. If they are clumsy, or illiterate, or ungrammatical, or inappropriate, they will annoy. No matter how good the reporting, how dramatic the revelation, how brave, despicable, corrupt, extraordinary or inspirational the events described, if the writing does not engage the audience all that came before it is wasted.
Good prose is not a first requirement; a good home computer page is. And needs to be. Most journalists today emerge from journalism courses where the reporting skills are taught. The most demanding of these is writing, and most of us in journalism education find there is a lot of time-consuming work to be done in this area. However bright the students, learning how to write for publication is challenging. The easiest thing is to give them examples of bad writing: bureaucratese; police speak; letters from banks and local authorities; wriggling defences from the providers of goods and services.
Some of the worst comes in internal communication with companies and organisations. Sadly one cannot exclude the academy. Jargon and obfuscation reign. Anna McKane makes her daily contribution to that in her teaching, her rigorous, McKane-Prelims. I have seen it at close hand, the devices she employs, her patient explanation of what the student could do to make it better, her ability to disguise pedantry not a pejorative, in my book, where news writing is concerned through clever examples.
