Sunday, February 19, 2012

So what?

A well-known journalism axiom tells us to cover the who-what-where-when-why of what we're writing about so that we relate the whole story.
Actually, stories can be told many different ways. If they all followed the same formula, they would lack the creativity to keep them interesting. What the who-what-where-when-why process does is to keep them objective. Strictly adhered to, they keep the writer's opinion out of the work.
There are two other important questions to consider. If you want to get the reader excited right away, write as if your opening line is "Guess what?"
The other far more important question is "So what?"
You can cover the entirety of the who-what-where-when-why but at the end, if the reader says, "So what?" you haven't accomplished a thing.

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