When writing an article journalists must set their story up a certain way for people to read it all the way through. The average human attention span is 8.25 seconds, meaning people are more than likely going to dip out of reading all your hard work pretty soon into it unless you can keep them there and engaged. That’s why the most important information in a news story is contained within the first 35 words.  

The most important information contained in a story is typically the who, what, when, where, and why. Who is involved? What happened? When did it happen? Where did it happen? And most importantly why did it happen? And why should I care? When writing for news you must get all of that out of the way first before you get to the lesser details in the case that people do stop reading.  

When writing for news, journalists write in an active voice rather than passive because passive voice is boring and will make your readers move onto something else. We also only write up to an 8^th grade reading level to ensure that everyone can read it and there aren’t any words someone has to look up. Usually staying in the two-syllable range for wording is best. We also cut words that are unnecessary to save space for more important words because most articles stay within a 500-word limit.  

Another thing about formulating a news article that is different than the writing we are typically used to is punctuation. AP style excludes the oxford comma. Instead of saying “Joe, Benny, and Jennette” went to the supermarket you would say “Joe, Benny and Jennette went to the supermarket.” It could make english majors a little angry, but it saves space when writing. Another thing, we don’t capitalize majors. Too many commas confuse a reader and quotes are always their own paragraph.