Newsletter Writing in Stylewriter Software

When writing newsletters, you should aim to make your writing readable, interesting and easy to understand.  As most newsletters have a wide audience, you should write as simply and as clearly as you can.  Start with the most important information.  You should use:

• a simple sentence structure,
• short sentences,
• active verbs,
• familiar words, and
• concrete and specific words that your reader can picture.

When you select Newsletter as your writing task, StyleWriter Software adjusts its statistical measures as follows:

	Style Index	Average Sentance	Passive Index	Long Sentance Limit
Excellent Range	0-15	13-20	0-15	35

Reporting news – whether in newsletters, newspapers, magazines or press releases – means producing interesting and informative coverage of decisions, events, people and news.  You have to design each article to fit the readers’ needs and to hold their interest.  You must learn to present information in an interesting and simple way that readers will want to read and be able to understand.  In short, this means knowing and using some journalist writing techniques.

Headlines

A good headline covers the story and attracts the reader.  Most headlines in company newsletters fail because they just outline the subject matter. Professional journalists use strong verbs and much more specific information in headlines to draw the reader into the story.  Here are examples of journalistic headlines from the computer press.

Bitter Fruits of Going IT Alone

Marketing Means More Than a Brochure

‘Perform or Else’ Threat to IT Managers

Police Swoop in Raids Against Virus Writers

Suppliers Threaten to Put on Own Exhibition

What Role for Workers in Brave New World?

Good headlines use strong verbs, questions, quotations or thought-provoking ideas.  They are usually under eight words long and announce the idea or theme of the article.  Clever use of humour in headlines can also help attract readers’ attention.

Opening Paragraph

Your opening paragraph in every item in your newsletter is the most important.  It should grab your readers’ attention and make them want to read on.  You can do this by using:

• a summary sentence
• the Five-W lead paragraph: who, what, when, where, why.
• a quotation
• a question
• a local angle of the story
• humour

Summary Sentence

A summary sentence following the headline tells the reader about the article.  Although not usually necessary in a news story, it’s an effective technique when writing articles and reviews.  It summarises the story for your readers and lets them decide whether to read the story or not.  You can set the summary sentence apart from the article so it stands out.

Headline:    Choice of a New Generation

Summary Sentence:    There is a baffling range of software development tools on the market and little chance of any common standards.

Headline:    Improving Prospects

Summary Sentence:    As the number of job vacancies grows, will salaries keep rising?

The Five-W Lead

News reporters use a technique called the Five-W Lead to provide the reader with the most information quickly.  The “lead” or opening paragraph covers who, what, when, where and why.  For example:

Who:    Computerlink
What:    Launched a ? million takeover bid of Buscomp
Why:    To raise its market share of accounting software
Where:    North America
When:    Yesterday

Computerlink launched a £3 million takeover bid of the Buscomp group yesterday to raise its North American market share of accounting software.

This technique makes sure you write your opening paragraph concisely, concentrating on the news and highlighting the facts.  It also helps you adopt a good news reporting style.

Note:    There is a sixth key word: how.  Sometimes you need to explain how something works or happens in your opening paragraph.

Developing the Story

The easiest way to develop the news story is to draw on the key information in the lead paragraph,  expanding the news and explaining its significance in each paragraph.  This means placing  the most important information in the lead paragraph and then adding the next most important information in the second paragraph, and so on until the end of the story.  This has the advantage of giving a reader who only reads one or two paragraphs the key information quickly.

The second and later paragraphs add information about names, descriptions, quotations, explanations, background information, previous news, conflicting views and so on.  You can bring in quotations and examples to add interest and variety to the news.

In developing the body of the news report, make sure you use words and phrases to link your paragraphs and you keep to specific and relevant information.

Checklist

• Identify what is newsworthy.  Put the most important item first.
• Write a punchy headline.
• Use a summary sentence in articles or features.
• Write a lead paragraph of the key information.
• Write news stories in descending order of importance.
• Make sure the story flows between paragraphs.
• Use quotations and examples to change the pace and add variety.
• Use lots of short items to make the newsletter interesting.
• Avoid long articles.   If you have to use them, break them up.
• Use cartoons, photos and graphics to break up the page.
• Rewrite contributions that are boring or too long.
• Don’t use too many different fonts or type sizes on a page.
• Add variety to newsletters by having different items such as:

opinion columns

interviews

letters

humorous pieces

internal news or gossip.

Plain English Writing Task Styles in Stylewriter

This entry was posted on June 13th, 2010 and is filed under Writing Task Styles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.