Our writing center colleagues at Boston University College of Communication offer a concise guide to AP style .
Ask your instructor or the KSC Bookstore about a comprehensive guide, AP Stylebook. We have a reference copy at the Center.
Ask the Center Staff
We took a good question recently about pyramid structures. Part 1 responded with information about using a pyramid concept to understand academic writing. This post, Part 2, discusses the pyramid’s uses in journalism.
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Pyramid or inverted pyramid structures are often associated with news writing. These organizational strategies place the most attention-getting material at the beginning of a piece and follow with details and background information. As Steve Webster comments,
The principal value of the pyramid structure is that it tends to put the noun-verb-noun ‘meat’ of the story first, the color and temperature second [...]“
Inverted pyramid writing also interferes with the tedium of strictly chronological writing. Readers may not read an entire blow by blow account of an event. However, an inverted pyramid structure emphasizes the weightiest and most newsworthy information right away so readers need only skim to get the gist of what happened.
As with any prescriptive structure, however, the pyramid has both proponents and detractors. Contending articles from PoynterOnline and the American Society of Newspaper Editors discuss the uses and abuses of pyramid structures in journalism.
For: Roy Peter Clark, Time to Play the Pyramid
Against: Don Fry, Writers Should Avoid the Perverted Pyramid
It Depends: Chip Scanlan, You Hate It, You Love It: The Inverted Pyramid
Ask the Center Staff
I’m having trouble switching from writing essays in my English classes to writing news articles in my Journalism classes. I’m supposed to use sources in both situations, but I’m not sure how to do this right in Journalism. Can you explain the difference? – Trying to Switch
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Dear Trying to Switch:
At the Center, we see a variety of assignments that stretch writers beyond just one kind of essay or one way to give credit to sources. With your academic writing, you may be used to APA, MLA, or another citation system’s guidelines – depending on the discipline.
In addition to papers, KSC instructors also have students create newsletters, blogs, news articles, editorials, creative nonfiction pieces, and even emails to legislators. It’s great to see Keene State writers working in these many different genres, but you’re right. Making the switch can be tricky and it involves more than just learning to cite your sources differently. But let’s start there.
Here’s guidance adapted from PoynterOnline, a journalism resource: Citation for Non-Academics. I think it’s just as valuable for creative nonfiction as it is for newswriting – and it’s adaptable to other situations, too.
The bottom line: writers are responsible to both their readers and their sources when they clearly show where their information originated.
Check with your instructor, too, to see what advice he or she can offer to help clarify the expectations in an unfamiliar writing situation.