When writing a featured story, one of the first things to consider is the target audience. Is it for the general public or is it for a specific group of readers? If you are writing for the readers of a lifestyle magazine or for the lifestyle section of the newspaper, for example, you need to consider whether you should write from the view of a third person or a second person.
Most reports are written in the third person. The exceptions where the second person is used instead is when the story is about ‘what you should get’, for example for an occasion or a festive season. The first person is seldom used to write feature films, except when the author recounts his own experience.
Take, for example, the first paragraph of an article on entrepreneurship written in the third person:
- John lost his job two years ago due to the economic downturn. Believing it is only temporary, he actively seeks employment while improving his skills through short courses. Today, he is still unemployed. Now, at the age of 41, he is forced to consider self-employment and entrepreneurship, but hesitates because he has been employed his entire working life.
If this first paragraph is written in the second person, it would read:
- You have been employed your entire working life. Two years ago, he lost his job due to the economic recession. Believing that the recession is only temporary, he actively seeks employment while improving his skills through short courses. Today you are still unemployed.
As you can read from both approaches, the third person voice draws readers to the story better than the second person because there is no need to get personally involved in the story unless it is a call to action. It works well to use the second person if you are writing for a lifestyle magazine that shows shopping products, but not quite well for a news story that aims to convey a message that contains facts and advice.
When writing for a news article, there are four components to consider: anecdotes, quotes, facts, and topic statements.
Year anecdote a news article must be written from a third person as the narrator. The purpose of this is to use content to attract readers to the feeling of reading a novel or storybook. For a story to be successful, at least one anecdote must be included to help readers visualize the “reality” of a situation or the life of the person being told in the anecdote.
A feature should also include facts and quotes for human interest angles. Facts It can be a research finding that quantifies the content of the story, official statistical figures, or actual events witnessed by people:
- According to official figures from the labor department, unemployment is now 4.5 percent.
Quotes they are actual accounts of events by witnesses or spoken comments from interviewees. Quotes can be direct or indirect. For a story to be credible and interesting, both direct and indirect quotes are needed.
A direct quote is the actual words spoken by the people interviewed:
- “I’ve been an employee my entire working life,” said John Doe, 41, a laid off worker.
An indirect quote is a paraphrased or rephrased writing of actual words spoken by interviewees:
- John Doe, 41, said he has been employed his entire working life.
Topic statements are sentences that link the original topic of the story to various parts of the article. This is especially useful when there are multiple sections or story points that need to be expanded into different areas of the feature. The goal of thematic statements is to get readers back to the main topic of the story.
The main story is usually written with each paragraph leading readers forward to read to the closing point or a conclusion or instructions to continue. It is common to end the story by drawing the readers’ attention to the points made in the main paragraph, but with additional knowledge on the subject.