AY Honors/Journalism/Answer Key
1. Describe the elements of a good lead paragraph and the use and importance of headlines.
Lead Paragraph
A lead paragraph in Literature refers to the opening paragraph of an article, essay, news story or book chapter. Often called just "the lead", it usually opens together with the headline or title, almost always gives the reader the main idea of the story preceding the main body of the article and the final conclusion. The "lead" immediately grabs the attention of the reader and must be at least three sentences long. It also needs to directly relate to the body of the article.
Types of leads
Journalistic leads emphasise grabbing the attention of the reader.
In journalism, the failure to mention the most interesting or attention grabbing elements of a story in the first paragraph is sometimes called "burying the lead."
Leads in essays summarize the outline of the argument and conclusion that follows in the main body of the essay. Encyclopedia leads tend to do define the subject matter as well as emphasizing the interesting points of the article. General articles in magazines tend to be somewhere in between journalism and encyclopedias and often lack a distinct lead entirely. Leads or introductions in books vary enormously in length and content.
Rules
The key to understanding the lead usually lies in the reader’s ability to identify and understand the subject and the main verb. In general, there are three sentence types found in the lead.
- The subject and the main verb are found together at or near the beginning of the sentence. This is by far, the most common sentence type.
- The subject is separated from the main verb by information about the subject, often in the subject, often in the form of a relative clause – the clause that starts with who, which, when, where and whose.
- The sentence begins with an introductory phrase. In such cases, students must learn to read until they find a comma, after which they will find the main verb.
Headlines
A headline is text at the top of a newspaper article, indicating the nature of the article below it.
It is sometimes termed a news hed, a deliberate misspelling that dates from production flow during hot type days, to notify the composing room that a written note from an editor concerned a headline and should not be set in type.
Format
Headlines are written in much larger type size than the article text, and often in a different font entirely. Headlines are often in sentence case, although title case is often used in the USA.
Headline conventions include normally using present tense even when discussing events that happened in the recent past; omitting forms of the verb "to be" in certain contexts; and removing short articles like "a" and "the". Most newspapers feature a very large headline on their front page, dramatically describing the biggest news of the day. Words chosen for headlines are often short, giving rise to headlinese.
A headline may also be followed by a smaller secondary headline, often called subhead or "deck hed", which gives more information.
Headlines have been described as the "barb on the hook."
2. Write a news article of at least three paragraphs, using a good lead paragraph about something interesting that has happened in your church, school, home, or Pathfinder Club.
3. What are the essentials of writing a good story?
4. Know the difference between passive and active verbs, and give three comparative examples.
In grammar, the voice (also called gender or diathesis) of a verb describes the relationship between the action (or state) that the verb expresses and the participants identified by its arguments (subject, object, etc.). When the subject is the agent or actor of the verb, the verb is in the active voice. When the subject is the patient, target or undergoer of the action, it is said to be in the passive voice.
For example, in the sentence:
- The cat ate the mouse.
the verb "ate" is in the active voice, but in the sentence:
- The mouse was eaten by the cat.
the verbal phrase "was eaten" is passive.
In a transformation from an active-voice clause to an equivalent passive-voice construction, the subject and the direct object switch grammatical roles. The direct object gets promoted to subject, and the subject demoted to an (optional) complement. In the examples above, the mouse serves as the direct object in the active-voice version, but becomes the subject in the passive version. The subject of the active-voice version, the cat, becomes part of a prepositional phrase in the passive version of the sentence, and could be left out entirely.
Active verbs are generally preferred to passive verbs. One clue for determining if a sentence is active or passive, is the presence of a to-be verb (such as is, was, were, are, be). If one is found, the sentence is likely to be passive. To change a sentence from passive to active, figure out who or what is performing the action specified by the verb, and see if you can rearrange the sentence to make the "actor" the subject.
Examples
The Pathfinder is encouraged to come up with his own examples, but we provide a few for inspiration:
| Passive Voice | Active Voice |
|---|---|
| The Journalism honor was earned by Johnny. | Johnny earned the Journalism honor. |
| Our campfire was built by the Companion class. | The Companion class built our club's campfire. |
| The Explorers were taught Knot Tying by the Guides. | The Guides taught Knot Tying to the Explorers |
| Susan was rescued by the lifeguard. | The lifeguard rescued Susan. |
5. Write to a publisher, requesting story-writing guidelines.
Story writing guidelines are available free from the following:
- Pacific Press Publishing Association
- 1350 North Kings Road
- Nampa, ID 83687
- Phone: 208-465-2500
- Fax: 208-465-2531
- http://www.pacificpress.com/index.php?pgName=newsOLFPTsub
- Review and Herald Pusblishing Association
- 55 West Oak Ridge Drive
- Hagarstown, MD 21740
- http://www.reviewandherald.org/services/guidelines.asp
6. Write a story on one of the following:
- a. How your family first accepted Christ, whether it was you, your parents, your grandparents, etc.
- b. Personal experiences of answered prayer or divine guidance.
- c. An interesting pet that you have had.
- d. An experience you have had while at summer camp or on a camping trip.
- e. When God first became real to you as a friend and personal savior.
- f. The most difficult thing about being a Christian today.
7. Submit a story to a Seventh-day Adventist publication.
8. Know how to write a cover letter to the editor for submitting your story or article and write a cover letter to the editor to include with your story or article.
9. What education is helpful for getting into the career of journalism?
Many of the most famous and respected journalists of the past and present had no formal training in journalism, but learned their craft on the job, often starting out as copy boys/copy girls. Today, in many parts of the world it is usual for journalists to first complete university-level training which incorporates both technical skills such as research skills, interviewing technique and shorthand and academic studies in media theory, cultural studies and ethics. Many universities offer Journalism as a major. A journalism school is a school or department, usually part of an established university, where journalists are trained.
