News Writing Part 5

Just plain ordinary geese and a few ganders held up a train on the Milwaukee road to-day and forced their owner, Nepomcyk Kucharski, 1287 Fourth Avenue, into district court.

=Cause and Result=

Because Harry A. Harries, 24, 2518 North Avenue, wanted two dollars for a license to marry Anna Francis, 17, 4042 Peachtree Avenue, his aged mother is dying this morning in St. Elizabeth Hospital.

Sometimes, particularly in follow or rewrite stories, probable results become the feature.

=Probable Results=

That immediate intervention in Mexico by the United States will be the result of the Villa raid last night on Columbus, N.M., is the general belief in official Was.h.i.+ngton this morning.

Another feature often played up in leads is the means or method by which a result was attained.

=Means=

A sensational half-mas.h.i.+e shot to the lip of the cup on the eighteenth green won to-day for Mrs. Roland H. Barlow, of the Merion Cricket Club, Philadelphia, over Miss Lillian B. Hyde, of the South Sh.o.r.e Field Club, Long Island, in the second round of the women's national golf champions.h.i.+p tournament at the Onwentsia Club.

=Method=

Working at night with a tin spoon and a wire nail, Capt. Wilhelm Schuettler dug 100 feet to liberty and escaped from the Hallams.h.i.+re camp sometime early this morning.

Often it is necessary to feature the name:

=Name=

Cardinal Giacomo della Chiesa, archbishop of Bologna, Italy, was to-day elected supreme pontiff of the Catholic hierarchy, in succession to the late Pope Pius X, who died Aug. 20. He will reign under the name of Benedict XV.

=Name=

President Wilson and Mrs. Norman Galt have selected Sat.u.r.day, Dec. 18, as the date of their marriage. The ceremony will be performed in Mrs. Galt's residence, and the guests will be confined to the immediate members of the President's and Mrs. Galt's families.

Even the place and the time have to be featured occasionally.

=Place=

New Orleans will be the place of the annual meeting of the Southern Congress of Education and Industry, it was learned from a member of the Executive committee to-day.

=Place=

Chicago was selected by the Republican National committee to-night as the meeting place of the 1916 Republican national convention, to be held June 7, one week before the Democratic convention in St. Louis.

=Time=

Monday, Sept. 20, is the date finally set for the opening of the State Fair, it was announced by the Program Committee to-day.

=105. Form of the Lead.=--The grammatical form in which the lead shall be written depends much on the purpose of the writer. Some of the commonest types of beginnings are with: (1) a simple statement; (2) a series of simple statements; (3) a conditional clause; (4) a substantive clause; (5) an infinitive phrase; (6) a participial phrase; (7) a prepositional phrase; (8) the absolute construction.

=106. Leads with Short Sentences.=--The value of the first two kinds is their forcefulness. Often reporters break what might be a long, one-sentence, summarizing lead into a very short sentence followed by a long one, or into a number of brief sentences, each of which gives one important detail. Such a type of lead gains its force from the fact that it lends emphasis to the individual details given in the short sentences. Note the effect of the following leads:

OAK PARK HAS A "TYPHOID MARY"

The epidemic of fever that has been sweeping through the western suburb since the high school banquet more than a month ago was traced yesterday to a woman carrier who handled the food in the school restaurant.

George Edward Waddell, our famous "Rube," fanned out to-day. It was not the first time Rube had fanned, but it will be his last. Tuberculosis claimed him after a two-year fight.

If Mrs. Mary McCormick sneezes or coughs, she will die. Her back was broken yesterday by a fall from a third-story window. Thomas Wilson is being held under a $5,000 bond pending her death or recovery, charged by the police with pus.h.i.+ng her from the window.

=107. Lead Beginning with a Conditional Clause=--The lead beginning with a conditional clause is valuable for humorous effects or for summarizing facts leading up to a story. As a rule, however, one must avoid using more than two such clauses, as they are liable to make the sentence heavy or obscure.

If Antony Fisher, 36, 1946 Garden Street, had not written Dorothy Clemens she was a "little love," he would be worth $1,000,000 now. But he wrote Dorothy she was a little love.

If Joe Kasamowitz, 4236 Queen's Avenue, speaks to his wife either at her home or at the news-stand she conducts at the St. Paul Hotel; if he loiters near the entrance to the hotel; or if he even attempts to call his wife over the telephone before Sat.u.r.day, he will be in contempt of court, according to an injunction issued to-day by Judge Fish.

=108. Lead Beginning with a Substantive Clause.=--The substantive clause has two main values in the lead,--to enable the writer to begin with a direct or an indirect question, and to permit him to s.h.i.+ft to the very beginning of the lead important ideas that would normally come at the end of the sentence.

That Jim Jeffries was the greatest fighter in the history of pugilism and Jim Corbett the best boxer, was the statement last night by Bob Fitzsimmons before a crowd of 5,000 at the Orpheum theater.

That he had refused to kiss her on her return from a long visit and had said he was tired of being married, was the testimony of Mrs. Flora Eastman to-day in her divorce suit against Edwin O. Eastman, of St. Louis.

=109. Lead Beginning with a Phrase.=--Infinitive, participial, and prepositional phrases are valuable mainly for bringing out emphatic details. But the writer must be careful, particularly in participial constructions, to see that the phrases have definite words to modify.

To see if the bullet was coming was the reason Charlie Roberts, aged 7, 2626 Ninth Street, looked down his father's pistol barrel at 8:00 A.M. to-day.

Playing with a rifle longer than his body, three-year-old Ernest Rodriguez, of Los Angeles, accidentally shot himself in the abdomen this morning and is dying in the county hospital.

Almost blinded with carbolic acid, Fritz Storungot, of South Haven, groped his way to Patrolman Emil Schulz at Third Street and Brand Avenue last night and begged to be sent to the Emergency Hospital.

With her hands and feet tied, Ida Elionsky, 16, swam in the roughest kind of water through h.e.l.l Gate yesterday, landing safely at Blackwell's Island.

=110. Lead Beginning with Absolute Construction.=--The absolute construction usually features causes and motives forcibly, but it should be avoided by beginners, as it is un-English and tends to make sentences unwieldy. The following ill.u.s.trates the construction well:

Her money gone and her baby starving, Mrs. Kate Allen, 8 Marvin Alley, begged fifteen cents of a stranger yesterday to poison herself and child.

=111. Accuracy and Interest in the Lead.=--The two requirements made of the lead are that it shall possess accuracy and interest. It must have accuracy for the sake of truth. It must possess interest to lure the reader to a perusal of the story. Toward an attainment of both these requirements the reporter will have made the first step if he has organized his material rightly, putting at the beginning those facts that will be of most interest to his readers.

=112. Clearness.=--But the reporter will still fail of his purpose if he neglects to make his lead clear. He must guard against any construction or the inclusion of any detail that is liable to blur the absolute clarity of his initial sentences. In particular, he must be wary of overloaded leads, those crowded with details. It is better to cut such leads into two or more short, crisp sentences than to permit them to be published with the possibility of not being understood. If a reader cannot grasp readily the lead, the chances are nine out of ten that he will not read the story. Note the following overloaded lead and its improvement by being cut into three sentences:

Barely able to see out of her swollen and discolored eyes, and her face and body covered with cuts and bruises, received, it is alleged, when her father attacked her because of her failure to secure work, Mary Ellis, 15 years old, living at 1864 Brown Street, when placed on the witness stand Monday, told a story which resulted in Peter Ellis, her father, being arrested on a charge of a.s.sault with intent to do great bodily harm.

Charged with beating unmercifully his daughter, Mary, 15, because she could not obtain work, Peter Ellis, 1864 Brown Street, was arraigned in police court Monday. The girl herself appeared against Ellis. Her body, when she appeared on the witness stand, was covered with cuts and bruises, her face black from the alleged blows, and her eyes so much swollen that she could hardly see.

The following lead, too, is overloaded and all but impossible to understand:

Two letters written by H. M. Boynton, an advertising agent for the Allen-Procter Co., to "Dear Louise," in which he confessed undying love and which are replete with such terms of endearment as "little love," "dear beloved," "sweetheart," "honey," and just plain "love," and which were alleged by him to have been forged by his wife, Mrs. Hannah Benson Boynton, obtained a divorce for her yesterday in district court on the grounds of alienated affections.

Few readers would wade through this maze of s.h.i.+fted constructions and heavy, awkward phrasing for the sake of the divorce story following. In the following form, however, it readily becomes clear:

Two love letters to "Dear Louise" cost H. M. Boynton, advertising agent for the Allen-Procter Co., a wife yesterday in district court. The letters were produced by Mrs. Hannah Benson Boynton to support her charge of alienated affections, and were replete with such terms of endearment as "undying love," "honey," "sweetheart," "dear beloved," "little love," and just plain "love." Boynton claimed that the letters were forged.