Starter activity
With your partner, read the beginning of a
newspaper article which appeared in the
Daily Mail and try to guess the order of
the paragraphs.
List the letters of the paragraphs in the
correct order at the back of your book.
The structure of
newspaper
articles
News articles


Journalists have to write to deadlines and
present sometimes complex issues in
short, readable articles.
Newspaper articles are structured – or
organised - to catch the reader’s attention
and then keep it for as long as possible.
How do you think they do this?
Headline


First of all they will use a short and (for
tabloid newspapers) an attention-grabbing
headline.
e.g.
Lesson ban on girl
who made herself
look really scary
Paragraphing

Paragraphs are kept short and snappy.
The rules for paragraphing – especially in
tabloid articles – can be different from
those followed in other kinds of writing.
Pyramid writing

When writing news reports, journalists
often introduce the article with the most
dramatic and most important fact – the
intro – and then follow it up with the
second most dramatic, then the third, and
so on. This is known as ‘pyramid
writing’ .
Pyramid writing cont.

It is known as ‘pyramid writing’ because,
while 100% of readers might read the
headline, only 70% may read to the end
of the first paragraph and only 50% to the
end of the third (as though in an inverted
pyramid). Journalists often say that the
intro is the hardest part of the article to
write.
Intro
Parag. 1
Parag. 2
Parag. 3