How do you organize a compelling feature?

Model this piece, which Loring Leifer wrote for Northern Funds’ marketing magazine, Northern Update. In it, the Wylie Communications head writer and senior writing coach includes all of the elements you need to craft a compelling feature story.

Headline

Start with a feature head. A creative feature deserves a creative headline. Wordplay works beautifully for this one.
Let’s pause and ponder that for a minute too.

Bridge the gap

Deck

Summarize the story in your deck. Clever headlines grab attention, but they don’t fully explain the story. So write a summary deck in 14 words or less.

May-December marriage? Here’s how to span the age divide and retire together

Lead

Show instead of tell in a feature lead. Feature leads are concrete, creative and provocative. In this example, compression of details gets the piece off to a good start.

Long before Tim Robbins hooked up with Susan Sarandon, 12 years his senior, William Shakespeare, at 18, married 26-year-old Anne Hathaway.

Background

Broaden the story in the background section. Here, you explain why we’re covering this story now, give broader context for the piece and fill in the details readers need to understand the rest of the story.

(Loring also included a sidebar, which explained in detail the special financial problems challenges confronting May-September couples.)

Nut graph

Put the story into a nutshell in the nut paragraph. Here, you tell people what you’re going to tell them.

Body: Section one

Avoid the muddle in the middle: Organize the body of your feature-style story into clear, complete parts. Then use subheads to label the parts for your readers.

See how Loring writes like a roller coaster. That is, she weaves metaphors, examples and concrete details throughout the piece to keep readers’ interest.

Body: Section two

Although this is a linear feature, Loring uses subheads, bullets, bold-faced lead-ins and other display copy. These make scanning easier and lift ideas off of the page.

Body: Section three

Notice how Loring has developed her bridge analogy in the display copy. One key to using an extended metaphor is to do so lightly. If Loring used a bridge reference in every paragraph, we’d soon grow weary of the analogy.

“By being realistic upfront about what is possible for the future, you can ward off putting your younger spouse in a detrimental situation… and alone,” she says.

Conclusion

Finally, draw to a close in the conclusion. The conclusion has two parts:

1. The wrap up, where you tell readers what you’ve told them. Again, note the concrete details here and throughout the piece.

2. The kicker, where you leave a lasting impression with concrete, creative, provocative information. Here, Loring returns to and spins her bridge analogy for a satisfying final note.

So you may be part of a bridge to a longer life for the next generation.

How can you craft a feature-style story like Loring’s?

Get the word out with clear, compelling copy

Each day, your readers are bombarded with 5,000 attempts to get their attention. That’s nearly 2 million messages a year. Is your copy getting through to your tired, busy, distracted audience?

These days — when people are more inclined to discard information than to read it — you need copy that captures attention, cuts through the clutter and leaves a lasting impression.

Wylie Communications can help. With Wylie Communications on your team, you can:

• Deliver copy that sells. When Ann’s not writing or editing, she’s training other writers. Or helping companies get the word out to their audiences. She applies the best practices she develops for her training and consulting business to her writing and editing projects. So your project will cut through the clutter, lift your ideas off the page or screen and deliver copy that sells products, services and ideas.
• Bring award-winning talent to your project. Ann’s work has earned nearly 60 communication awards, including two IABC Gold Quills. Let us help you produce world-class business communications, as well.
• Get writers who get business. Ann has interviewed George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Robert Redford. But she really enjoys chatting with economists, engineers and surgeons. At Wylie Communications, we’ve written about communication technology for Sprint, about personal finance for Northern Trust and — despite the fact that Ann’s preferred form of exercise is the hike from recliner to refrigerator — about fitness medicine for the Mayo Clinic. We’ll get up to speed on your industry, quickly and thoroughly.
• Stop working weekends. Our team provides a virtual staff to write and edit newsletters and magazines for Saint Luke’s, Northern Trust, State Street/Kansas City and Sprint. Let us pick up the slack in your department, too.

Now let’s see yours! Please post or link to your original inverted pyramid and revised feature in the comments section.

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What do you notice about this passage, excerpted from an article in The Economist?

With the exception of “Winston” and “Churchill,” this 800-word story uses only one-syllable words. And, with an average word length of 3.7 characters, it scores a Flesch Reading Ease of 100.

Make 80% of your words one syllable long.

Take a tip from this passage: Use mostly one-syllable words.

Chances are, you won’t lose anything but reading difficulty. As Alden S. Wood, columnist on language and English usage, writes:

Use short words.

It is possible to write in mostly one-syllable words.

In fact, members of the “Club for One-Pulse Words” go so far as to speak exclusively in words of one syllable.

And you thought writing with short words was tough.
____

Sources: “In praise of short words,” The Economist, Oct. 7, 2004

Alden S. Wood, “Wood on Words: Keep it Simple,” IABC Communication World, December 1988

Ann Wylie, Cut Through the Clutter, Wylie Communications Inc., 2005

Dave Blum, “In Praise of Small Words,” The Wall Street Journal,  “Some Month, One Nine Eight Two”

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Want to make sure you’re not eradicating clarity in your organization?

Slaughter these problems instead, suggest Martin J. Eppler, Ph.D., and Nichole Bischof. They’re the authors of “Complex to Clear: Managing Clarity in Corporate Communication.”

Top 3 clarity killers

According to participants in a survey by Eppler and Bischoff, the top three reasons corporate communications are hard to understand:

• Information overload. Including too many details in a communication vehicle (mean=3.61/5.0)
• Approval process. Involving too many people in creating the communication vehicle (mean=3.36/5.0)
• Death by tweakage. Inserting errors and inconsistencies and making too many changes to over time (mean=3.36/5.0)

Institutional clarity killers

These recurring managerial issues often lead to unclear communication, according to Eppler and Bischof:

• Too many cooks. The approval process results in inconsistent, overlapping and stylistically diverse messages. Example: An intranet article that’s been written by half-a-dozen “writers.” Driver: Lack of ownership. Solution: Give one owner the authority as well as the responsibility for the piece.
• Too big to fail. Everyone gets their own essential detail into the vehicle, which is now redundant, unclear and overloaded with information. Example: A marketing brochure that includes every grunt and groan about the project or service. Driver: “Iterations without consolidation.” Solution: Consolidate and redraft.
• Re-use abuse. Cut-and-paste segments are outdated, redundant and inconsistent. Example: A blog post that contains unedited paragraphs from a partner company’s website. Driver: Time. Solution: Fact-check and rewrite cut-and-paste passages.
• Swiss Army knife. Documents that attempt to serve multiple audiences but really serve none. Example: A press release for investors, journalists, community members and employees. Driver: Time and money. Solution: Divide and conquer. Write one piece, then tailor it to target audiences.

Clarity killers by project

Some topics and vehicles bring with them additional communication challenges. Are you communicating:

• The corporate vision and values? Clarity killer: Making these top-line messages abstract and generic. Simplicity solution: Add examples, stories and concrete details.
• Strategic direction? Clarity killer: Using the structure of the strategy, such as a balanced scorecard or strategy map. Simplicity solution: Develop an accessible visual metaphor for the audience, not for the creators.
• Social media? Clarity killer: Using jargon and communicating down a one-way street. Simplicity solution: Write in the language of the reader. Invite and listen to feedback.

Which of these clarity killers is your organization guilty of? How can you resuscitate clarity in your shop?

___

Source: Martin J. Eppler, Ph.D., and Nichole Bischof, “Complex to Clear: Managing Clarity in Corporate Communication,” University of St. Gallen, November 2011

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“Good writers are visible just behind their words.”

— William Zinsser, author, On Writing Well

Eliot Fette Noyes was a Harvard-trained architect and industrial designer. He worked on projects for IBM — most famously the IBM Selectric typewriter and the Westchester IBM Research Center.

Frustrated with IBM employee jargon, Noyes composed a pamphlet called “Dear Mother.”

He suggested that employees write memos as if they were simple notes to Mom.

Dear Byron

It was 1962, and Tom Wolfe was covering the hot rod and custom car culture of Southern California for Esquire magazine.

That is, he was trying to cover it. He was having so much trouble that his desperate editor, Byron Dobell, asked Wolfe to send him his notes so he could have another writer try.

On the night before deadline, Wolfe he sat down at his typewriter and, ignoring all journalistic conventions, banged out a personal letter to Dobell explaining what he wanted to say on the subject. Dobell just removed the salutation — “Dear Byron” — and published the letter intact.

The result was “There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby” — an article that helped establish the New Journalism movement.

____

Source: “Ten Things You Should Know About Eliot Noyes,” Dwell, April 2007

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Talk about brief: The New York Times packs 13 stories onto its briefs page, called The (One-Page) Magazine.

Notice the combination of:

• One-paragraph profiles, trend pieces and new nuggets
• One-sentence reviews
• Charts (History, in Kardashians)
• Glossary items (This should be a word: Denigreet)
• Timelines (This one’s running across the top and down the right side)
• Infographics (This one’s running across the bottom of the page)

How brief are your briefs?
If they were briefer, would they be better?

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