As you gather your facts after your assignment and make your way with them to the telephone or back to the office, force yourself to decide where your story will begin. In the main, you have two choices. You can choose the most important and striking of the facts you have gathered; or if the basic facts themselves are not of immediate human interest you can choose some more personal and human point which does have this interest.
Here are two good openings: ‘The postmen’s strike is on – no mail will be delivered today’; ‘It was washday yesterday for Mrs E— of Puddletown; but by the time she came to hang her washing out, part of her garden wall had been knocked down to make room for a new bus shelter.’
The first of these sets out ...
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