Chapter 10 in our textbook covers the techniques of features and storytelling in journalism. This chapter had many interesting points, especially as an intersection between crafted reporting and narrative storytelling. For example, the chapter made the point on page 188 where the author says, “Narrative writing combines show-in-action description, dialogue, plot, and reconstruction of an event as it occurred”(188). I also noticed the chapter mentioned one of my favorite writers and thinkers, Joan Didion, who I have been thinking a lot about during this class. The ability she and others mentioned have in what the chapter calls “reading to write” is super important – appreciating the techniques through reading other works and analyzing tone, characters, scenes, etc., can help storytelling in the news or magazines take on that novel-like feel but is entirely factual. Another section within this chapter that I found helpful was the structure of the feature or the story, which has more choices than hard news arranged chronologically. A feature or a narrative story could be topically or even a literary structure with a plot form of beginning, middle, and end. The bullet points on page 194 helped me to visualize this form I know so well in other forms of writing but less so with journalism, such as connecting to the lede or nut graph and looking to the future at the end of the piece, which hones in on the significance of the story.
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