006

The author says that a direct quote "should be the exact words of the speaker." Can you think of any circumstances in which this would not be true?

A circumstance under which a direct quote may not have to be the exact words of the speaker is one in which the speaker is not eloquent or uses bad grammar. For the purpose of uniformity in an article, the writer should use good grammar in the parts of the article that they write themselves and if the speaker uses anything less than good grammar, they should clean it up so that it matches the rest of the article.

When the exact words of the speaker are confusing, excessive, or sound unintellgent, their language should be "cleaned up" by the writer of the article, but the "gist" of what the speaker says should stay the same. A writer should strive to make sure the message the speaker is trying to convey gets across to the reader as the speaker had originally intended, even if that means not using the speaker's exact words if they sound unintelligent and interrupt the flow of the journalistic piece. Also, if the speaker has used coarse language that might offend readers or if the speaker has used jargon that many readers may not understand, it might benefit the writer to rephrase what they have said in a way that the readers might be able to better digest.

If I were to rephrase this rule, I would say that it is important for a direct quote to convey the exact meaning of what a speaker has said. Using the exact words of the speaker in a direct quote would be ideal, but not at the cost of the quality of a piece.

005

Some critics argue that newspapers should abandon the inverted pyramid news story structure. They say that television and radio deliver news much faster than newspapers; therefore, newspapers should not be as concerned with getting information to readers quickly as with getting more complete and accurate information. What do you think?

I do not think that the inverted pyramid news story structure should be abandoned by newspapers. The inverted pyramid news story structure provides a way for readers of the mass media (mainly newspapers), to get the most important information across in the first few sentences that they read.

Why deprive the newspapers and other printed mass media of this way of getting information across to readers as fast as they feel they need the information they are seeking?  If the inverted pyramid news story structure was completely done away with, there would be many frustrated newspaper readers, scanning an article for the most important facts.

Different structures have their places and those places are in other types of news stories. Feature stories can use a non-inverted pyramid structure freely, and they often do. Most feature stories are not pieces that a reader approaches with an urgent need to know the most important details right off the bat; they are more likely to sit back and read the story as they would a novel, at a leisurely pace.

In fact, through learning about writing for the media this year I have come to consider the inverted pyramid news story the backbone of newspapers. Without it, information would be hidden and the people who want to obtain certain facts would have to search for them. If this were the case, newspapers would be much less popular and not serve the purpose they were intended to serve. The inverted pyramid news story structure is, in fact, the last thing that should be abandoned by the newspapers.