11  Making a coherent whole

This chapter concentrates on the teamwork that keeps a feature unified. Title, subtitle or standfirst if any, intro, body and ending must work together. Anecdotes and quotes, examples, case studies, figures, pictures, charts, boxes and suchlike can bring illumination, resonance, relevance and humanity. Key terms and other kinds of links keep the theme focused. It has to be a juggling act, and the ingredients you’re juggling with have to be the best you can find, within the time available, not necessarily the first that you find.

You’ve collected and verified facts. You’ve represented (‘interpreted’) interviews accurately. You’ve got an outline, with a few links inserted to keep you on track. You’ve got one or two anecdotes and quotes that should serve. You know what you want to say. Surely that’s enough?

It depends. Before you start writing up, it will be a good idea to ask yourself one or two more questions. Are you sure that what you want to say is of obvious interest to the readers you have in mind? Are those readers like you? Do you love Bach cantatas and spend a lot of time with your train set? Or are you a heavy metal/down the pub sort of guy?

You have, of course, got certain readers in mind. Your ability to interest them may well be easier if you’re addressing people of like mind, if your interest in trains has encouraged you to write for Trainspotting Magazine. Otherwise, if you’re writing for a general market, which might include readers of both those persuasions mentioned, you will be wise to assume that many of them will be coming to your subject cold. Based on that premise you’ll have a much better chance of making those ingredients add up to an article that will capture interest and sustain it throughout. You’ll keep in mind that purpose/theme, content and style are in harmony throughout. Let’s contrast two quite different features to see the teamwork in action.

EXAMPLES OF TEAMWORK

Triumph over tragedy

First, a typical popular magazine formula in an article by Dawn Doherty.

Title	‘My 12-year-old had a nervous breakdown’
Publication	Woman
Date	12 April 1999
Length	850 words
Purpose/theme	To give the inspirational story of a child’s struggle against a disease, with much success, that can be told mainly in the words of mother and child.

Standfirst

‘Yes, children can suffer stress and Jamie had so much to cope with he cracked.’

Intro:

(Hook)

Tina Kennedy loves to splash out on expensive clothes for her teenage son, Jamie – happily spending 200 a month. She says: ‘It means he’s getting taller, like any other young boy – and that’s fantastic.’

(Bridge)

Jamie suffers from a rare illness which stopped him growing when he was 10 and caused his weight to shoot from 5 st. 4 lb to 7 st. Bullied at school and forced to give up his beloved football, he had a nervous breakdown. Tina and her husband, Philip, watched as Jamie changed from a confident boy into a tearful child, haunted by nightmares.

(Text, moving into the body)

‘We’ve lost a year of his life, which is sad,’ says Tina, 42, from High Wycombe, Bucks. Jamie’s future had always seemed so bright. A talented footballer, he’d been invited to join a local club’s school of excellence.

Summary of body

The progress of his disease. He had to leave the football club. In hospital his illness was diagnosed as hypothyroidosis, an underactive thyroid gland, and he started a drug treatment. Bullied at school, he refused to leave his house. He had a nervous breakdown and joined a special teaching unit at the hospital; his parents also received counselling. After three months Jamie began to lose weight. Slowly his confidence returned, he began playing with a new club and he gained height and weight.

Ending

Now 13, he goes part-time to senior school and hopes to go full-time by the autumn. He’ll take the drugs permanently and his growth should be normal by 19. ‘It’s wonderful to have him back.’

Colour photos with captions

Jamie looking stressed: ‘Jamie was haunted by nightmares’

‘Happy at last – Jamie with his parents Tina and Philip’

‘On the pitch, Jamie forgot all his troubles and was his old self ’

Text breaker quote

‘We’ve lost a year of his life – it’s just so sad’

Linking

Key words: breakdown, tears, haunted, nightmares, sad, struggled, devastated, lethargic, underactive, crying, ugly, and then:

confidence, cheeky, better, will, forgot, shot up, good, great, enjoying, growth, wonderful.

Paragraph to paragraph: bullied (mid paragraph) … the bullies, after that, then, after three months, by last November, since then, finally, no longer.

Anecdotes and quotes

Slowly, Jamie’s confidence returned. ‘When his doctor told us he’d been cheeky one day, we knew he was getting better,’ laughs Tina. ‘Another time he was caught throwing things out of the hospital window. Though he’d been naughty, it was a good sign.’

The elements are carefully chosen to explain and move the story forward at the same time.

The teamwork of purpose/theme, content/structure, style

1  Readers will gain inspiration and reassurance that families suffering misfortune can get much help if they refuse to give up to despair.

2  The case study indicates that with determination, family and expert support, childhood misfortunes can be overcome. The structure effectively brings out the drama of the story.

3  The message is put across with simplicity, using the words of the boy and his mother: the emotions are projected directly, with no tricks.

Exploring the Nazi legacy: description of a place and its people

The second feature is a description/narration/exposition that relates a place with some shameful history to the people living there now.

When you’ve got three times as many words and more there are more complexities but you can adapt some of those simple structures shown above. The novelist and journalist Angela Lambert had a personal motivation for visiting the small Bavarian town of Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s retreat: she was researching a book on the Third Reich and her mother came from Hamburg. We don’t discover this until halfway through the feature. Her personal motivation is interesting because it deepens her involvement with the people and guides her to discoveries about the Nazi past. But as readers we want more than her personal odyssey, and we also get a fascinating picture of the Berchtesgadeners today and some reflections on their relationship with the racists of the past.

Title	‘In his ideal world’
Publication	Financial Times Magazine
Date	4 October 2003
Length	2800 words
Motivation/purpose	To answer the questions: What are the people like? What is their connection with the Nazi past? With the evils committed by both sides in the Second World War?

Standfirst

Hitler chose as his retreat a Bavarian town where the scenery and people met his Aryan desires. Seventy years on, Angela Lambert feels haunted in the Fuhrer’s Utopia.

Intro:

(Hook)

The small Bavarian town of Berchtesgaden has a disproportionately vast railway station, designed by Albert Speer in 1937 to impress visitors to Obersalzberg, Hitler’s mountain retreat. They included Mussolini, monarchs of central European countries keen to curry favour and, on 23 October 1937, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor: ‘We thank you especially for the pleasant hours we spent at Obersalzberg,’ the former Edward VIII later wrote to the Fuhrer – nothing if not well brought up.

(Bridge)

It is more than 50 years since Hitler’s retreat was razed and today not many people in the pretty town even know that he once lived here. Fewer still are aware that Speer, his chief architect and creator of special effects at the Nuremberg rallies, was responsible for their grand neoclassical station. Under the three archways designed to frame Hitler or his guests before they climbed into his armoured Mercedes and sped up the mountainside, there is no sign or plaque dating from those years. In the 1930s, thousands of people gathered every day outside Hitler’s house (well protected by iron railings and SS guards) shouting ‘We want the Fuhrer!’ Now, it seems, he has been almost airbrushed out of the history of this peaceful place.

(Text, moving into the body)

Germany is waking up from half a century of denial. Books that tell the truth about the Second World War are being published, such as Bernard Schlink’s The Reader and Gunter Grass’s recent novel Crabwalk, about the sinking of a German refugee ship by a Soviet submarine in January 1945. More than 9000 people drowned – it was the worst marine disaster ever and was all but forgotten for 55 years. Films and documentaries are being made that reveal the shame and suffering of the German people.

Summary of body, with the main links in italics

28 July 1943: 40,000 people died in the bombing of Hamburg by Bomber Command.

Near the Berghof, Hitler’s former home in Berchtesgaden, an information centre, Dokumentation Obersalzberg, exhibits Third Reich documents and a video in which former residents describe how their homes were compulsorily purchased and pulled down and rebuilt as villas for the Fuhrer and his circle.

Between 1932 and 1937 the village was colonized by the Nazi leaders. Dokumentation tells also the story of the annihilation of the Jews through letters and photos of the dead and dying in the extermination camps, while speakers can be activated to hear Hitler’s speeches. She spent a week here in a chalet below Hitler’s Berghof trying to understand ‘how the two decades during which he lived here might have changed it, or the people living here, then and now’.

In a supermarket she was astonished by people’s sudden, unprovoked rudeness. People like this, she concluded, became Nazis.

‘It is easy to see why Hitler chose to make his retreat here.’ He was born 75 km away just over the Austrian border. He was nostalgic for this area with its blonde, healthy people, prototype of his idealized Aryan race.

‘Toweringly beautiful’ Bavaria appealed to the ‘blend of the epic and the sentimental in Hitler’s nature’.

The pretty doll-like women and the gnome-like men in their lederhosen reassured Hitler, who was generally ill at ease with women and suspicious of men. She found them unsettling.

They are well behaved in this Catholic stronghold, with respect for order and authority. My landlord’s two sons helped him convert a garage into a flat with exceptional obedience.

If Bavarians personified the ideal Germans Hitler, with jet-black hair and greyish skin, was physically lazy. But he knew how to lead these ‘good, God-fearing people’.

First though the purifying had to be done: it lasted for more than a decade. There were no Jews here, or handicapped or blacks or Asians. The landlord loaned her books about Hitler’s colony, the Obersalzberg, in the 1930s and gave me the address of a bookshop specializing in such books.

The owner of this bookshop … gave her other contacts and she surfed through Second World War websites. Those covering the Third Reich took pains to deny any Nazi convictions.

The next day she went on a four-hour guided bus tour of the area. The guide explained that Obersalzberg was not only a retreat but an alternative centre of government with telephone exchange, SS barracks for thousands of soldiers, and a bunker.

On 25 April 1945 RAF Lancasters bombed the area into ruins, which were later demolished.

For the last part of the tour the bus climbed to the top of the 3000 ft mountain. The German people paid 34 million Reichsmarks (about 100 million today) for the Eagle’s Nest, a 50th birthday present for Hitler, ordered by his private secretary, Martin Bormann, now a café with a splendid view. Tourists, mostly German, buy souvenirs. She saw no sign of disapproval at any record of the Nazi regime.

Ending

In this Eden-like landscape of mountains, meadows, wayside shrines, happy children and hard-working adults, how could Satan intrude? Bur perfection is always flawed. It is not only lager-louts with shaven heads who preach the racist creed. They rant from incoherent rage at their squalid surroundings, lack of opportunity and unvalued lives. Berchtesgadeners have no such excuses. Most, of course, are welcoming, decent people. So why was I haunted by the feeling that the little town’s immaculate streets and immaculate citizens hid not just an appalling past but a troubling present? There were many who might still, in spite of everything that happened here, respond to a stirring and seductive call for the purification of the German race.

Colour photos with captions

(Above the title, no caption) Hitler in uniform, a mountain in the background.

(Beside the title) ‘Hitler’s Berghof, which was blown up and bulldozed after the war.’ A spacious two-storey villa seen against the mountainous backdrop.

(Above the title, no caption) Picture of Hitler in uniform, grim-faced, with swastika armband outside the Berghof.

‘Once visited by the elite of the Nazi regime, Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest now attracts curious tourists.’ The picture shows the café perched on top of a high mountain.

Text breaker quote

As a 50th birthday present to Hitler, Bormann ordered the building of the Eagle’s Nest. This was not a good idea: Hitler suffered from claustrophobia and a fear of heights. It is now a café, with a rather good view.

Other linking

Between 1932 and 1937 the entire village was colonized by the Nazi leadership. ‘Staying at the Berghof [Hitler’s home] in Obersalzberg,’ recalls Heinrich Hoffmann, one of Hitler’s closest friends, ‘was like living in a gilded cage.’ The members of the inner circle enjoyed every luxury here …

The quote follows up the first sentence by giving us the experience of one of the Nazi leaders and transports us back in time and place.

Unpleasantness in the supermarket is made dramatic by the angry shopper incident and the quote:

‘Mensch! Just pile it back in the trolley, can’t you, instead of keeping other people waiting!’ He was so vehement and aggressive that I felt physically threatened.

The taxi driver knows the place well:

There’s no crime here. Why should anyone want to commit a crime in this beautiful place?

The teamwork of purpose/theme, content/structure, style

1  The author’s main theme is that in Hitler’s idyllic retreat there’s a disturbing sense that many of these decent, happy, prosperous people could be turned into Nazis again.

2  She puts across this haunted feeling by contrasting the serene beauty of the place with facts about the shameful past, the rudeness of some of the inhabitants and her uneasiness about the Nazi purification scheme leaving no sign of multiculturalism. A skilful collaboration of narrative, descriptive and expositional structures.

3  The style is unobtrusive, letting the facts speak for themselves. The article reminds us that evil lurks in the most beautiful places – that the Nazi evil is still there and could be reawakened – without dramatizing. We are calmly persuaded that the human race will always be capable of evil and to be on our guard.

For a long feature you need resonances and the above summary reveals some. In particular, though, note the way that the ending reminds you of where you started – ‘respond to a stirring and seductive call’ echoing ‘waking up from half a century of denial’ – and makes the connection with the journey made into the legacy of the past – ‘in spite of all that has happened here’.

Let’s zoom in a bit closer on some titles, intros and endings to identify some formulae worth noting. If you work for a publication as staff writer or subeditor, or write for one regularly, your feeling for titles that are appropriate for it will be finely tuned. Freelances should give special attention to these parts of articles in publications aimed at. They have particular likes and dislikes.

TITLES

Even though freelances’ titles are often changed (you don’t normally know how the page is going to be designed), a provisional title can help to provide you with the controlling idea, or at least keep the feature on track. A title must first of all grab the reader’s attention. It should charm, amuse, intrigue or buttonhole the reader in some way.

The first title of each pair below, in italics, would serve as a provisional title. The second is given an attribution if known. One or two are made up.

1  The superiority in Russian tanks
WHY RUSSIAN TANKS ARE BETTER
‘Wh’ phrases get straight to the point, and it’s easy to give them a smooth rhythm. Avoid long abstract words such as ‘superiority’. Simple, direct words work best on the whole.

2  The lack of good manners today
WHERE ARE ALL THE MANNERS GONE?
The tone of the first is too serious and preachy. The second is helped by its allusion to an old song, ‘Where are all the flowers gone?’ An example of how a question can sometimes make a good title – though of course any publication would ration their use.

Here are some examples of puns, two of them alliterative as well, a common combination:

1  The answer to depression – exercise
EXERCISING THE DEMONS
A pun from The Observer Magazine.

2  Studying a star
STAR STUDIED
This headed a Guardian feature about a Hollywood star. A pun on ‘studded’.

3  Our poor attitude to waste
DOWN IN THE DUMPS
Another piece from The Observer Magazine (25 January 2004) by Jane
Withers of around 3000 words deplores the lack of recycling in the UK.
It has a standfirst that neatly summarizes the content:

Every year in Britain we produce millions of tons of rubbish; yet we recycle a mere 12.4 per cent of it. Our bin, burn and bury approach to waste means we are now drastically out of step with our European neighbours and environmentalists who practise the three ‘Rs’ – reduce, reuse and recycle. So when are we going to clean up our act? (© Jane Withers. With kind permission of The Guardian)
The ending is discussed below.

4  The unemployed who are happy as they are
THE RISK OF FINDING A JOB
The irony of the second gives it more resonance.

5  The problem of obesity
A JOB FOR NANNY
A title that wouldn’t work for many publications these days, since
nannies are thin on the ground.

It needed the standfirst: ‘Fat people aren’t victims,’ says Tania Kindersley. ‘They’re just fat, and it’s time they were urged to shape up.’ From The Spectator of 6 July 2002.

THE INTRO

Let’s label some devices, starting with the intro to the spectator piece.

Vivid, surprising or shocking statement

Often in the hook:

We are all vast now. Columnists, doctors, cross-bench committees and government ministers desperately inveigh against the epidemic of obesity, the rising tide of fat that will swamp us all. We may have put a man on the moon, but we can’t get off the sofa to change the television channel.

(We then get a bridge – stark statistics such as 30,000 deaths and £500,000 cost to the NHS annually; and the text paragraph, which lists the several bogeymen to blame, including fast foods, diets, television and amoral advertising.)

A quote can add support to the right to shock:

There were four ways in which airmen used to come into Ward 3 of the Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead during the war: boiled, mashed, fried and roast. ‘Just like potatoes, really,’ said one of them. (A Mail on Sunday feature on plastic surgery)

Anecdote

It was 5 a.m. when the fuse-box in the cupboard under the stairs in the Doherty family’s house in Ilford, Essex, developed a fault. As it grew molten red, it set fire to plastic rubbish bags near by: acrid, poisonous fumes started to pour out towards the sleeping family.

Then suddenly a small, saucer-shaped object fixed to the ceiling of the landing above the cupboard emitted a piercing, 85-decibel shriek. It woke Olive Doherty, who shook her husband Jimmy. Together they grabbed their three daughters from their bedrooms and rushed down the stairs before the smoke and fumes, already spreading through the house, could engulf them. (From an article on ‘Home Fire-Alarms’, Readers’ Digest)

Atmosphere/description

As the last rays of sunlight caress the evening sky, a fascinating metamorphosis takes place all over Malaysia. Shops close up for the day and traffic on the usually congested streets begins to thin. But as one cycle ends, another unfolds over a few crowded and brightly lit streets bearing such exotic names as Tuanku Abdul Rahman, Chow Kit and Petaling. Here, the night hawkers prepare themselves for another busy night, hanging lights, heating woks, fastidiously arranging their wares and airing the latest Malay hits on their sound systems. It’s pasar malam time. (From an article titled ‘Late-night shopping’ by Michael Defreitas in Geographical magazine of March 2003. © Geographical, the magazine of the Royal Geographical Society)

Not so much trying to grab you, this intro, as trying to cast a spell over you with a sort of incantatory rhythm. The mood was set by the standfirst: ‘With its history of trading, colonization and immigration, modern-day Malaysia has an extraordinarily multicultural society. Nowhere is this more apparent than in its night markets, where exotic flavours of the past and present create an intoxicating, unmissable experience.’ And of course, if you’re new to Malaysia, you guessed that pasar malam means night markets, which makes you feel pleased with yourself, even if you’re not told so until the third paragraph.

Exposition/argument by analogy

Ironically, the animal whose name is a synonym for everything contemptible in the human vocabulary is in many essential respects the most similar of all animals to man. The basis of this similarity is the fact that men and rats are the only omnivorous animals.

In this example the analogy quickly builds a bridge from the familiar fact to the unfamiliar facts that will be the basis for the article.

We’re all in this together

There’s an unwritten law among friends – most of whom have small children – that we will never criticize each other’s offspring. Nor, for that matter, will we ever raise our voices – or worse still, our hands – to any child that has sprung from the loins of one of our mates. This rule is so vital, it may as well be emblazoned on our foreheads in fluorescent pen.

The Woman feature titled ‘Don’t you criticize my child’ can confidently assume that its readers and their friends will have small children and that analysing the contrast in their attitudes to their own and others’ small children will be of immediate interest. Including them all in ‘we’ in the intro emphasizes this bond. From the second paragraph on it’s ‘my’ and ‘your’ children.

Don’t, however, assume your readers are ‘we’ too readily; you risk being an unwelcome guest.

Significant scene

A hackle-raising howl filled the moonlit valley and died away. The slight young woman with a knapsack stood quietly and listened. Nothing. Then, cupping both hands round her mouth, she howled once more. This time she heard an answering howl, with the playful yapping of pups, coming closer.

Ghostly as puffs of smoke, three young wolves sprang into the clearing. They shot curious glances at the intruder, then darted back into the moon-shadows. (From a Reader’s Digest article about wolves reappearing throughout Europe)

Significant quote/quotation

‘There you are,’ said my first-born accusingly. ‘ The Spectator is just saying what I’ve been thinking for some time now. This generation of grannies is a disgrace.’

‘They’ve lost the plot … still careering on and ne glecting their duties as parents. I mean, when am I going to get the chance to do half the things my mother does?’

Margo MacDonald in the Edinburgh Evening News points out that the social structure today doesn’t embrace many extended families living in the same area, and the ‘glamorous grannies’ with a new lease of life are either finding new careers or careering off to the sun and to the golf course.

You can quote from a person in your story and from a magazine article, as the author does, or from a book or a report or a TV programme or from a book of quotations. But make sure it’s relevant.

Literary allusion

April may be the cruellest month in the natural world, but in the world of humanity January is when the fists start to fly …

So begins a feature in The Independent Magazine about violence in Britain and an organization that tries to help those addicted to it, reflecting the start of T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land. Readers of that organ are expected to catch the allusion. To have expectations of this kind further downmarket can be intellectual snob territory; to explain, however, that Hamlet was one of Shakespeare’s plays can be very patronizing. Of course, if you integrate an allusion as skilfully as Will Self does here, it doesn’t matter whether readers catch the allusion or not.

In the same publication is a piece describing a restaurant called Allium, which is the garlic genus, beginning:

In The Arabian Nights, a young man came to his bride smelling of garlic. Because he had presumed to appear thusly, she cut off his thumbs and his big toes. And never again did the young man forget to freshen up after a ragout …

Celebrity peg

That great British institution, immortalized by Ronnie Barker in the classic sitcom Open All Hours, is pulling down its shutters for the final time.

The modern-day Granvilles and Arkwrights – who have managed to survive against the odds by providing basic home essentials – are having to seek alternative employment as customers turn increasingly to supermarkets.

Every week, 11 independent convenience outlets close as owners find themselves priced out of business.

And these traditional shopkeepers say they are victims of chain stores such as Tesco and Sainsbury’s which are opening smaller, ‘local’ versions on their doorstep. (The Mirror)

Cryptic/intriguing/dramatic

There is an unreported war in progress in Ireland. The island is in danger of being covered to a depth of ten feet by a vicious Turkish importation which eats everything in its path, swallows up whole oak trees, houses and entire colonies of the native inhabitants, and is insidiously and maliciously spread by Japanese immigrants. A vigorous counterattack has been mounted and armies of sturdy Irishmen and their valiant women are to be seen by the alert, North and South, conducting their lonely and arduous campaign as intrepidly they creep through the undergrowth in valley and hillside, up mountains and across the treacherous surface of boglands, their weapons ever at the ready, eyes peeled for the enemy. (From a gardening piece, ‘Day of the Rhododendrons’, by Stan Gebler Davies in You, Mail on Sunday magazine; the title echoes that of the science fiction novel Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham)

A good beginning can be elusive. It may be found hiding somewhere in your feature. Try removing the first paragraph or two of your first draft and you may find it there. Or have you got a feeble beginning but a strong ending? Can you turn the ending into the beginning and rewrite the ending?

THE ENDING

Here are a few types of endings:

The most important point to remember

The ending of ‘Late-night shopping’ (see the intro above) is concerned to give you the best practical advice you will need if you are to get off your armchair. It comes on top of a detailed survey of the markets, greatly varied because of the country’s multiracial composition: the influences range from traditional Malay through Thai and Chinese and there are Indian and Moslem flavours. The pasar malam is ‘the social and cultural heart of Malay life’ and that, it’s also implied, is knowing how to shop in the markets:

Haggling is an important activity in the night markets, particularly for dry goods (food is very expensive and prices are generally not negotiable). In fact, if you accept the first price offered you will be labelled a lembik (for weak or weakling). But there are a number of rules to remember before you enter into any negotiations: never insult a vendor by offering a ridiculously low price; for locally produced clothes, arts and crafts bear in mind how long the goods would have taken to make; start your haggling at around 60 per cent of the asking price and you should end up at about 75 per cent.

No trip to Malaysia is complete without at least one visit to a night market. So don’t spend all your cash during the day, because when the sun goes down it’s pasar malam time.

Summing up

That often comes with a simple restatement of the thesis. An article in Choice, about The Queen’s Messengers, who are all over 50, and who deliver state papers to diplomats abroad has:

Such demanding work and hours … engenders considerable loyalty and comradeship. No wonder the Colonel can point out with pride that the Corps has never had a traitor in its ranks in over 300 years and never knowingly failed in its duty.

‘A Job for Nanny’ (see page 184) had to weave among all those who dole out blame widely for fatness and show how fat people can be encouraged rather than victimized. Kindersley’s conclusion, in two paragraphs, is that ‘we need something imaginative and left-field’. The first paragraph recommends ‘jumping-for-joy meetings’ instead of weigh-ins. The final paragraph is a clincher:

Too simple, perhaps, but the point holds: we need to take a fearless approach; to call a spade a spade. The obese should not be abandoned to an imperfect world and crappy food. We must face fat, without flinching, because we need hope; and the blame-culture and political correctness offer only hopelessness.

Final quote

An article on the looting of ancient sites, using metal detectors, quoting an archaeologist:

‘Our main hope,’ says Gregory, ‘is for landowners and police to take a greater interest in what goes on at local sites. It is vital if we are to prevent the small minority who detect illegally from inflicting damage out of all proportion to their number.’ (Reader’s Digest)

Provocation to action

Or at least to think again. An article advising parents how to deal with children’s nightmares and night terrors:

If your child suffers three or more night terrors a week over a period of months, you should ask your doctor for advice. (Living)

Your provocation to action may benefit from experts’ quotes and if you’re spreading the problem wide you may need to suggest a solution. ‘Down in the Dumps’ (has a standfirst) that gives the problem – see page 184. Its conclusion runs for three paragraphs:

As Rethink Rubbish, the waste awareness campaign says, ‘recycling has to be made easier for people to understand and do’. It cites disinterest as a problem area: ‘Currently, people are neither incentivized to act nor penalized for inaction.’ The ‘Waste Not Want Not’ strategy includes recommendations ‘for a third of collection authorities to have tried incentive-based schemes’ by 2005/6.

The Dutch already enforce strict penalties. ‘In Holland, you only put out rubbish on rubbish day, not the day before or the day after,’ says Hettinga Hester Hettinga, a Dutch marketing consultant who lives in London on and off and is amazed at the litter one sees everywhere in this country]. ‘Once I got the day wrong and put my garbage out too early; the environment police contacted me. Because they found I was freelance I got the business fine, not the residential fine – about 400 Euros.’

The truth in this country is revealed in The Tomorrow People, where trend forecaster Martin Raymond found that even those who claim to be keen recyclers are in fact only marginally better than the average household. ‘Keen recyclers might bank bottles and paper but still discard large quantities of recyclable materials and foods. Radical action is needed before it’s too late. I’d vote for the designer Michael Marriot’s bolder tactic: If we have a Swede running our football why shouldn’t we have a Dutch government running our recycling”. Now that might actually get us out of the waste crisis.’

Note the way that the quotes (indirect and direct) are incorporated seamlessly into the ending.

Future prospects or possibilities

One of Yemen’s latest projects, now almost complete, is the building of a new dam here at Ma’rib, to restore the region’s former glory. (a travel article about Yemen in Country Life)

If your first draft is done and you’re not pleased with the ending, try removing the last two paragraphs. Is it there? If not, look elsewhere in the draft. It is usually easy to pull out with a little changing of links.

The ending should make you feel that the writer has achieved their purpose, whatever that was. It should be fulfilling, satisfying in some way, though some daily newspaper features might tend to raise questions and worries that stem from the raw edges of news, while magazine features within their slower process are more likely to answer questions and suggest solutions.

Whatever the purpose of the feature is – to persuade or provoke to action, to create a climate of debate, paint a portrait, move emotionally, argue a case, leave the reader something to think about – some kind of evidence that the purpose has been followed through if not fulfilled should be present in the ending. Make sure your ending grows out of the context of the article, and does not appear to be stitched on as an afterthought.

Make sure you have arrived at as clear a view of things as you can get on the basis of your material. You may have too many points/aspects circling round each other that need to be pulled together in the ending.

Avoid preaching or begging the question. Make sure you have given the evidence throughout the article by which readers can come to their own conclusions as well as follow yours. A proposition can fail if you are seen to have imposed rather than argued your case from evidence.

Both anecdotes and quotes are effective devices throughout a feature but must be used sparingly, with relevance and impact.

LINKS

They keep the theme constantly in mind, threaded throughout the article, but they must not draw attention to themselves. For a straightforward argument or exposition a sentence outline indicating links is effective. Here’s such an outline, each sentence indicating perhaps one par (some of the content is no doubt out of date):

Title: ‘Warning: Alcohol can seriously endanger your foetus’

•  There is much damage done to unborn children of women drinking in pregnancy.

•  This fact has been evidenced by convincing research.

•  Yet only extreme cases tend to attract health authorities.

•  This is because the damage is not very visible unless extreme.

•  Which is defined as ‘well below average size’ or ‘very noticeably backward’.

•  In fact, there is no ‘safe amount’ of alcohol for pregnant women.

•  In spite of this the warnings given to drinkers among pregnant women are much less urgent than those given to smokers.

•  When visible, the damage is called ‘foetal alcoholic syndrome’.

•  Some of the questions that arise are the following. Is the government’s slowness connected with the revenue from sales of alcoholic drink? How greatly is the government swayed by the brewing interests? By the fact that drinking is a ‘socially acceptable’ activity?

•  And so to the conclusions.

Figure 11.1
Connections that make for coherence: an extract from a backgrounder piece (John Major had resigned to bring about a leadership election) by Michael Harrington in The Sunday Telegraph of 2 July 1995. Two separate networks are shown: balloons of pronouns and miscellaneous connectives; and linked boxes of key terms (‘leader’ and ‘manager’ and synonyms). Note the parallelism device whereby statements about the two key terms are contrasted

APPENDAGES

Panels, graphics, sidebars, boxes and tables are added to a feature, generally in-house, to give facts that can be presented in a usefully memorable way or that are not easy to incorporate in the text because of their complexity.

Here are a few examples from the features we have come across in this chapter:

•  The feature on the corner shop has an illustrated panel contrasting prices of common foods at Tesco, Sainsbury’s and a mini-market.

•  ‘Down in the Dumps’ has a ‘round cheese’ graphic showing percentage segments of different kinds of household waste: paper/card 33.2%, compost 28.4%, glass 14.1%, and so on. Another shows waste management: landfill 77%, recycled/composted 12.4%, incineration 9%. A sidebar describes ‘Top 3 Landfill Pests’: disposable nappies, plastic bottles and packaging, and mobile phones, with some startling figures. Eighty per cent of plastic waste is sent to landfill sites and it takes 450 years for a plastic bottle to biodegrade, and hundreds of years for plastic bags. Another sidebar lists 10 countries which do far better at recycling with descriptions of their solutions. A third gives ‘The Top 10 Tips for Compost’. A ‘Further Information’ list at the bottom of the feature gives addresses of organizations involved in recycling.