Does your story have a professional 'look'?

Content aside, does your news copy have the look and feel of a top-tier news story?

Try keeping your paragraphs to one or two sentences...once in a while three.

But who am I to say how many sentences should be in a paragraph or how many words should be in a sentence? Don’t take my word for it. Let’s let editors of top news agencies offer their answers. They’ll tell us as we examine what they publish.

This post is on how to compare your stories to the pros in terms of appearance. Your stories should look like they belong in a top-selling newspaper.

For analysis, I pulled at random a story off the front page of three major market papers – Chicago Tribune, San Diego Union-Tribune, and The Washington Times.

I know I use the Times a lot. I recommend for beginners and those trying the exercises in this blog to frequently use The Washington Times and/or USA Today – both consistently use short, punchy sentences. Often, it can be harder to write short, meaningful sentences. It’s a good skill to know instead of relying solely on long or meandering sentences (see the September 8 posting on using fewer words).

I examined in each of the following three stories:

-words per story

-number of paragraphs per story

-mean average of words per paragraph

-shortest paragraph

-longest paragraph

-shortest sentence

-longest sentence

-frequency of number of sentences per paragraph

The first story I examined was this one from the San Diego Union Tribune: http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2011/nov/05/historic-ship-found-off-hawaii/

It has 840 words, 21 paragraphs (‘grafs’ from here on), which equals a mean average of about 41 words per graf.

Shortest graf: 9 words

Longest graf: 60 words

Shortest sentence: 6 words

Longest sentence: 39 words

Number of grafs with:

-one sentence: 5 (23%)

-two sentences: 12 (57%)

-three sentences: 2 (10%)

-four sentences: 2 (10%)

The second story I examined was this one from the Chicago Tribune: http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-1105-groupon-20111105,0,4021709.story

1029 words, 21 paragraphs = 49 words per graf.

Shortest graf: 16 words

Longest graf: 77 words

Shortest sentence: 6 words

Longest sentence: 44 words

Number of grafs with:

-one sentence: 5 (24%)

-two sentences: 11 (52%)

-three sentences: 4 (19%)

-four sentences: 1 (5%)

The third story I examined was this one from The Washington Times: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/nov/3/house-subpoenas-white-house-solyndra-documents/

831 words, 26 paragraphs = about 32 words per graf.

Shortest graf: 12 words

Longest graf: 53 words

Shortest sentence: 6 words

Longest sentence: 41 words

Number of grafs with one sentence: 17 (65%)

Number of grafs with two sentences: 9 (35%)

Sorry, I’m not great at layout and design; I know it would be helpful to see all three of these examples side by side. Here is a crude display of all three examples and their mean averages:

Total words per story: 840, 1029, 831 = mean average of 900

Number of grafs per story: 21, 21, 28 = 22.6

Story’s mean average of words per graf: 41, 49, 32 = 40.6

Number of words in shortest graf: 9, 16, 12 = 12.3

Number of words in longest graf: 60, 77, 53 = 66.3

Number of words in shortest sentence: 6, 6, 6 = 6

Number of words in longest sentence: 39, 44, 41 = 41.3

Percentage of grafs with:

  -One sentence: 23, 24, 65 = 37%

  -Two sentences: 57, 52, 35 = 48%

  -Three sentences: 10, 19, 0 = 10%

  -Four sentences: 10, 5, 0 = 5%

I know I don’t have enough examples to make this statistically significant, but by looking at numbers from each story example and then by combining all three, we at least have something to go by.

At this point, some of you may be shrugging your shoulders, while others might find that you’re surprised by some of the results. Perhaps you were previously writing paragraphs with four to six sentences (the above examples suggest that most of your grafs should be one or two sentences). Maybe you never had a sentence with fewer than 20 words. Or maybe your words-per-graf were way off from any of these examples.

You don’t have to write like the examples above. But if you feel your writing has plateaued, try examining structure in some of your own stories. If you find you’re way off from some of the examples here -- or examples found in media you’d like to emulate -- getting your writing closer to these boundaries may help.

And don’t just aim for the average within the boundaries. Bump up against the extremes now and then, as the above examples do. While you may choose to write some longer sentences and paragraphs, be sure to write some that are fewer than 10 or 6 words. Mix it up. (there’s a three-word sentence right there)

If you want to study the top five best-selling newspapers in the U.S., they are:

-The Wall Street Journal

-USA Today

-The New York Times

-Los Angeles Times

-San Jose Mercury News

Personal development guru Earl Nightingale said that all philosophers throughout history agreed upon only one thing: “We become what we think about.” Maybe studying top writers will make you a better writer yourself.

Try this exercise on your own with the kinds of stories you’d like to write – national, local, sports, features, lifestyle, or you may wish to study special interest magazines, such as fashion, travel or art.

Pull stories from online and paste into Notepad or Word Wrangler. Then cut and paste into a Word document for total word count. You can then highlight paragraphs and sentences and choose Word Count under the Tools menu. Remember to first remove the picture caption and advertising copy if it accidentally pastes into your document.