and
point out any misplaced emphasis.

6. Wage war on "was the unusual experience of" and "was the fate
of" in leads.

7. Try to avoid "broke out" in fire leads. Devote the space to more
interesting action.

8. Cut out all useless words in students' exercises; strive for
brevity. Go through a student's story and weigh the value of
each word, phrase, and sentence; cut out the useless ones or try
to express them more briefly. Do the same to actual newspaper
stories.

9. Weigh the value of every detail introduced into a lead and cut
out the unnecessary ones; relegate them to the rest of the
story.

10. Wage war on all meaningless generalities; demand exactness.

11. Refer the class to the Style Book in this volume and require
them to follow a uniform style. Point out the differences in
style of various papers.

12. See if the bodies of students' stories mean anything without
the presence of the leads. Require the body of the story to be
separate and complete in itself. This need not, of course, be
carried to the point of repeating addresses given in the lead.

13. Try writing a story by simply elaborating and explaining the
details mentioned in the lead of the story. Determine what facts
must be added.

14. See if any story can stand the loss of its last paragraph.
Determine how many paragraphs it can lose without sacrificing
its interest.

15. In writing the body of a fire story, list the facts that are to
be told, in their logical order; thus: origin, discovery,
spread, death of firemen, escapes, injuries, rescues, explosion,
extinguishing of fire. Number them in the order of their
importance. Try to build a story out of these by following the
logical order and at the same time crowding the most interesting
facts to the beginning.

16. Practice getting the facts of a story by means of interviews.
The instructor may have the students determine what persons they
wish to interview for the facts and the instructor may
impersonate these persons in turn. The class may then write the
story from the facts gained in this way without reference to the
interviews. This is for selecting and arranging facts in their
logical order.