Creative Editing
Chapter 4
Exercise 5
5. In hard-news stories, reporters try to make their leads as simple and as short as possible. Some of the following leads contain unnecessary attribution, redundancies, opinions of the reporter, excess wordage, unimportant quotations, too many statistics or imprecise information. Tighten the following leads:
a. Blue-collar rocker Bruce Springsteen won three American Music Awards Monday for his 18-month-old Born in the USA album, and nine other artists or groups won two awards each at ceremonies that ended with a stirring anniversary salute to "We Are the World."
b. The space shuttle Challenger's solid-fuel rockets were not equipped with sensors that could have warned of trouble because designers thought the boosters were "not susceptible to failure," William Graham, acting administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, said Tuesday.
c. A 14-year-old boy fired three shots into a third-floor apartment at 91 Monmouth St. Wednesday to climax an argument with a 39-year-old mother who had defended her 9-year-old daughter against an attack by the boy.
d. Four French and two Canadian women have started a ski trek from Norway's Spitsbergen Island about 690 miles across the Arctic, aiming to reach the North Pole by Jan. 1, the Norwegian NRK television reported Thursday.
e. A federal grand jury indicted former Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos and his wife, Imelda, Friday in a racketeering case that includes charges they embezzled more than $100 million from the Philippine government and used the money to buy millions of dollars' worth of New York real estate.
| BACK TO PREVIOUS EXERCISE |