First Ledes: Don't Forget Your Articles!

I don't mean stories. A mean a grammatical article, like a, an, the.

Like here: 5- and 3-year-old brother and sister die in house fire after playing with matches when smoke detector doesn’t function and babysitter fails to rescue them.


It should be, A 5- and 3-year-old brother and sister die in a house fire after playing with matches when a smoke detector doesn’t function and the babysitter fails to rescue them.

When it comes to writing for news, what messes us up regarding articles are newspaper headlines, which usually drop articles in favor of brevity. While that is true of headlines, that is not true of the actual stories under the headlines. Articles need articles.

If you're not sure if you have articles, read your story out loud and ask yourself if it sounds like you've formed complete sentences (e.g., do you sound like a robot talking -- must bowl now -- or a human being -- I must bowl now?). If not, it's usually because you're missing an article.