Writing with impact

Journalistic stories should not only be attractive, but also persuasive. This training is unique because you will learn to combine narrative techniques with rhetoric - the art of persuasion.

The facts do not speak for themselves. We live in a time when many readers, viewers and listeners have decided to ignore or fight the facts or simply dismiss them as unimportant. If we want to reach them, we will have to go out of our way to show that the facts we present are correct, have serious consequences and are shared by us with the best of intentions. Put differently (negatively): our stories must leave no sliver of light for doubt, escapism or suspicion.

Telling ‘a good story’ is also still important. The impact of stories that ‘move’ readers, viewers or listeners is indisputable. The challenge for modern journalists is therefore to get the most out of both the narrative and rhetorical toolbox.

In this course, you will learn to apply the following in your stories:

• various rhetorical techniques
• chronological and a spatial structure
• major and minor tension arcs
• dramatic scenes
• telling examples and details
• narrative elements such as ticking clock, foreshadowing, cliffhanger, protagonist, antagonist, dialogue and animation
• a gripping beginning and a thunderous ending
• powerful nutshell paragraphs

Quality control

If the need arises, this training can be supplemented with ‘quality control’. You then learn to use a checklist to check a story sentence by sentence, or image by image, for ambiguities and inaccuracies. For this, we fall back on Nils Hanson's renowned line-by-line editing method.