Writing Features

https://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/specials/weblines/431.html



Feature writing is somewhat different. There is more room for creative expression in feature articles because they are more concerned with mood and feeling. They are written as much to entertain as to inform. Still, newspaper readers are still in a hurry, still have a thousand things competing for their attention and are still interested in getting information quickly and easily. That means that certain conventions have grown up around feature articles.
Feature articles usually begin with a delayed lead - an anecdotal or descriptive lead. Instead of the who-did-what-and-when of hard news, a feature often begins with one or two or three short paragraphs to set the scene. Then comes the real lead of the article. In a feature article, the part that does the job of the lead is usually called the nut graf ("graf" is newspaper slang for paragraph.) This nut graf must explain the opening anecdote and put it in a broader context. It tells the reader what the feature article is about.
Here is a New York Times feature article written by Rick Bragg about Vietnamese immigrants in New Orleans.

The Virgin Mary, cast in smooth, white concrete, stands watch in many of the small yards in New Orleans East, her arms spread wide, palms out, as if to signal that this is a good spot to stop, to stay. Two, sometimes three to a square block in the neighborhood, the statues are heavy, permanent, and the plain, tiny houses they guard are brick, built to last. The journey to get here was too hard to even think about moving again.
"We walked through the jungle all day, and spent the next 30 days on the ocean in a small boat," said Mary Nguyen, her mind slipping back almost a quarter-century, back to the waves off the coast of Vietnam. "We stayed in the boat in sunshine, rain, mist. We couldn't move. After a while, we were hungry.
"My 2-month-old boy had a fever, and I couldn't feed him because I couldn't produce milk for him. I didn't have food to eat myself. He died. I had to put the baby in the ocean. I couldn't leave him in the boat because he would smell. It was the worst day of my life.
"First, we went to Malaysia. Then, we flew to California. We spent the night there, and the next day we flew to New Orleans. My parents lived there. We haven't lived anywhere else since."
Vietnamese, many of whom survived journeys like Ms. Nguyen's, have been coming to New Orleans for 25 years, resettled here by the Roman Catholic Church after the fall of South Vietnam. More than 10,000 Vietnamese live in the New Orleans East community, a hot, damp and tangled, swampy landscape much like the one they fled -but, at the same time, as different as the dark side of the moon.
So even as they have assimilated here, they have also created a world that sounds and feels like home, from the sweet, dark coffee, swirling with condensed milk, to unofficial community banks that help start businesses, to the open-air market that rings with the Vietnamese language.
Old women in conical straw hats work fields of greens with hoes and picks, and old men patiently fish the bayou and canals. It is not home, exactly, but there are no killing fields, no state-run apparatus to control thoughts and politics.


Structurally, the article begins with a physical description, followed by a long quotation that tells a story. This is a little longer than most quotations this high in an article, but the quotation is so good, so full of important information, that the reader is carried along. At the end of the anecdote is the nut graf, the paragraph beginning "Vietnamese, many of whom. …" That is what the article is about. Note that the next two paragraphs support the nut graf and expand upon it. They can even be considered part of the nut "graf," which in a feature article can go on for awhile. The nut graf is not under the same length and style constraints as the news article lead.

Taking a journalism class makes me to become a habitual reader. I read a lot in my childhood, but then I started to relieve my stress through different channels of media, mostly cable TV shows. I learn a lot from class readings, and I seek for more. I found this website that clearly explains what feature article is. It gave me an inspiration. Fighting to my classmates who are writing feature article by the end of this month!