AP Guide to News Writing

Read chapters 1 and 2, paying special attention to ways to reduce clutter, and to use specific details rather than make general statements.:

Smith pushes a black cat out of the way to sit in front of her 30-inch flatscreen TV, on which three other cats are perched.

"Where's the remote?" she says, and finds it under a snoring heap of white and gray fur at the other end of her 24-foot trailer.

She puts on a DVD, the 2001 comedy "Cats and Dogs."

"I don't so much care for the dogs," she says, "but the cats are fun to watch."

Nowhere does this passage say "the lady is obsessed with cats," because 1) that would be an opinion, and journalists are not supposed to put their own opinions into news stories; and 2) the details clearly SHOW that the woman is obsessed with cats. (If this were a TV report, the camera would just pan across a room full of cats, and the sound of mewing would be in the background of the whole report. In print, you have to put specific details into words, and organize them to create the effect you want to get across.)