What will I learn? Alternative story forms, ASF's, ALT's, storytelling devices — they go by different names and include everything but stories written in the traditional inverted pyramid style. This course will introduce you to the world of alternative story forms and show you how to add them to your writing, editing or designing repertoire. You'll learn how to select, write, edit and present a variety of alternative forms through various interactive games and activities.
"Beyond the Inverted Pyramid" will give you the tools you need to create effective alternative story forms. You’ll learn to break down information by theme and organize stories to make them snappy and more useful to time-crunched readers. With a focus on the importance of newsroom collaboration, this course showcases a range of supplemental and standalone forms, demonstrates what forms work best with what story ideas and provides techniques for editing alternative forms for factual errors and other problematic copy.
After practicing your newfound skills, you’ll have a chance to build your own standalone alternative story forms and browse through a gallery of exemplary work from newspapers around the country.
How long will it take? This course will take one or two hours to complete. You can access the course on your schedule, starting and stopping as needed. And you can return anytime once you’ve enrolled. You can use this course as a primer, refresher or continual reference.
About the instructor: Andy Bechtel is an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina's School of Journalism and Mass Communication. He blogs about editing and writing at editdesk.blogspot.com.
Cost: This course will be available free of charge to registered users of NewsU.
Note: This course will require Flash Player 8 or higher. (Get the latest version of Flash.) For Mac users, we recommend accessing this course with Firefox or Safari 2.x or higher.