The Art and Craft of Feature Writing: Based on The Wall Street Journal Guide

I cannot recommend this book enough. As a new journalist for print newspapers for local news, and someone without formal journalism training, I am constantly looking for books to show me the proper way to convey stories my community needs to hear.I read this book cover to cover, highlighted relevant sections, took notes, and boy did it show! I would suggest to take notes as well, and definitely take notice. Your readers will.Lastly, I should note that because of the drastic improvement in the style of my feature piece writing, within just a short few months I won my very first journalism award on minority reporting. Worth the price and then some!

Decent. Some of it was dificult for my class to follow but overall it served the purpose.

High quality "how to" on reporting and feature writing. An excellent gift for the budding (or struggling) journalist. Somewhat less useful for non-journalists seeking to blog or to write op-ed pieces.

This book is an illuminating look at what is required for successful and engaging feature writing. The examples throughout the book are some of the best newswriting I have ever read. The author does a great job of laying out methods and pointing out things the novice may not think of and the expert may have forgotten.The strong point of this book is definitely the examples and the included narratives that explain why these stories were successful.

The reviewer from Laguna Niguel who says this book is boring apparently has been reading too many textbooks and therefore is only used to reading textbooks. Yes, the examples in this book are out of date, but so what? The full-text examples are still excellent articles after 15 years or so; great writing is always great writing even after it goes from being current events to being history. In 1984, I saw the transcript of Blundell's lectures on feature writing that became the basis for this book, and I still use this book in teaching my feature writing course and my magazine writing course, because nothing else comes close. Among many other accomplishments, this book gives students a SYSTEM for coming up with original story ideas and original story angles that most of them couldn't come up with on their own--in direct contrast to other books that use poetry or other gimmicks to try to make students "feel creative" and then be creative. Rather than being read once or not at all and/or being used only for reference, this is a book that should be read over and over again.

It took me a long time to write this review, because I honestly struggle putting into words how much this book fundamentally changed the way I go about writing not just features, but any piece of news. I'm still a relatively green reporter, having been in the business for just under two years, and I picked up this book hoping to find some techniques to improve my (admittedly lacking) feature-writing skills. The writing advice offered by Blundell is good and practical, but where this book really shines is in describing how a feature should be structured and the mix of elements it should contain. I now keep a printout of Blundell's six elements - history, scope, reasons, impact, countermoves, and futures - in a file in my desk, and often consult it when I'm starting work on a new story. I've yet to read a better instructional book on news writing.

I haven't wanted to put it down, wish I had time to read in one or two sittings. The book has given me a lot of useful ideas that, if I use even some of the tips, will result in improvements to my writing. It was recommended to me by the editor of the paper I freelance for. He used it several years ago as a textbook in a college journalism class he taught.

Lots of sage advice

Classic book on feature writing.

The old-school is indeed the best school

Un libro bellissimo che annovero sicuramente tra i miei preferiti. Chiara e diretta l esposizione, assolutamente asciutta e pratica la sostanza. Il libro senza alcun dubbio insegna ciò che promette, mi sento davvero di consigliarlo.

Very fast delivery. The book is exactly as expected!! A really useful piece on how to choose a topic and how to write a feature article!

De très bons exemples.