When writing a News Report on the Literacy Test, you should follow these steps:
- Analyse the picture and Headline provided (if they are provided) to determine your article’s content.
- Jot down the 5WH (who, what, where, when, why, and how) of your article in the rough notes section provided on the test paper.
- Create an interesting Summary Lead that includes the 5WH of your article.
- Create expansion paragraphs (of 2-3 sentences in length) based on the 5WH mentioned in your Summary Lead, and organise these paragraphs from the most to the least important information.
- Insert quotations into your expansion paragraphs by people involved in or related to your article’s content. Use dialogue tags, like “said” or “says” to maintain objectivity (to ensure that you do not appear to be biased in your article).
- Provide a caption for any photograph included with the report.
- Read over your News Report during any time remaining, checking for spelling errors, punctuation errors, grammatical errors, structural errors, and any phrases or words that could be improved.
To prepare yourself for the News Report section of the literacy test, you can try the following preparation strategies:
- Read the newspaper often and “mark up” a few articles to familiarize yourself with an article’s structure.
- Examine the Headlines and the photographs in newspapers in an effort to find ideas for your news report.
- Practise writing news reports using the structural information provided for you by your teacher.
