User:Gryllida/Quiz/StyleGuide

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This quiz includes questions about the style guide. Please read everything in the style guide carefully, and test yourself today!

  • Copyedit other submissions in the Newsroom and improve their chances of publication.
  • Write your articles better with the aim of getting them published easier and earlier.

1 What is the style guide about?

The ways Wikinews content should be presented to readers.
Wiki editing syntax.
Information on the reporting process.
A comprehensive guide to English spelling, grammar, and punctuation.

2 What is the purpose of the style guide?

To make writing more difficult and to create excuses for not publishing an article.
Style guides help ensure consistency in such things as headlines, abbreviations, numbers, punctuation and courtesy titles.
The Wikinews style guide is aimed at producing understandable and informative articles readily understood by the majority of readers.
A style guide helps writers and editors by providing a standardised way of writing.

3 What is the status of the style guide?

It is a policy, which allows no exceptions.
Changes may be proposed at the talk page, however, they are not applied retroactively.
It is a guideline.

4 In his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language, author George Orwell devised six easy tips to make anyone a better writer. What are these tips?

Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything barbarous.
Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
Never use a long word where a short one will do.
Use Simple English only.
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
Use a couple foreign quotes in each story. They provide an international view on the topic and make the article more neutral.

5 What are some more of the technical, easily fixable, guidelines about headlines?

Use present tense.
Use upstyle capitalisation.
Use downstyle capitalisation.
Use past tense.

6 What are the guidelines about headlines?

Use verbs.
Make them short.
Use active voice.
Avoid jargon and meaningless acronyms.
Write in a neutral point of view.
Tell the most important and unique thing.
Try to attribute any action to someone.
Make them unique and specific.

7 How do we specify date of the article?

As the first line of the article, using the date template.
It is not needed, because we have the sources and the story says anyway.

8 What needs to be included in the first paragraph?

Five Ws and an H: who, what, where, when, why, how.
The most impressive part of the story. What makes it relevant.
Five Ws: who, what, where, when, why. The 'how' is not important, leave it to the end.

9 Approximately how long is the first paragraph?

Around 50-80 words, using one to three sentences.
One sentence.
There is no length limit.

10 Approximately how long is the article?

At least three paragraphs, and single-line paragraphs do not count for this purpose.
Any length, at least one paragraph.
At least five paragraphs.

11 What are the expectations in regards to language in news reports at Wikinews?

Each paragraph should ideally be only one or two sentences (three if you use very short sentences).
Use punchy, active language to intone a sense of immediacy.
Each paragraph needs to be at least five sentences long.
Use spoken English constructs to make the text more energetic and impressive.
Each paragraph covers a single topic only.
Write about two-three related topics in one paragraph.
Write one-sentence paragraphs with quotes, and group them by topic using headings.

12 What is the article structure?

Concentrate on the new facts and their known or potential consequence — background information is of lesser importance.
Put the most important and newsworthy facts first, with least important and least immediate facts last — this is opposite to development order in typical narratives, and is termed inverted-pyramid style.
A key, and strict, policy is absolute neutrality.
Start with the background to contextualize the reader, then write about the new event at the end.

13 What is the article tone?

Ask questions which engage the reader into the activity of completing the description of the event.
Be clear, concise and unambiguous.
Be balanced.
Promote the human aspects of any story, using quotes etc — this makes the story interesting to a wider range of people.

14 What about fact checking and how they are presented?

Ascribe any speculation to a source — never introduce any of your own.
Speculate about the event. Write your opinion about what happened. It is interesting for the readers to read blogs and opinion columns.
Be clear, concise and unambiguous.
Argue your point in the article, to present it to the readers more clearly.

15 When is attribution needed?

Everywhere, it is like an inline citation and helps the reviewer with fact checking.
Opinions, unverified claims, speculation.

16 In what tense do articles need to be written?

Past tense or the present perfect.
Present tense.