How To Write A Feature Article

I've been a professional writer for about 25 years and I'm the author of these two books, 'Your Writing Coach' and 'Your Creative Writing Master Class' and today, I'm going to share some writing tips with you. How to write a feature article? The difference between a news article and a feature article is that a news article is about the facts and its supposed to be neutral in term, just to give you the information about whatever has happened. Whereas in feature article, the writer adds his or her own with own interpretation, try to make it more entertaining and may add other elements to be strictly relevant to the story that they find interesting.

So for example, here we have a feature story about Hangovers and the opening line in the article line of the hangovers will be statistical and very straight forward and here the opening is 'Sore heads are a dime a dozen during party seasons but what exactly causes a hangover?' So there's a factual element and that's to many feature stories but it's also an interpretation and this one I suspect because it's humour, which is also not uncommon to examine something. Some stories use exaggeration, some stories use irony and sometimes the graphics that go with the story have that element. For example here, this chap who's obviously has a hangover and even it you are to it, that can come in the text or in the way the story is illustrated.

A typically feature story will have more quotes and more human interest elements. So it's really not just about whatever happens but how it affects people. So the article here might even include some basic facts.

It could be the news story like how many days are lost, employment are lost when people have hangovers. But then it all has some case studies and funny things people say about hangovers and so on. So that's quite typical of feature stories, interpretation, entertainment are strong elements.

They tend to be longer than news stories and also sometimes, not always but usually somebody writing feature stories has more lead in terms of space. So just to summarize, when you write a feature article, you probably will have some kind of factual core but you will also have the right and the ability to interpret, to add humour, to add a lot more human interests in the form of quotes and case studies and have more fun with the story. When you've got those elements, you know how to write a feature article.