Customer Reviews

Writing Feature Articles, Third Edition (Focal Press Journalism S.)

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This is the best book I have found for practical guidance on developing feature articles and marketing them to a wide variety of publications; the author presents information in a way that is easy to follow and a pleasure to read. Excellent resource!

Some 160 pages into Hennessy's mag op, I am seized ever-more violently by the urge to lob it into a nearby wall.

Despite the supposed revision in 2006 the book is now heavily dated. The brief, rather patronising consideration he gives to the internet (uppercased as 'The Internet') says it all: fusty, outmoded, potentially still hankering after moveable-type. As you'd imagine, his patter about 'meta-search engines' and 'internet directories' is useless.

Where it hasn't dated, Hennessy retains a rare gift for stating the terminally obvious. The whole book seems to be a litany of the sort of axioms that one only need be a sentient human being - not a seasoned feature writer - to grasp (like 'ask creative questions'; 'be precise when pitching by telephone'). It's all then hacked together in Hennessy's inimitably humourless, dry-as-dust style. He uses irritatingly folksy made-up case studies which are again mainly facets of common-sense, to the extent that the overall feel is one of heavy padding: paragraphs could be condensed into lines, chapters into pages. Fatally, he has tried to be 'thorough', perhaps more pointedly, 'methodical' in surveying the subject, but that approach has merely translated into being boring and long-winded.

Every sentence is a tedious battle to the end.