Updated by Walsworth Yearbooks You’d be surprised how often it happens. You pick up a yearbook, see a cover design you really love, or flip through and eye a font you like, then flip to the back looking for the colophon to read the specs and… nothing. A number of yearbook staffs get overwhelmed with…
Social media holds enormous potential for yearbook staffs. It no longer needs to be relegated to the “Oh, yeah! I guess I could do that” category. With everyone spending more time online than ever before, social media is a channel for getting information in front of an audience. Whether you use it as a news…
So you’re ready to Level Up your writing. Congrats! The fact that you’re reading this blog already means you are taking steps in the “write” direction. In the yearbook world, we know that any story worth telling is worth telling well. Sure, a picture may be worth a thousand words, but a picture with words…
Are your readers actually reading your yearbook? In many cases, the answer is “no,” and with good reason.
Most yearbooks are not written to be read. Yearbook copy tends to be a collection of non-compelling facts put together too lazily and too hastily, without regard for the reader. While that is a harsh indictment, it is often true and it is nothing new.
Hey, you worked hard on the yearbook — wouldn’t it be nice if people read it? Instead of dull and lifeless facts, stories should be a collection of interesting people caught in defining moments — moments that reveal character and personality.
This holiday season, Walsworth has decided to celebrate by creating the 12 days of eBooks! We’re pretty proud of all the helpful eBooks we’ve created, and we want to make sure you’re aware of them too. That’s why over 12 days this month, we’ll be putting the spotlight on 12 of our specific eBooks. Each…
Good leads begin stories. Bad leads can finish them. If the first couple of sentences don’t make the reader feel helplessly curious and compelled to continue, your body copy won’t be read. Yearbook leads don’t sum up the entire article like newspaper leads. Instead, they give the reader a tempting taste of what lies ahead without necessarily addressing the main point of the story. They can tease, mislead, startle, amuse – anything that will invoke the reader’s curiosity. Study the following types of leads. Learn to write more creative and effective leads – leads that are real attention-getters.
Walsworth’s Jim Jordan and Susan Massy, yearbook adviser at Shawnee Mission Northwest High School in Shawnee, Kansas, held the second of two live National Yearbook Week webinars on Thursday. Their session, Feature It!, was focused on in-depth yearbook storytelling and feature writing. What is the best way to tell a yearbook story? The options for…
Everyone always wants to know what the current “trends” are for the upcoming yearbook year. What cool things are other schools doing that we should consider doing? Or even better, what did we do that has become a trend that everyone is going to be doing in 2019? At every workshop and every convention everyone…
There are lots of ways to be informative. Pie charts, bar graphs, quotes, polls, and lists are all ways to convey information. The key is to use them to impart information that is important to the students. A bar graph for a survey question on whether students were happy the football team won the homecoming game does not make for compelling reading.
Photos are the most-seen element of any yearbook, which makes the blocks of text that accompany them – the captions – essentially the most important text written in the book. Your yearbook staff needs to be giving captions the attention they deserve. Walsworth’s newest eBook will help. In Writing Yearbook Captions That Will Captivate, you…
