Story Annotations

For "In the Ashes of Ghost Ship," Elizabeth Weil saw beyond existing news coverage to explore a story no one else had told

The New Yorker story "A Raised Hand," by Rachel Louise Snyder, is the foundation of a new book on the scourge of domestic violence

Storytellers in any medium can learn from those in others. Writers must know how to paint mental images through the hieroglyphics of text, apply (and break) rules of grammar to…

Rejections aren't personal: “70 percent of why pitches don't work has nothing to do with the writer”

Rachel Aviv of The New Yorker uses the narrative of one child in one school to reveal the widespread costs of "separate and unequal"

EDITOR’S NOTE: While we did not annotate this project by ProPublica Illinois, we are including it in “Annotation Tuesday” because the story itself, as published, was an innovative example of…

"Ephemeral" true stories that inform, surprise and delight

In a full-circle illustration of the way life sometimes imitates art, screenwriting led Sarah Berns to smokejumping. Then smokejumping led to a cinematic memoir, written with a director’s eye and…

From the archives: National Geographic writer Craig Welch turns silent subjects into the compelling voices of climate change

A story that garners wide acclaim, gets multiple plays across ESPN and draws tweets from Reese Witherspoon is not your everyday deadline fare. For most writers, it will never happen.…