History of the Inverted Pyramid Style

Video Transcript

"This is Peggy Charlton for Expert Village. Now the interesting thing about inverted pyramid is the reason is began. It was during the civil war when they had one of their only methods if their only, besides telegraph would be newspapers. So they would write up the battles and they would write them chronologically and guess what would happen? You wouldn't know who won the battle until the very end of the story and because they had only a certain amount of space for the story, a lot of times it would be cut off. That's how they do it in the newspapers. You would have to cut out sometimes for room for advertising or things like that. So there are many of a time that people would pick up a newspaper about a battle and they never knew who won it. That is why they started putting who won the battle in the very first of the news story in the lead. That way if anything was cut off down here, it wouldn't matter and that is why we write in the inverted pyramid style today. "