I’m working on this week’s End of Sentence, my newsletter about nonfiction crime writing. At the moment, I’m writing with true crime writers and reporters who don’t handle crime stories often. This is what I have so far.
Journalism students are often taught to write headlines using the SVO framework, where the order of elements in the headline is subject, verb, and object. Someone did something to someone else or something.
In countries where an accused is presumed innocent until proven guilty in court, this framework often doesn’t work when we’re dealing with a crime, especially when nobody has been convicted in court. We can’t write a headline that says: “Man kills wife, evades police.” We don’t legally know that’s what happened.
BTW: I’m not a lawyer; this isn’t legal advice.
Having said that, a better alternative might be something like: “Woman murdered, husband sought on murder warrant.”
True crime writers should…
I need to take a break, my perpetual headache is rising and making concentration difficult.