It's a standard formula for concocting a feature story: Start with an anecdote that illustrates the story's point, step back for a moment so readers can see the context into which the anecdote falls, carry on with the reporting, and perhaps pick up the anecdote at the end.
It's such a good formula that it has become a cliché, and poor writers who try to hang weak reporting on this scaffold usually find that the whole thing comes tumbling down.
But Alison Motluk, at the Canadian magazine and website The Walrus, shows us how it is supposed to be done, with a moving story on the scientific controversy over a controversial condition called PANDAS.
That stands for pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders associated with streptococcal infections, a weird complication of a strep infection. Motluk's description:
The hallmarks are rapid onset, and extreme emotional instability marked by screaming rages or uncontrollable sobs. “Some families have told us that their children seem possessed,” says Susan Swedo, an American physician who was part of the team that first described and named the condition. Children often exhibit classic signs of obsessive-compulsive disorder, such as repeatedly checking that they have locked a door. Or they display the tic-like symptoms of Tourette’s syndrome: blinking, shaking their heads, clearing their throats, grunting. In still other cases, they stop eating, because they find the texture of food repulsive or fear that it might be contaminated.
Motluk doesn't tell us this until more than 700 words into the story, when she first tells us the name of the syndrome. Until then, she engages us with an extended anecdote about a five-year-old boy who suffered from the disorder. He woke up one morning "surly and withdrawn," Motluk writes, and when his mother asked him to tidy up his LEGOs, he "screamed, head-butter her, and dug his nails into her arms." The rage lasted for four hours, and it recurred over the next three days.
The story is heartbreaking. The boy had never shown such symptoms before. His mother was beginning to think that he faced a lifetime in mental institutions, because "he can't live like that in society."
As Motluk broadens the story to discuss the history of PANDAS and its discoverer, Susan Swedo, at the National Institute of Mental Health, she leads us into a whopping scientific controversy. Not everyone agrees that PANDAS is a real illness.
Motluk explores the issues and then takes us to a 2010 conference in which the National Institute of Mental Health convened a meeting of 41 experts to try to resolve the disagreements.
You'll have to read the story to find out what happened there, and what happens when Motluk returns to her anecdote at the end of the piece.
There are many other ways to write features stories, but this one shows us that the standard formula I described above can still work very well in the hands of a capable reporter and writer.
-Paul Raeburn
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