Five Ws

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In journalism, the Five Ws (also known as the Five Ws (and one H) or simply the Six Ws) is a concept in news style, research, and in police investigations that most people consider to be fundamental. It is a formula for getting the "full" story on something. The maxim of the Five Ws (and one H) is that in order for a report to be considered complete it must answer a checklist of six questions, each of which comprises an interrogative word:

The principle underlying the maxim is that each question should elicit a factual answer — facts that it is necessary to include for a report to be considered complete. Importantly, none of these questions can be answered with a simple "yes" or "no".

In the context of the "news style" for newspaper reporting, the Five W's are types of facts that should be contained in the "lead" (sometimes spelled lede to avoid confusion with the typographical term "leading" or similarly spelled words), or first two or three paragraphs of the story, after which more expository writing is allowed.

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The "Five Ws" (and one H) were memorialized by Rudyard Kipling in his "Just So Stories" (1902), in which a poem accompanying the tale of "The Elephant's Child" opens with:

I keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.

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