dead body of someone who has been a member of our family, without saying some words about them. If a newspaper, radio or television station wants to be part of a community, it must mark the deaths of notable figures in that community. It must deliver those funeral speeches, as obits. Writing an obituary An obituary is essentially a news story, and it must be planned as a news story. That means that the key points of the story must be identified and the intro must include the most newsworthy of the key points in the story. However, as we shall see, we are reporting two things: the news of a person's death and the story of their life. This means that we need an intro which identifies the person by the main key point of their life and tells the reader that they have died, followed by a paragraph which acts as an intro to the story of their life. Sometimes, for very important people, these two things are split into two separate stories. We look at all this in detail below. There are certain pieces of information which must be included in any obituary. They are: The person's name, or names if they had more than one. For example, when the American film star Marilyn Monroe died, her obituary had to include both her professional name, which everybody would know, and her real name, Norma Jean Baker. The person's age, if that is important in your society. This