It's so simple and effective: if you make sure you have answered these six bigguns, then chances are you'll have answered all the important questions:

• Who: Clearly identify who is most deeply involved or impacted by the circumstances you write about; be observant about your subjects and their motivations. Were there witnesses, unidentified victims? If you ask yourself, “Is there anybody I am forgetting about?” you'll come up with interesting possibilities.

• What: Describe as fully as possible the circumstances and what is at issue. This may be more than asking, “What happened?” It may require coming up with a “back story” for your story, the history, facts, philosophies, etc. behind the incident.

• Where: The locations involved (there may be many). Be observant about the places in your story. Think of this part as the way a cop would write up a crime scene. Details can be amazingly important. As it is in real estate: location, location, location.

• When: People always want to know when. Night? Day? Before lunch? Also, no good What can be accomplished without a competent When.

• Why: Did you ever enter a science fair? You had to write up your theory of why eggs go stinky if you leave them in the sun for too long. You had to ‘splain. And there's a lot of ‘splaining to do in journalism, so get used to it.

• How: Some commentators have added a sixth W, “How” (for sticklers to detail, it has a “w” on the end). There is an important distinction between Why and How. One way of thinking of it is to answer “How did we get to this point?” It’s partly related to your back story and the What—essentially, it’s taking your truth shovel and digging into the What.

If you have problems remembering these six, you might want to memorize a mnemonic Rudyard Kipling wrote a hundred years ago: