Report on the Price Hike of Essential Commodities

Lead with what has risen and by roughly how much, then move to who is affected and how, what traders say the cause is, and what the authorities are doing. A price report needs concrete examples of goods and of households rather than economic argument, which belongs in an editorial and not in a news report.

The question: Write a report on the price hike of essential commodities.

The format

Lead with what rose, not with inflation

Name the goods and the movement in the first sentence. A report that opens on the cost of living in general has led with the background paragraph.

• Three or four everyday items, no more.
• Describe the movement in proportion rather than in taka.
• 🚨 Invented precise prices date instantly.

Report from a market

A price report needs a place and a day. Say which markets were visited and when, and what retailers there said about their own buying prices.

• Name two real markets.
• Attribute the cause to traders rather than asserting it.

Quote a shopper, then the regulator

One short quotation from someone buying, then what the consumer rights directorate says it is doing. That gives the report its human paragraph and its official one.

• Keep the quotation to two sentences.
• Give the speaker a job and a location.

Model answer

Model answer (about 200 words)

Essentials dearer as rice, oil prices climb again

Staff Correspondent

Dhaka, 5 September: The prices of rice, edible oil and eggs have risen sharply in the capital's kitchen markets over the past fortnight, putting further pressure on households already struggling with the cost of living.

A visit to Karwan Bazar and Mohammadpur Town Hall market on Thursday found coarse rice selling well above the level of a month ago, while bottled soybean oil and eggs had both risen again. Retailers said their own buying prices had gone up and that supplies from the mills had been irregular for about three weeks.

Consumers said the increases were becoming impossible to absorb. "I buy for a family of five on a fixed salary," said Abdul Malek, a government office assistant shopping at Town Hall. "Every month something has moved and nothing has come down."

Officials of the Directorate of National Consumer Rights Protection said monitoring teams had been active in several markets this week. Traders' representatives, however, said the problem lay further up the supply chain, at the mill and wholesale level, rather than with retailers.

What earns and loses marks

• Use a quotation from an ordinary shopper. One short quoted sentence lifts a price report above the many that consist entirely of generalisations.
• Put the numbers in the first sentence. A news report leads with how many, where and when; anything else in the opening line is an essay opening in disguise.
• 🚨 Keep yourself out of it. “We should all be careful on the roads” is a sentence from a composition and loses the register mark immediately.
• Attribute every claim you could not have witnessed. Unattributed figures are the clearest sign of an invented report.
• About 180 to 220 words in four short paragraphs is the right length; newspaper paragraphs are short by convention.

Mistakes to avoid

• ✗ The price of rice is now 80 taka per kg and oil is 200 taka per litre. ✓ Coarse rice was selling well above the level of a month ago, while bottled soybean oil had risen again. — invented precise prices date instantly and are easy to get wrong