Report on a Road Accident

A road accident report opens with the essentials in one sentence — how many died or were injured, where, and when — then adds how it happened, who the victims were, what the police said, and the wider context of road safety. Facts before comment, and no speculation about blame.

The question: Write a report on a road accident for a daily newspaper.

The format

Put the casualties in the first sentence

An accident report leads with how many were killed or hurt, what collided, where and when. That is the information an editor keeps if there is room for one paragraph only.

• Deaths before injuries; both before the vehicles.
• Give a time as well as a date.
• 🚨 Describing the road before the casualties inverts the pyramid.

Reconstruct the sequence in paragraph two

The second paragraph explains how it happened: direction of travel, what the vehicles were doing, what the impact did, how the injured were freed.

• Attribute the sequence to police.
• Name the highway and the nearest landmark.
• One sentence on the rescue.

Sources, then background

Paragraph three carries the hospital and the police — condition of the injured, cases filed, vehicles seized. Paragraph four gives the pattern: is this stretch known for collisions?

• A duty doctor for the injured; highway police for the case.
• ⚠️ Do not assign blame in your own voice.

Model answer

Model answer (about 200 words)

Three killed, eleven hurt in Savar bus crash

Staff Correspondent

Savar, 5 September: Three people were killed and at least eleven injured when a passenger bus collided head-on with a covered van on the Dhaka–Aricha highway at Hemayetpur early on Thursday.

Police said the accident occurred at about 6:30 am. The bus, travelling from Manikganj towards Dhaka, was overtaking a truck on a bend when it struck the van coming from the opposite direction. The front of the bus was crushed and both drivers died at the scene, along with a woman passenger. Fire service workers from Savar took nearly an hour to cut the injured free.

The injured were taken to Enam Medical College Hospital, where a duty doctor said two remained in a critical condition. Savar Highway Police said the bus had been seized and that a case had been filed against the driver's assistant, who fled after the collision.

This stretch of the Dhaka–Aricha highway has seen a number of similar collisions in recent years, most of them attributed to overtaking on bends. Local residents have repeatedly asked for speed-control measures near Hemayetpur.

What earns and loses marks

• Give the time as well as the date. “At about 6:30 am” is the kind of precision a real report carries and an invented one usually forgets.
• 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

• ✗ Yesterday a very terrible accident took place which made everyone sad. ✓ Three people were killed and at least eleven injured when a passenger bus collided with a covered van.