Features are different from news stories. News stories are factual, providing straight news reporting together with comment where appropriate. Features go one step further in that they will take a story and develop it, adding much more detail including interpretation, even speculation, but much more content. They are more informative and more entertaining, and their style is therefore different.   

Feature articles can be written from a personal viewpoint and can contain material written in the first person. While they should obviously focus on a subject of interest to ‘hook’ the reader, the content does not need to reflect recent events in the way that news stories do. 

There is a basic structure for most features:

• An introduction will outline the main content in an exciting way to encourage the reader to continue. It will give the reader expectations of what is to come.
• The main body of the article will contain the ‘meat’ of the story. It may follow a set path, progressing through stages, perhaps in a geographic or temporal manner if it is a travel piece, or it may have a more creative structure which gives the author more freedom to tell the story.
• The conclusion will contain any final thoughts or recommendations, and might also sum up the main premise of the story.

From the start you must be clear what the intent of the article is. You could be writing it to inform, to entertain, to evaluate or maybe to provoke support. 

• Try to write in an active manner, using the passive tense as little as possible.
• Make sure that you are writing in an appropriate manner for the audience.
• Avoid using jargon, and spell out any acronyms when they are first used.
• Use comment from others if it is appropriate and entertaining.
• When quoting from other written material, always give credit, as a reference if necessary.
• Take care with the tense of a story; is it in the present or the past?
• Keep sentences fairly short. If you have a long, complicated idea to put across, break it up into chunks. Paragraphs should also not be too long, especially when writing for the web.
• Don’t mix singular and plural.
• Be accurate: if something is a supposition or guess, then state so clearly.