"Without make-up, her hair pulled up in a bun and wearing worn sweatpants, she sits in front of her laptop and taps away at the keys while her younger daughter holds a craft under her nose, her older daughter rummages through her business documents in search of her homework and the cat on her lap extends its claws: Mathilde Mustermann has been working in her home office since the outbreak of the pandemic, taking care of the household and daughters and pets on the side. Like Mathilde, countless Swiss are currently foregoing childcare by parents or parents-in-law due to the risk of infection and are doing their work at home instead of in the office..."

Pictorial and exemplary

The aim of a feature is to illustrate a general fact with an individual case. The text type works like a news report on television: Symbolic pictures are shown as an introduction to the topic so that the viewers know what it is about and, at best, can identify with the people who appear in the scene. So in a report about parents in the home office, you can show - representative of all people in the same situation - a parent working next to noisy children at the dining table before the actual facts follow, such as the result of a study that looks at the effects of home office on the efficiency of workers. That is why a feature is also called a "scenic introduction".

From scenic entry to hard facts

The feature is an elegant way to convey fundamentally dry facts to the readership in an entertaining way. The scenic introduction may therefore be written in a stimulating and sensual way - i.e., "appealing to different senses". If the feature is about health hazards for road workers, the construction site in the introduction may be noisy and the tar sticky and smelly. Similarly, in an article about the high stress levels of nursery workers, the children's screams may be loud, their hands sticky and their nappies smelly. Once the readers' attention is caught, they are receptive to the hard facts and finish reading the article.