Left-handed People are Weirdos and this is the Best Headline Ever

For this "blog," we were to complete the assignment on page 42 in Rich's book Writing and Reporting News.  The following article is based on information given to us and is in no way meant to represent any factual news story.  In the words of Norm McDonald on SNL - "And here's the fake news...":

Focus sentence: Right-handed people live longer than left-handed people.

Suggestion for visual: Bar graph with male left-handed people, female left-handed people, male right-handed people, and female right-handed on the horizontal axis.  Ages in ascending increments would run up the vertical axis from zero.  This is the easiest way to show the results of the study, minimizing variables and providing an easy-to-read chart.

The article:

Study Shows Right-handed People Live Longer

The hand you write with might determine how long you're going to live.  A study released in today's New England Journal of Medicine suggests that right-handed people might outlive their left-handed counterparts.  

Diane Halpern, psychology professor at California State University at San Bernadino, studied the death certificates and dominant hands of 987 in Southern California.  She and her colleagues determined that left-handed people were six-times more likely to die from accidents that right-handed people.  

"The results are striking in their magnitude," Halpern said.  She also learned that right-handed women outlive left-handed women by six years.  Right-handed males outlive left-handed males by 11 years.  Halpern adds that "There are many, many old left-handed people" and that her study "should not, of course, be used to predict the life span of any individual."

Halpern suggested that individual health and fitness also influence life-span.  She offers another practical reason for the frequency of accidents among left-handed people.  "Almost all engineering is geared to the right hand and right foot," Halpern said.  Halpern warns against trying to change the habits of left-handed children precisely as a result of the study.  She adds, "some of my best friends are left-handed."