It is difficult to give myself an accurate assessment of my writing abilities, because of the contradiction in the previous two assessments I received. The managing editor at The Sacramento Union, Ryan Rose, had nothing to say but positive things about my writing. If I were to accept his opinion, I struggled with article organization and flow at first, but since then I have solved those problems, and now suffer from a lack of experience more than anything else. It is worth noting that the Union is a small, weekly tabloid that is distributed for free. When the summer internships ended early last month, the paper lost around 2/3rds of its reporting staff, and its possible that the only reason Rose has so many complementary things to say about my writing was an attempt to keep me at the paper.
On the other hand, Kelly Hayden, my Journalism 201 instructor, said that my work lacked something. During our end of the year conference, Hayden said he thought I was capable of better work than he had seen from me, but that because the work I was doing for his class wasn’t going into print anywhere, I had not put my best foot forward. If Hayden was correct in his assessment, which I believe he was, I run the same risk this semester—not putting my fullest effort into the stories I write for this class, and not writing the best stories that I can.
Despite the assessments of Hayden and Rose, I feel that the place I am weakest as a journalist is in AP style. I find it difficult and time consuming to reference the guide while I write my stories, and often I do not have time to check problematic words or phrases in the Guide. While much of AP style is self explanatory, I still often forget the proper spelling for words such as “percent”, or the proper way to include numbers in a story, or other basic elements of AP style.
As far as the rest of the semester goes, I would like to perform well in the print portion of the class, and experiment in the areas of broadcast and advertising. I will try to approach them with an open mind, however, I am very fond of print writing, and feel that the rest of the class will be a boring struggle.
2 comments:
AP Style is a toughie, but the great part is that you always have a resource - the book - by your side. Just learn to love it and flip it open ANY time you question something in your writing.
As for your concern about your writing "lacking something," I really think we all go through that... and I honestly think the lack of pizzaz arises during school time (or at least that's my experience). We're forced to write things simply to satisfy an assignment, and that's a bummer sometimes! I try to combat that by encouraging you to write about things you are truly interested in... find something you're passionate about and it's all downhill from there.
In-class writing assignment points awarded.
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