Some of the takeaways from the reading that I've been thinking about are the importance of being concise and using the correct words to accurately tell your story.
Telling a story in a succinct but complete way is something that is vital to good reporting. The value of time is important. As the book mentions in chapter 12, this is especially true now with online reading. People digest information online in smaller, more scattered pieces, but still in a way that makes sense.
One of the points in chapter 10 that stuck with me was the importance of word choice and how every word has to be precise. This is something I still have to work on as I write. I've noticed in my own writing that I am much more likely to write in a conversational and feature-based way than in a news story structure, and with that comes a likelihood of misusing certain words or taking freedoms with words that could be interpreted in different ways depending on the audience.
And even as I say that, my last sentence broke the two points I'm talking about - it was neither concise and could probably be interpreted in different ways.
Going off of what you said about word choice one of the things that stuck with me from the reading was being careful about biased language. I probably don't think about that as much as I should. Especially with things like pronouns. Especially in cases when you have to decide should I use his/hers or theirs. Without the right words your story isn't going to be a quality piece and it could even offend people.
ReplyDeleteI totally agree with you, Daniel. Writing a concise and good news is such a difficult job for me. I have to decide which part is unnecessary in a news and i have to delete it. And sometimes a few words are much better than a long paragraph.
ReplyDeleteI have the same problem in my writing. Since I was an English major, we were encouraged to drag out our sentences and really drill our point into readers head by in-depth explanations. Writing journalism, however, seems to be the exact opposite of that, and we now have to focus more on finding the simplest and shortest way to get our point across. Now with the internet news forms, we have to be even simpler than journalists before us because we have an even shorter word count to write under.
ReplyDeleteI agree, Daniel. The importance of conciseness is something that has become abundantly clear to me now in the short time that we've been with Pat. At the primary school level——in my experience at least——teachers beat the arbitrary rules of the English language into our head. They taught us that super short sentences were fragments. They taught us the comma-comma-and. They taught us to never start sentences with "and" or "because." What they didn't teach us is that many of those rules would change and we have the ability to break those rules for more thrilling, sharper writing.
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