The "One Thing" Week 12- "But news writing IS creative," said Young

This week, the "one thing" I learned was how to properly insert a quote into a news article. While I thought my article was sort of atrocious, you convinced me that it wasn't as bad as I thought, so that you. This is what I learned about using quotes in news articles: 

1. Before the quote, introduce who said it, then breifly summarize what the quote is going to say, without using any of the same words. 

2. The quote itself should be it's own graph (I did know this….just forgot to do it in my article) 

3. Even though you introduced the speaker before the quote, you still have to end with ,"said Soandso

Knowing all of this, the second draft of my article will be editied accordingly.  

The "One Thing" Week 11- Interesting Interview

For homework this week, we had to write a news article, and in that news article, we were required to have at least two quotes from people who we interviewed for the article. While doing this, I learned how much I love interviewing. The article included news from the locations of Erie, Syracuse and Buffalo, luckily for me, I knew individuals from each of those places, and was able to get great feedback for my article. While doing this, I also realized how much a few interview quotes can spice up a news article. I think this was a great assignment.

The "One Thing" Week 10- Lexie No Like Lead Writing

Our homework assignment for this week (Assignment #8) was writing more summary leads. From the previous lead writing assignment we had, I learned an import lesson. This week, the "one thing" that I learned is this; when writing leads, you must use complete sentences. I don't know why I, and so many of us in the class, instinctively went to "cave man talk" when writing these leads, but now we know the correct way to do it!

The "One Thing" Week 9- He Had Many Moneys

Being an ex-writng major, I pride myself in my ability to (most of the time) correctly use adjective and adverbs. However, during most of my education process, although I learned the rules, I didn't know these rules were, it was usually "just because." I was one of those things where didn't really matter if you knew why you were right, as long as you were right. With that being said, I don't believe I was ever officially taught the basic rules for using adjective, I just trusted my sense of "does it sound right?" I know that the Purdue OWL website has always been available to me, so if I really wanted to, I could have learned the official rules on my own, but I never did. After reading "The Basic Rules: Adjectives" article, I learned the technical terms for many concepts that I already knew. For example, it seems pretty obvious, but I didn't know the terms  "countable nouns" and "uncountable nouns" was a technical term,  for me it was always just "singular" or "plural." In addition to this, I had never sat down and read the rules for the use of individual adjectives. Obviously I knew that a sentence like "he had many moneys" was not grammatical, but I never would have been able to tell you the reasoning behind that is that "money" is an uncountable noun and the adjective "many" can only be used with countable nouns.

The "One Thing" Week 8- Stay On The Ball

Although we just had a test in class this week, I still feel like I learned something worthy of a "One Thing" post. This is something that I was always aware of, but I feel is especially applicable to this class. This "one thing" is staying on the ball, with that I mean I've realized the importance of keeping up with readings, homework and really paying attention in class. To be honest, I did not spend that much time studying for this test, however, I felt prepared when I got the test, because of this "staying on the ball" concept. I usually try to stay on the ball, but fall short, and end up not studying very much for tests that I am nowhere near prepared for. This class reiterated the importance of keeping up with my work, and I'm happy to have re-realized that.

The "One Thing" Week 7- Lead The Way

I learned the importance of a lead in a Newspaper Practicum class that I took last year. I learned that a strong lead is important to grab the reader's attention, if they're not interested in what the lead is telling them, chances are slim to none that they will continue to read the article. Although I already learned how important a lead is, the article containing the six rules for writing news leads was a nice refresher, and made writing a lead almost as easy as following a check list.
Something new I learned was while reading "The Lexicon of Leads" article we were given. I never realized that leads could be categorized in this way, and that depending on the content of the story or article, the lead should be written differently. Before reading this article, the only kind of lead that I knew how to write was a summary lead, but now I feel more educated on how to make a lead more fitting to the story.

The "One Thing" Week 6- Rules And Regulations

After reading the Associated Press Style Essentials, I learned many rules that I was not familiar with before, most of them taught me that I had been incorrectly writing many things.

Here are some of the rules I found most important, that I didn't know before:
-DO NOT abbreviate Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Maine, Ohio, Utah and Texas.
-DO NOT capitalize a.m. p.m. Always use figures with them. Do not use spaces in the abbreviation.
-DO NOT capitalize academic degrees when spelled out, or names of college classes.
-DO use periods in lower case abbreviations.
-DO NOT use periods with upper-case abbreivations.
*Exceptions: Use periods in abbreviations of United Nations and names of countries and cities and         in special situations where an all-cap abbreviation replaces a common noun (as in D.A. for district attorney).

These rules not only are important to know for enhancing my overall writing skills, but I feel as if many of the rules in this packet will help me with things such as resumé writing and job applications.