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.

Assignment #5- Grammar Police

1. "Walk In's"- Corrected: Walk Ins

2. "Sunday's"- Corrected: Sundays 

3. When I first saw this poster, I thought the phrase "tender loving care" was incorrect and that it was an eggcorn for the phrase I normally heard, which was "tender love and care." However, I looked up the phrase online and was surprised to find that I was the one with the eggcorn and that it is actually correct. However, the lack of commas in this poster still make it very dramatically incorrect and unappealing. 

4. "Gallons of water is"-Corrected: Gallons of water are 

 

5."Thru"-Corrected: THROUGH 

6."Wedensday"-Corrected: Wednesday 

The "One Thing" Week 5- I FINALLY GET IT!!!!

After numerous years of being "taught" the difference between active and passive voice, I finally understand it. I can't believe I let myself lose points on almost every paper I've written over the past few years because of something so simple.

From the lesson this week, I learned that there is such a big difference between telling someone something and teaching someone something.

I have learned that active voice is: Subject, Verb, Object

For example- Andrew threw the ball (rather than passive voice, The ball was thrown by Andrew).

I think that when students assist in the teaching, rather just the teacher lecturing, it helps to make learning more effective. I know it helped me when in class, multiple students gave their explanation of active voice before we were actually given a definition and example from Kim Young.

This week was very helpful to me.

Assignment #4- Poster Problems

Semi-Colon? 

Oxford Comma

Oxford Comma

Thru? 

The "One Thing" Week 4- The Perfect Pronoun

In my writing, I tend to use pronouns very nonchalauntly and not put very much thought into them. After this week's lesson, I know I need to be more careful. If used correctly, pronouns can be great, but if not, your readers may not be able to make sense of what you're trying to say. For example, the sentence I just wrote would be much more confusing if I had used ambigous pronouns:

"If used correctly, they can be great, but if not, they may not be able to make sense of what your trying to say."
 
There is no way for readers to know what "they" is referring to, and this sentence essentially becomes useless. As a journalist, none of your sentences should ever be useless. An important tool I learned this week for checking your pronouns is this; look at your sentence backwards, identify the pronoun, if the noun directly before the pronoun is the noun to which the pronoun is referring to, your pronoun is being used correctly, if not, change it.  

The "One Thing" Week 3- Comma Coma

This week in class, a quote was said that I really enjoyed:

"Popping in a comma can be like slipping on the necklace that gives an outfit quiet elegance." 

 I felt instantly attracted to this quote because it combined two of my favorite thing: fashion and grammar. This quote made me look at commas in an entirely new way. Rather than thinking of the comma as a necessary part of a sentence, this quote makes it seem as if the comma is an accent piece, pulling it all together, which I suppose is what a comma does, I had just never thought of it that way before.

The "One Thing" Week 2- Get To The Point:

For the past three semesters, I had been studying as a Creative Writing major. Switching to Communication, I quickly learned that the writing style I had just recently become accustomed to, needed to change. Writing as a journalist, your mission is to get the point of your story across in the most quick and accurate manner. I learned this lesson while completing assignment #2, where we had to write one sentence that described the life of someone, based on the obituary that individual wrote about themselves. When completing this assignment, I used the word "loquacious" to describe my individual. When reading this out loud to the class, I realized that the majority of my classmates did not know the meaning of this word. This taught me an important lesson about journalism, you essentially have to write at a sixth grade level, one you can be sure that your entire audience will be able to understand, or else your meaning will get lost. Journalism is less about your language and more about your message, and while I am used to very vocabulary oriented style of writing, that kind of writing will no longer benefit me, and I am happy to have learned this lesson sooner, rather than later.

The "One Thing" Week 1- Literally Illiterate:

During the first week in class, I became more aware of a serious issue that I have, and as a journalist, it is a habit that needs to be broken. We went through a PowerPoint presentation in class which listed common errors that writers encounter, one of these errors was the improper and overuse of the word "literally," a literary crime which I am guilty of committing over and over again. Being a college student, when I'm not sitting in class, I'm engulfed in all kinds of social media, be it Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, I frequent them all. Because of this, I have become accustomed to phrases which include the excessive use and misuse of "literally." Just to name a few, "I'm literally dying," "I literally can't even" and "I'm literally obsessed." After discussing this with the class, I have realized that I'm never "literally" doing any of the things that I claim to be "literally" doing. Now that I have become more consciously aware of my issue, I will literally never make this mistake again…