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.