Journalism: Thursday, Period 4, Class 11
"Last week we started doing investigative reports. By now you should have a subject, some research, and an idea of what you're going to write about," Jonah said. And then the bell rang. "Now it's time to work with one of the journalist's biggest obstacles, the deadline."
"You only have until the end of the class period to get this article written up, so here's some advice: first, get to your point quickly. If you don't do a good job of getting your main point across with some of your best evidence to support it within the first paragraph or two, you'll probably lose the reader to a more interesting article, for one, and you might not get a chance to get everything you want to in before your deadline comes up and that means you've wasted your time researching, for two. That said, you should have collected enough information to fill the rest of the article with interesting bits. If you didn't, it'll be clear that you're just writing b.s. as filler. At least it'll be clear to your editor. Readers might be too distracted by something shiny to realize that you did a crap job. Anyway, if you have good research, keep checking to see how you can fit more information in before you run out of time. And be sure to save the last five to ten minutes to wrap it up and get your conclusion written. That's five to ten depending on your writing speed, how complex your conclusion is, how much you want to get in there, and whatever other things that might eat up a minute or two as you go along."
"Okay, forty seven minutes and fifteen seconds to get your investigative reports written and turned in to me! Anything that's handed in after the bell is an F! Get to work!"
"You only have until the end of the class period to get this article written up, so here's some advice: first, get to your point quickly. If you don't do a good job of getting your main point across with some of your best evidence to support it within the first paragraph or two, you'll probably lose the reader to a more interesting article, for one, and you might not get a chance to get everything you want to in before your deadline comes up and that means you've wasted your time researching, for two. That said, you should have collected enough information to fill the rest of the article with interesting bits. If you didn't, it'll be clear that you're just writing b.s. as filler. At least it'll be clear to your editor. Readers might be too distracted by something shiny to realize that you did a crap job. Anyway, if you have good research, keep checking to see how you can fit more information in before you run out of time. And be sure to save the last five to ten minutes to wrap it up and get your conclusion written. That's five to ten depending on your writing speed, how complex your conclusion is, how much you want to get in there, and whatever other things that might eat up a minute or two as you go along."
"Okay, forty seven minutes and fifteen seconds to get your investigative reports written and turned in to me! Anything that's handed in after the bell is an F! Get to work!"