Wednesday, February 6, 2013

The Deadline Experience


As I strapped myself in, little did I know how smooth sailing it would be for me. Due to my love of writing, this assigment came second nature to me. I think the only bad side to it was how time consuming it was for me considering I have about 1,234,321 things on my plate. But worrying about this deadline actually helped me supress my worries for everything else. The people I intervied basically wrote my article for me. I managed to ask questions straight to the point and recieved all the right answers.. Smooth sailing.
 
But because of my ability to write.. A LOT.. there was SO much editing that had to be done to my paper. I think that will be a struggle for me in this class. OVERwriting. I have never experienced writing a school paper before or have done interviews and quoted people. This experience opened a new door for me in the writing area and gave me the experience I needed to know where I truely wanted to be in this specific field. It was a good challenge; something I haven't experienced in a long time.
- Elisha

Monday, February 4, 2013

Phew! Article #1 is done!

I have always written...

From grocery lists to poetry, reviews, short stories and to-do lists, grabbing a pen and a piece of paper is normal to me. But writing a newspaper article, though not so different, was definitely something new. Looking back at my first article for The Scribe, I wish I would have pushed myself more. The writing was easy, sort of, but interviewing and finding people nice enough to give you a few minutes of their life to make a story juicy was the hard part.

At some point, after having the rough draft done and seeing that the people I wanted to interview were not interested, I thought, "I can't do this, I'm shy, and no one really likes to be interviewed." But my passion and support for the story I was writing made me want to continue. I pushed myself to contact more people whether they knew me or not and finally got the quotes I wanted.

I've learned that being a writer for a school's newspaper not only strenghten your abilities to be a better writer, but it opens doors. I got to communicate with the Director of communications for the company of the story I was writing about all the way in the Netherlands!

After some reflection, I've decided to stay. Not only because this is what I want to do as my career, but because I need to be more out there, need to be pushed more to do things I usually wouldn't do and by being a journalist, I finally have an excuse.

Sorangel Santiago
staff writer