The Week with A Lot of Work

Well..at least we're all still alive. With the forum and the midterm, this week was worth 20% of our semester grades. I hope we all got A's!

Professor Eisman began Monday's class by passing back the "Hiker" stories (finally). She suggested that we save them as momentos of our early days of writing. After eight weeks, we've improved drastically, and Professor Eisman is beginning to know all our "little quirks."

Next, we received our Washington Post broadcast pieces back. In usual form, we argued about nearly every detail.

In general, we picked good stories, but used too many big words and weren't conversational enough.

Professor Eisman discussed the midterm and announced that she would email us the bio assignment for Monday. We also discussed the due date for our forum articles. Sometime in that process, confusion broke loose and Professor Eisman realized she was "losing control." I think the rest of us knew that weeks ago.

For those of us who couldn't attend the forum, Professor Eisman promised that somewhere, there would be a person talking about something because "that's all they do in this town."

We got a few great pieces of advice for our forum pieces:
-paraphrase bios for articles.
-don't write about ties, water, or the fact that someone tallked last night.
-"every fact you don't know is a fact I don't know, although I know more facts than you."-Professor Eisman
-use one speaker for the lead, and then transition into the rest of the article.
-or, summarize the news for the lead.
-avoid jargon!
-keep to one thought per paragraph, no matter what.

We also looked over some sample leads, and were given permission to criticize our colleagues because we'll be critcized.

Last but not least, we watched part of last year's forum and took notes to practice. We found out that we already knew how to indentify news-worthy quotes.

Tuesday, most of us covered the forum, which was a lot more interesting than I expected. I thought the best quote of the night was from David Corn: "anything involving Sarah Palin, Dick Cheney, and sex, hopefully all three!" That's not a news value Professor Eisman taught us.

And then the day of the dreaded midterm arrived. We'll found out how we did soon, but I'm proud of all for making deadline.

Happy Fall Break Everyone!!!

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