I Learned A Lot?

What have I learned? That's a tougher question than it seems.
I guess that i will start out with the obvious things. I have learned different formats for writing stories. Chronological, day-in-the-life, problem and solution, catalog, repetitive are all examples of formats. As much as I would like to dismiss these as being boring stuff I cannot tell you how important they are. But what I learned most about formats is that I definitely have my favorites and least favorite styles. I like the ones where you start the story off with an anecdote in the lead then go on with the story and finish up the anecdote in the ending. It's kind of like "The Rest of the Story," with Paul Harvey. But if I am going to be totally honest, I don't know which format that is called. Maybe I didn't learn those things.
Leads, nut graphs, endings and theme statements are another bunch of terms that I should have learned. All kidding aside, I did learn them! The leads and endings are my favorite part of writing a story. To see if you can get a reader hooked by the first couple of sentences is pretty fun. If you can give the reader a good ending, most likely, they will walk away with the thought that it was a good story. It's like a movie. You could watch a great movie with a terrible ending and end up hating it. But if the final scene is good, you're going to remember it.
But the most important thing that I have learned from UNC is that news writing is not just jotting down what happened, the who, what, when, and where. It's telling a story and making your readers care about what happens to the characters in your story.
And now the sappy stuff. I learned that I can actually write. Granted it's just sports writing but I know that I can do it.

Know Who You Are and Who You Aren't

I wrote a story on the head coach of the UNC Bear's baseball team, Kevin Smallcomb. I really thought that this was the easiest assignment that a teacher or an editor could assign. A-day-in-the -life story is what it is called. Why did I think it would be so easy? Well, all you do is hang out with the person you are writing the story about, ask some questions to the subject and the people that he interacts with during your time with them and then write about what happened. Easy, right? Should have been.
So here it is. I listen to a lot of sports talk radio and there is this radio show host named Sandy Kluff. If you ever listen to him, then you probably know what I am talking about. He comes off as pompous and all-knowing. He goes off on these analogies that, to me, just sounds like he is trying to show everybody how smart he is. And don't get me wrong, he does seem smart, but he is mostly over the top.
That is kind of what I did with my story on Smallcomb and I didn't realize it until I got my paper back from my professor. When I finally did realize what I did, I was kind of mad at myself because that is just not me. I am glad that it happened now because I can make sure that I don't do the same thing in the future instead of becoming another Sandy Kluff.

My First Well Writen Profile

I wrote a profile on the captain of the University of Northern Colorado's baseball team, Kevin Sandberg. The story was challenging in the aspect that I really did not know much about him when I decided to write the story. When I had a chance to talk to him, it made the story a lot easier because he was very open and easy to talk to. He did give me a lot of sports cliches but at the same time he did answer every question that I had. The research that I did is what made me decide on Sandberg as my topic. He was at the top of virtually every team stat in 2008. I need to work on getting more information from other sources is what I learned from doing the rewrite, but I think that the story turned out well.