[the writing center]

Journalism Ethics

If Writing Center tutors put out a paper, and if the paper has stories that start to seem “journalistic,” then you’ll have to talk about and learn journalistic ethics. With journalism goes some responsibility and some legal accountability. I will bring in some jounalism books that have chapters on this subject. (My knowledge is a little outdated. I assume that writers of blogs are now being sued for libel sometimes; I do not know whether the suits are successful.) Here are a few reminders: (1) To avoid libel, be right! (2) To avoid libel, pick on famous people. They cannot win a suit against you unless you practice reckless disregard for the truth, or unless they did not actively seek the fame that has come to them. (3) Do not count on a word like “alleged” to get you out of responsibility if you say something bad about someone and it turns out to be false or unproven. (4) Interview 3 people for most news stories.

Newswriting

Leads:

If you write a news story in the way that daily newspapers write them, and you will probably wish to do this from time to time, be aware that the first sentence is easily the most important. It is supposed to be the executive summary, the sentence that contains the whole story in microcosm. If readers stop after the first sentence, they’ve got the gist of it.

Because of its importance, it has to be assertive. It cannot be an “about” sentence, it has to have a strong predicate. (For tutoring purposes, this distinction is also useful. “About” sentences–sentences that identify topic but nothing else–are usually a waste of time.) The usual rule is that it contains the WWWWWH of the story. “When” and “Where” are usually pretty easy, so it will be tempting to start the sentence with them. But that’s probably not what to do. Put the “yesterday in the McNichols Student Union ballroom” at the *end* of the sentence. “Who” is also usually easy, but remember that it does not have to be someone’s name. Sometimes it is “A prominent Detroit businesswoman.” The name can come later, and does not belong in the first sentence if no one will recognize it. The “what” is the problem part, the part that will require some thought and even some creativity. It is the most newsworthy thing that happened, the conclusion, and often the most recent (this recency is more important for modern news sources that are up-to-the-minute). It is difficult to describe a conclusion with no background set-up; your sentence will not seem clear. So you have to fit background into the same sentence. As in “Violence directed at the police broke out during the funeral service for recently assassinated Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto … ” Look at how much background information can be fit in, even though the *narrative* aspect (<<Violence yesterday>>) is brief. “How” and “why” are often crowded out, but if you think that’s what makes a news story a news story, and if the “why” is not your opinion but the opinion of other credible sources, then it’s good to fit that in too.

Writing your way into a quotation:

Good newswriting uses a lot of quotation and a lot of attribution (phrases that give credit to sources). If the news is arranged in columns, each paragraph is usually one sentence long. Let’s say the third sentence in your story is: <<”The whole Chemistry Building will meet the standards of the American Disabilities Act by 2010,” said Ken Henold, Associate Dean of Engineering and Science.>> Your set-up for that sentence (the *second* sentence of the story) cannot be <<Ken Henold, Associate Dean of Englineering, confirmed that the Chemistry Building will meet the standards set by the ADA.>>  It has to be something closer to this: <<One of the reasons for the new construction is to provide access for disabled people.>> The set-up for the quotation has to be *connected* with what is conveyed in the quotation, but the overlap should not be too close.

(My apologies to Ken Henold for the total made-up-ness of the above quotations.)

Endings:

If it’s a conventional journalism story, it does not need an ending. Just write it from most-important-to-least-important, or from most-recent-to-least-recent, and try to make it so that it is satisfactory no matter where it is cut.

Exploration Questions

My suggestions in the margins of student essays are not usually marching orders but something more akin to menu options. Most students need a lot of menu options, and they will be better off if they realize that the title of their essay will be a lot better if it is chosen from a list of five *possible* titles. And this goes for everything else about their essays. They sure could use some more exploration strategies. I think they are also called critical thinking strategies, but since critical thinking seems as if it is of a high order of intellectual development, and perhaps comes farther along in the essay-writing process than exploration, maybe exploration can be a good label for now.

A long time ago I used a book called *Four Worlds of Writing,* which I didn't even like. It recommended that student writers adopt, alternately, a static view, a dynamic view, and a relative view. Describe the object of your analysis (or the topic of your essay)—that was the first one, the static view. Touch it and listen to it and look inside of it, whether it is a logical problem or a painting. The dynamic view asked how it had changed over the years, or how you the student writer had changed with respect to it. The relative view asked what other things it was like.

We need guidelines and questions like this for generating ideas.  Probably you already have some favorites. Various writing texts do have their own. Sometimes they ask for a more complex analysis of causality. Does A cause B? Are you sure it’s not the other way around: B causes A? Or could it be a third thing, C, that causes both A and B? Or perhaps B just comes *after* A, and there is no connection. (Something to think about before you decide that wearing a watch causes heart attacks.) Another recipe for critical thinking that these books might ask for is a sorting out of a problem according to whether it partakes of idealistic/utopian behavior, on the one hand, or pragmatic behavior, on the other.

My favorite questions, when the assignment features reading, are as follows:

(1) Where have you found a problem in the text? (That does not mean a place in the text where you disagree, but a *knot* in the text, a place where you have mixed feelings, or cognitive dissonance, perhaps because it is getting you to believe something you don’t really want to believe.) What can you say about that passage?

(2) What assumptions does the writer make about readers’ values? That is, what indications can you find of the values that the writer believes that he or she shares with readers? Are those fair assumptions? What readers do those assumptions leave out of account?

(3) What is not in the reading that easily could have been, without making it a *totally* different reading?

The best exploratory questions are usually contained within the professor’s assignment, and that’s good, because good exploration questions might differ from assignment to assignment. They differ, but students might benefit from having a few favorite questions that they can go back to again and again.

Freewriting and Sprinting

That’s all I have to say about explorations, but I also want to include something here about freewriting, or sprinting. Most of my English 131 students can write 150 words in 5 minutes, easily. They can do this if I tell them not to lift their pens from the paper for five minutes (or not to stop typing), and if I say that they should just keep writing if they find themselves going off on a tangent. In fact, if they somehow start to tell a story (a story that has a time element to it, like “one day last week”), that’s a bonus; that’s just the kind of thing freewriting can be good for. Five-minute timed writing will not always work to provide insights and clarity. In fact, most rhetoric books that recommend it call it “looping,” and suggest that it is best if it is done repeatedly, so that your second five-minute sprint is based on what is most interesting about your *first* five-minute sprint, and so on. But let me assume that you may not be able to get students to work for 25 minutes on looping. Can they still benefit from 5 minutes of freewriting? I think so, and you might even be able to do it while you are reading their drafts. Think of the possibilities. They can write for 5 minutes on why this topic rather than some other came to them. Or they can write an alternate final paragraph for the essay they just handed you. Or they can try to write a story of their own that came into their mind while reading this story that was part of their assignment (keeping the pen moving the whole time, continuing, if they have to, with “I have nothing to say about this topic because ..”) Or they can write for five minutes about another political or social issue that has the same logical structure as the one they have written on. (For example, someone might point out that the same thing that she is saying about illegal sales of drugs might be said for bodily organs or for automatic weapons. Making something illegal spurs the growth of prohibited black markets.)

Do you think any of this would make the students’ essays better? I think the chances are very good that it would. And it will pull us away, a little bit, from sentence-level proofreading concerns, which have their limits, as I think you’ll agree.

Dear Tutors:

 I plan to offer a Directed Study to accomplish the aims of Univ. Academic Services 099 (“Basic Writing”) to one of our students who never took the Writing Placement Exam and was consequently misplaced into English 130 at the beginning of the semester. She is Chinese, and has some difficulty with English, but most of the time not that much. I will be enlisting help from some of you to meet with her a few times during the semester, mostly just to converse in such a way that she practices both speaking and listening. Interactions with readings will be part of it too. No need to do anything now, but I may ask you individually about times-that-you’re-available.

 Michael Barry

    I sent out a message on Facebook but I’m sending out another one. Megan and I came up with this idea of writing a paper based on what we think goes in a good paper. We want everybody to be involved as much as you can which is why the things we wanted in it are easily contributive.  As of now, my motto for it is “unstructured but quality” which is definitely “not a slap” at the Varsity News.

We want to have fun and talk about things that matter, maybe even start up something new like a new paper. We need a title for the paper and Megan came up with the idea of using false names but something that would be able to be figured out by people if they really wanted to know so maybe combining names of the people on your wall and using that to write articles. Once we have a name we’ll also create a new blog so that people can post what they think and leave comments and all that (Varsity News don’t have a blog).

So think about it and what you may want to write, definitely check the board in the Writing Center because there are alot of things on it concerning the paper. If we all write that’s 6 writers and we can even open the idea to honorary writing center tutors, amy and megan tonjes- megan said she will.

This will be so much fun.

-Marco