Class began with avid discussion on poor headline writing. Some members of the class seemed perturbed by the fact that some headlines are misleading and sometimes even false information. Above is a perfect example of both things.
The hot button issue of the day was the grammar review session, which saw team yellow lead the blue team for the entirety of the match, winning by a margin of 18-2. Team blue grammar athlete Adam Gallagher addressed the press after the loss. “It really was a slaughter out there,” said Gallagher. “Geoff [of team yellow] really shined, and now I know that no matter what, it’s always Geoff and I, never Geoff and me. Ever.” A few members of team yellow held a conference shortly after the game as well and all seemed pleased with the victory. “After I got my 29th point I thought maybe we should slow down,” said Daniella Napolitano, “except that’s not really the team yellow winning mentality, so we kept going, winning harder and harder.”
Unhappy with the loss, blue team star David Mullins told the press that he is planning to file a full inquiry with the National Association of Grammar Style to contest the match. “Their bell was defective,” said Mullins. “It was making more of a DONK sound rather than the league sanctioned DING.”
After team yellow’s 200-3 victory, the class moved on to web writing. There was a general air of silliness as the class wrote headlines and blurbs for a story concerning the horrendous death via heart attach of a poor restaurant patron. The mood did not fit the gruesome nature of the story, and the class revealed its insensitivity to the matter of death. One particularly cruel and insensitive headline for the story read, “Patron’s Heart says, Check Please!” Clearly the headline writer has been desensitized by violent movies and video games.
And now for the boring bit, the homework we do in fact have. Sadly this is probably the only section anyone will read so I think I’ll take my time with it. We were given a story to write some things about. What things you ask? Read the first letter of each paragraph. Did you do it? Okay yeah there was nothing there; I’m not clever enough to write my story like that. We were given a story and told to write a headline and a short blurb à la Washington Post online articles. We also need to write a summary of the story and say what links to photos or videos we would include. Underline the story with where you would place the links.
Charles: Thank you for volunteering to write the blog this week and for reminding the class of a number of writing issues that we have discussed through the semester.
ReplyDeleteFirst, always read your copy over. Second, be careful of what you read on the web. As Charles points out, there is often erroneous information published that has not been fact checked. Third, when using a direct quote, do not put the attribution in the middle of the sentence, wait and include it at the end. Also, always be sure that your quotes are on the record, otherwise only identify the person by his or her position, such as American University undergraduate. Finally, for those of you interested in sports reporting, the AP Stylebook has an excellent section on sports guidelines and how to report scores and standings.
Writing headlines for the web can be a challenge. Keep them short and simple. Funny ones can work, if the topic is appropriate. We will discuss your web packages today, and look at what makes certain news web sites better than others. See you soon.