Poor writing plus questionable advising equals a sad situation

In local publishing controversies, the above opinion article, published in the Regis Jesuit HS "Elevate" magazine in December, led to retraction of the commentary, the firing of two full-time teachers (the adviser and assistant adviser of the publication), embarrassment for the author (I have removed her name), and incredible pressure on school administrators from the Archdiocese of Denver.

As is often the case, everything about this situation is complicated -- and few will ever know all the details and context that produced the controversy.

But let's start with the content of the writing, and an observation about the headline. The word "out" should be "our" and that is a simple typo. But the credibility of the magazine is immediately damaged when the largest type on the page was not properly proofread. An irony of proofreading is that headlines are often assumed to be correct -- after all, they are so large and someone likely typed them directly into InDesign.

A "forest for the trees" situation.

The subhead (or deck) is puzzling. Who is "confronting" and did the author really mean "reconciling" or "balancing" or something else that might be looking for some common ground?

Persuasive writing is best when there is a clear answer to "why am I reading this right now?" and the lead to this article doesn't provide anything timely as an answer. THAT should have prompted a conversation between editor or adviser and the writer in hopes of sharpening the argument. 

The last sentence of the opening graf is "Abortions aren't uncommon. Up to 1 in 8 women get an abortion in the U.S." But the opening sentence of graf 3 states: "By the age of 45, up to 35 percent of women in the U.S. have had an abortion." A reader could be forgiven for being confused. I certainly am. 

These two figures do NOT add up, with the two statistics, neither of which is attributed to any solid source, widely different. That makes readers wonder what else in the essay might be nonsense or poorly thought out, or poorly researched

The second graf is the one that struck me as potentially the beginning of a moving human story about choice and lack of choice and how one woman struggled with childbearing decisions. You can read it yourself, but notice that the first sentence is missing any sort of explanation or follow up. Was the writer claiming that she knows someone who chose an abortion before giving birth to two children? 

In my next post I hope to grapple with the more global questions this commentary raises, particularly about how ethics, the law, audience, and "community interest" intertwine. And on Wednesday I plan to explore what makes a good informal essay, or personal commentary.

But one way to sum up the entire situation is as a mess for all involved. 

Teaching and learning during a pandemic is like...

I have mentioned Frank Bruni's weekly round up of great writing, and his most recent post featured a series of great sentences that all made use of similes.

In case we are a bit hazy on what a simile is, here is the quick definition: a figure of speech involving the comparison of one thing with another thing of a different kind, used to make a description more emphatic or vivid (e.g. as brave as a lion, crazy like a fox). A quick clue is the use of "like" or "as" in the comparisons.

I copied four simile examples below.

Here’s the science writer Dennis Overbye on a special magnifying glass for the cosmos: “Sitting in a spaceport in French Guiana, wrapped like a butterfly in a chrysalis of technology, ambition, metal and wires, is the biggest, most powerful and, at $10 billion, most expensive telescope ever to be launched into space.”

This comparison of a telescope with a butterfly just before it emerges from its cocoon gets the reader "seeing" the device as about to make a big difference in science. There is no literal wrapping or protection, but that triplet of "ambition, metal, and wires" contains all sorts of information. BTW, who knew there was a spaceport in French Guiana?

Here’s David Segal describing one of the people in his article about a Dickensian workhouse in London becoming — of course! — luxury apartments: “Mr. Burroughs, a 77-year-old chartered accountant, speaks carefully and barely above a whisper, as if he were narrating a golf tournament.”

A comparison only works when readers comprehend both sides of the simile. Here the writer assumes the reader has watched some golf on TV and immediately conjures up the quiet voices (so as not to disturb the golfers and fans at the scene). There is also a sense of propriety and tradition in this comparison.

Here’s Gail Collins, from her weekly online “Conversation” with Bret Stephens: “Registering as an independent is like telling a charitable fund-raiser that you want to help by sending good thoughts.”

Ms. Collins represents the more progressive side in the weekly conversations she has with a fellow New York Times columnist. They like to keep things civil and a bit light, despite the often serious topics they discuss. Her point here is clearly that being a registered independent voter is an empty gesture.

Bret differed. “I’m happy as an independent,” he wrote. “It’s like getting to order à la carte, whereas everyone else is stuck with a bento box of things that don’t actually go together.”

Mr. Stephens represents a more conservative POV and a year or so ago he changed his affiliation from Republican to Independent. His point is that being an independent allows for more flexibility and choice and avoids being stuck with individual positions and policies he disagrees with. I had to look up what a "bento box" is, I blush to admit -- it is a multi-compartment box containing different courses of a (usually) Japanese lunch. 

But I got the gist of his simile from context, so his somewhat obscure reference didn't damage his simile too much. That reference was a great reminder that writers must always consider their readers and calculate just how far to push the diction and syntax.

A well-written simile can clarify things, ideas, and people and should become a tool to use (sparingly) in your own writing.

When in doubt, tighten your focus

Here is the promised continuation of my commentary on one sample piece of reporting can help us in the classroom. The original story can be found here, on the Washington Post website.

A snowstorm that catches millions of people off-guard and that produces all sorts of dramatic and revealing events and reactions might seem too big to effectively cover. Even a traditional school event like a dance or an assembly or Homecoming might seem a bit overwhelming to student reporters.

Where should they start?

My answer to this question was to invoke the reporting wisdom of Ernie Pyle, the famous and revered WWII reporter who invented the concept of G.I. Joe and tried to focus his reporting not on the generals and politicians but on the "grunts," the soldiers in the trenches and in the field. This may be slightly edited from Pyle's original statement, but the quote I put up in my classroom was, "If you want to tell the story of a war, tell the story of one soldier."

My localized version of this advice was, "If you want to tell the story of a high school, tell the story of one student."

I added that no one person's story was sufficient to provide full coverage but that an accumulation of focused stories, each showing students in action, each sharing student thinking and emotions, might provide the sort of insights that readers desire and need.

When I found this story about Senator Kaine and the focus on his specific experience while stuck on I-95 due to snow, ice, and (I assume) a healthy dose of human error and simple chance, I couldn't resist the combination of "one American" and prominence, along with the oddity of being stuck in a car for over a day.

Average reporters might be inclined to begin with an anecdote about a prominent person who has become part of a larger story, but then quickly turn to official reports, statistics, and a series of almost random direct quotes from a range of witnesses.

What I like about this story is that it is organized as a real story, not at all different from a piece of fiction (with the important difference being that all the facts come from research and interviewing and observation. 

Readers get a clear main character and a classic conflict -- man vs. nature -- along with a vivid setting. There is a resolution -- Kaine finally gets to his office in D.C. -- that is satisfying.

Structurally, this story makes use of the "hourglass" shape, with a lead that provides the 5Ws, sets the scene and introduces the character(s) and conflict. Part of this "story shape" is called The Turn, where the reporting moves from providing the basics for scanning readers to a chronological retelling of events.

The Turn happens here: 

Officials said later in the day that they hoped I-95 would be cleared and open again by Tuesday night and that they had been sending emergency crews to try to reach still-stranded motorists, while pledging a full investigation of what went wrong.

Kaine said he left Richmond at around 1 p.m. Monday for a pressing voting rights meeting later that day with other lawmakers at the U.S. Capitol, believing he had plenty of time. The commute typically took him two hours.

The rest of the report tightens to one person in one car, bringing in the telling anecdote of some neighbors sharing oranges with their fellow travelers. Even the photos move from those drone views of snarled traffic to the inside of a vehicle, to one point of view.

This story cannot exist on Twitter or other social media because the reporter needs enough time to follow the events through to some sort of resolution. Instant publishing is too restrictive.

The story also cannot exist without reporters who keep asking about what came next, about what our main character was thinking, and about what the main character remembers about interactions with supporting characters (the family distributing fruit). 

I would point out to students that the story ends up not really about a snowstorm -- after all, they happen quite regularly -- but about how one person dealt with the challenges.

And to add one more layer here: there are no stories about weather. There are only stories about people or animals reacting to the weather. 

All stories must be about people.

If students learn that, all will be well.

Young reporters need some tips on finding news that readers want and need

Student often complain that "nothing newsy ever happens at school," which mostly means that those students are not clear on how to define "news." That complaint may also translate to "please don't make me think too much about what happens at school." 

Or it might mean that they are so immersed in school that they would prefer to focus on something and somewhere else.

Advisers must always be ready for this attitude and have some prompting questions and provocative examples of finding interesting stories amid life's routines at the ready.

Journalism instructors need to discuss the elements of news from the very beginning of any journalism course. There are many factors that go into deciding if something is news or not, but two of the most compelling are "prominence" and "oddity." 

Prominence recognizes that people who are well-known often get more intense interest from readers. Bad things that happen to famous people are particularly attractive. "Hey, that guy is just like me!" 

Oddity, or the unexpected or the exaggerated, might be the most powerful news element of all. 

And that takes me to this story lead from today's Washington Post, following up on reporting that I mentioned yesterday about the big snowstorm.

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) felt bad for the stranded families packed in their cars and minivans all around him on Interstate 95. Then, when the temperature dipped even lower overnight, as he shivered alone in his car, he started to envy the larger groups, wondering if maybe their cars were warmer.

“It was cold,” he said in an interview around 10 a.m. Tuesday about his overnight experience being stranded on the interstate. “It was very cold.”

Kaine, a former Virginia governor, was one of myriad people trapped on one of the state’s busiest thoroughfares in below-freezing weather for hours — more than an entire day — on what was supposed to be a typical commute to work at the U.S. Capitol from Richmond. Instead, it turned into a marathon nightmare of fuel rationing, hunger and sleep deprivation for no doubt hundreds of people, although officials said they did not know exactly how many people were trapped on the 48-mile stretch south of Washington.

The report begins with the "who" of the story and immediately places this well-known politician in the midst of a scene. We can imagine the reporter asking questions like, "Help me understand what you saw and felt last night." Or perhaps, "What were you thinking as the hours stuck on the road dragged on?"

Beginning journalism students often feel the necessity of including the questions they asked. So a first draft might include something like, "When asked about how he was feeling 12 hours into being stuck on I-95, Sen. Kaine said, " ...."

It is important to get into this truth: readers don't need to be reminded that the journalist was asking questions. Readers want the answers (and they can infer what questions MUST have been asked to elicit certain responses).

But back to prominence and oddity, this story demonstrates both elements clearly. Even former governors and current senators may fall victim to nature -- just like us regular folks -- and the idea that people might be stuck on a busy interstate for over 24 hours, without food, water, bathroom facilities, etc., certainly is odd (and a bit horrifying).

In tomorrow's post I will dig into the narrative structure of this lead and how it is a model for student writing about an event.

Great reporting must precede great writing

For beginning reporters, using professional published stories is a great way to show them how newswriting works, from the individual pieces to how complex decision-making affects writing in the media.

Here is the lead from a Washington Post story on the big snowstorm that surprised the D.C. area this week.

Three people were killed Monday evening in Montgomery County when a car collided with a snowplow hours after a winter storm dumped several inches of snow across the Washington region, an area largely spared from blizzards during two years of intermittent pandemic shutdowns.

One person was critically injured in the crash, which occurred about 6:45 p.m. on Columbia Pike at Briggs Chaney Road in the White Oak-Burtonsville area of eastern Montgomery, officials said. Initial accounts indicated that the car had run into the rear of the plow.

The storm brought power outages, traffic snarls on major highways and untimely closures of coronavirus testing sites.

As adults grappled with school cancellations and the suspension of Metrobus service, children ventured outside to celebrate the most snow to fall in one storm since January 2019 — a time when antigen testing was not a holiday ritual and mask-wearing largely was confined to Halloween.

Students must learn that most of the 5Ws and H questions need to be addressed in order to provide readers with a complete account. Who, what, where, when, why and how are still the key starting points in reporting. If young reporters can't answer one or more of those basic questions, more reporting is needed. Some answers simply aren't available immediately, but future stories can fill in the blanks (and should).

An easy choice in our sample lead (above) was to feature the three deaths caused by the storm (though that causation is a bit too simple, since there was likely some human error involved in the crash). Names of the victims may not have been released in time for this story, but the dead are clearly the "who" here. "What" is that they were killed. "When" is Monday evening, while "where" is the Columbia Pike intersection listed. The "why" tends to be complicated but the immediate cause was a car running into a snow plow. The "how" is a bit sketchy, as officials usually take some time to reconstruct how crashes occur. Excessive speed? Unavoidable skidding? An unanticipated stoppage or turn? 

I would also point out to students the way this report combines the snowstorm with the pandemic, and would ask if that was inevitable or whether the reporters and editors of the Post could have made other choices.

My first thought was that the lack of big storms over the past couple years is clearly unconnected to the pandemic in terms of cause and effect. Both are challenges but they just happened to overlap. 

My second thought was that it is relevant to show readers that life is complex and that events certainly can be made worse (or better) by other factors. That fourth graf was a stretch, with its goal (maybe?) to provide some context for how long it had been since the last big snow in D.C. "Wow! It's really been that long?" you can imagine a reader thinking. "I can barely remember a time before Covid."

Would this news story connect with readers without the added pandemic connections? That is a great question to present to student reporters. An in-class activity worth a few minutes might be to ask students to write a new version of this lead but without any pandemic references. After all, the first big winter storm in over two years is inherently dramatic and newsworthy.

A final discussion might get into how journalists make decisions about what to include and what to exclude in their reports. Lots of discrete events occurred during the storm. There were many outages, non-fatal accidents, school and business (and testing center) closings. The story led with deaths, not with the millions who survived the storm. As always, most news is "bad news."

Reporters should cast a wide net, so to speak, and gather all the information and insights they can. The final published stories, however, need some curation, some analysis, and some structure. 

The connection between gathering information (reporting) and presenting information (writing) is the very heart of journalism and students need to practice these basic skills repeatedly.

Teachers benefit from reflecting on the past before plunging into the future

The first assignment encountered by students of my new Student Media Advising online course -- just finalized in December and unlikely to be taught this spring -- is that they create a simple blog site and write a reflection of some sort at least once per week.

Reflecting on what happened recently and on what options MIGHT be pursued or what improvements might be made seems like the single most important action a practicing educator can embrace. But it likely takes some sort of external stimulus, like a class assignment, to force teachers to take those few minutes a week (or day, if you wanted to be really focused) to examine their practice.

From an instructor's point of view, such a series of blog posts helps me better understand each student's needs and experience level, with few expectations from the writers (who basically earn all the points available each week by participating) and with plentiful options for written dialog between us.

I spent most of my own teaching and advising career just scrambling from day to da and from challenge to challenge, rarely taking a few minutes to step back and analyze what I was accomplishing and how I conducted classes, built some sort of academic culture, etc. 

Teachers tend to beat themselves up, often based on a small body of evidence -- like a class discussion that never went anywhere and left the teacher confused and students frustrated. Many times I would stumble into the teacher's work area at Rock Canyon and calmly state, "My god, I suck at this." And I was the department chair with 30 years of teaching experience.

The one thing teachers need the most is a bit of time to think, to analyze, to decompress, and to refocus. Five minutes of passing time between third and fourth hours is not even close to enough of a breather. An entire planning period is not enough. Winter Break is not enough.

So the first thing I chose for the online advising course was the reflective blogging assignment. 

I have already started rethinking this, however, as I increasingly realize that this course is likely to get reasonable enrollment only through tightening its time span -- I'm looking at a four-week, intensive version right now.

That's the challenge right now. Can I create a version of the semester-long course, with its many opportunities to pause and reflect on what is happening in class, that can fit in a more attractive four-week course. 

Four weeks respects the need for teachers to both expand their skills and knowledge and find some downtime to relax and recharge.

My first thought is that the reflective blog has to go. Most classroom teachers will opt for a summer session and they won't have "live" students to work with, try ideas with, share stories about. The best we can do (maybe?) is to find ways to have advisers look back on the preceding semester or year and prompt some reflection. 

That may be a fine strategy for advisers who advised the previous year but one target audience for the course is the brand new adviser (maybe brand new teacher) who may not have experience from last year.

Lots of unknowns, obviously, and it is likely that all the debate and adjustments for this course must stem from me, as the author, trying to anticipate how to proceed. 

Wrapping up 2021 and looking ahead to what has to be a better year

It's a new year (I waited until Jan. 1, a Saturday, to post) and this blog series totals 224 entries from the past year. At an estimated 550 words per post, that amounts to 123,200 words -- enough to constitute a novel (maybe two, according to most definitions) if there were any narrative threads to be discovered.

But it's a good example of how writing more often and sticking with it can produce quite a quantity of material in a relatively short time. This is why my preferred teaching strategy in my writing classes is to ask students to write a large number of posts and essays, but to keep each individual post or essay relatively brief. Most of my assignments suggest a maximum of 600-800 words, though students may write as much as they need to make their points.

The first day of new year is a traditional, though artificial, excuse to make some resolutions and my resolution for this blog is to transition it to building instructional materials for my newly completed online media advising class (which is approved and available for spring, but which has had no publicity and no one enrolled as of today). 

An online course designed as a crash introduction to the world of advising student media is likely to get more takers in a summer session, and we will have to see if this CSU Global Campus course can pick up enough students to actually run.

It was sort of fun and certainly challenging to create the course. Unlike a traditional in-person class, it's tough to gauge what changes are needed, what additions or deletions could smooth things out, what options or assignments produce the best responses and speak most directly to what students (who are also teachers) want and need.

My hope is to take some time, using this blog as the vehicle, to slow down a bit, analyze how the course unfolds, and think about how a 16-week course might be condensed to an 8-week summer session (or even a 4-week session, which might appeal to many teachers who would like to free up more of their precious off-time).

I may still comment on current events, weird and wacky trends, pop culture, and personal ups and downs on occasion. 

One trend I hope develops is 2022 slowly emerging from the pandemic. The last two years have been a struggle for so many. Kathleen and I haven't suffered much particularly, other than general angst and feeling a bit cautious about traveling. 

So 2021 ends up a bit of a "meh" in my informal rating system for years. Hey, "meh" is better than disastrous.