Feature Writing: Chapter 10

Chapter ten in the textbook Feature Writing: The Pursuit of Excellence talks about how as a writer you need to be very careful in what you write about another person. If you are not sure if it is true or not, then you should not write it. You can always get in contact with the person and ask them again to see if it was right, but never publish it when you are not sure. In fact lesson number one to be learned is be careful and always check your work over and over again. The author brings up a simple point when he says, "If you've written something that appears to be libelous on the face of it, make sure you can trust your notes".   I like the way he wrote about notes as if they were the reason you might mess up, as if they were trying to get you caught. He kind of personifies the idea of notes when he says this.

Another interesting thing this chapter talked about was the example on page 290 about Janet cooke who won the pulitzer prize award but had to return it because she admitted that she made the whole thing up after people became suspicious. This teaches us as writers that no matter how easy it is to sit at your computer and type away a made up story, you cannot become lazy and unmotivated. You need to get out there and find  a story like everyone else in the business.

The Working Poor: Invisible in America

My book club group is ready to start working on the project. For our next meeting we decided that we would have a couple things picked out that we were interested in while reading the book. Each of us will probably have something different that interested us so we were thinking of splitting up the presentation in that way. Each of us could talk about a different chapter that interested us to get the point of the book across to the class while talking about something we like and know.

The two chapters that I am interested in are Chapters seven and eight. Chapter seven is called Kinship and it is about a poor family who has been through tough times and the mother has cancer, but they are still hopeful and never lose the real meaning of life. They do not let their lack of money pull down their will to go on. Chapter eight is called Body and Mind and it is about a woman who sees all types of cases of children being malnourished because their families are too poor to buy nutritious food. It talks about the WIC program that is available to these types of families.

Ideas for Newspaper Essay

For my newspaper essay I am thinking writing a piece about education. I am observing in a fifth grade classroom right now and I think it would be a topic that I could work with. I really like writing about the environment and the harm that is being done to it. I think the environment topic will be better for the newspaper and the education topic will be better for the magazine paper. I need to narrow my topics down to be more specific, but I know that I want to have my newspaper essay about the environment.

Some narrow topics can be a how-to paper on how to involve your household in saving the environment or a number story on 5 ways the earth is in trouble. whatever I choose I want to find a knowledgeable person on the topic so that they can be quoted in my paper.