Hi guys -
I've posted the first email message I sent you to The Mackerel Wrapper, but when I tried the links the one to the story ideas tip sheet on my faculty page didn't work. I don't want the link to get broken with the transition to the new BenU website, so I copied the tip sheet to TMW. Here's the new link:
http://mackerelwrapper.blogspot.com/2010/10/comm-337-tip-sheet-on-story-ideas.html
By the way, did'ya notice how much I want you to have all the information you need to get started RIGHT NOW on the story? And how seriously I'm taking this?
Are you getting my drift?
In any event, please let me hear from you ASAPest.
- Doc
The tip sheet follows:
A guide for freshman English (and journalism) students
Taking notes for a profile. Photo: NASA
In basic newswriting (Communications 209), you will be writing stories all the time. In freshman English, you will be asked to write at least one descriptive essay. For 10 years, students at SCI labored through the fourth chapter of the St. Martin's Guide to Writing, which was about how to write something the authors of the text called a "profile" (some of us suspected it was just a fancy name for a human interest story or newspaper Sunday story). Now we have gone to another text for English 111, but I still assign students to use the techniques of profile writing. Don't get hung up on what to call it. Descriptive essay, profile, feature story, whatever -- good writing is good writing, and it's full of vivid detail. Even if you have no intention of going into journalism, you can profit from it.
"Whatever their subjects or whatever information may be available to them, profile writers strive first and foremost to present a person, a place, or an activity vividly to their readers," said the St. Martin's Guide. "They succeed only by presenting many concrete details that will enable readers to imagine the scene and the people. Most important, writers orchestrate the details carefully to convey an attitude toward their subjects and to offer an interpretation of them" (109). That attitude or interpretation is often known as a dominant impression. It serves the same purpose as a thesis statement, because it ties the essay together around a central idea. It makes one main point.
So how do you do a profile? You observe the thing -- or person, place or event -- you're writing about. Rise Axenrod and Charles Cooper, authors of the St. Martin's Guide, put it like this: "In writing a profile, you practice the field research methods of observing, interviewing, and notetaking commonly used by investigative reporters, social scientists, and naturalists. You also learn to analyze and synthesize the information you have collected."
Finding a lively topic (story idea)
What makes a good topic? Anything that interests you will probably interest your readers. Here are a few suggestions culled from the St. Martin's Guide (133-36). It's available only in a dead-tree (paper) format, but you can find it in SCI's Becker Library if you want to see more suggestions. The call number is 808042 A969 1997:
People. Anyone with an unusual or intriguing or interesting job or hobby -- a private detective, beekeeper, classic-car owner, dog trainer ... campus personality -- ombudsman, coach, distinguished teacher ... [s]omeone whose predicament symbolizes that of other people ... [s]omeone who has made or is currently making an important contribution to a community ... [s]omeone in a community who is generally not liked or respected but tolerated, such as a homeless person, gruff store owner, or unorthodox church member, or someone who has been or is in danger of being shunned or exiled from a community ... college senior or graduate student in a major you are considering ... [s]omeone working in the career you are thinking of pursuing [or] ... trains people to do the kind of work you would like to do.
Places. A weight reduction clinic, tanning salon, gody-building gym, health spa, nail salon ... used-car lot, old movie house, used-book store, antique shop, historic site, hospital emergency room, hospice, birthing center, psychiatric unit ... local diner; the oldest, biggest, or quickest restaurant in town; a coffeehouse ... florist shop, nursery, or greenhouse; pawnshop; boatyard ... facility that provides a needed service in its community, such as a legal advice bureau, child care center, medical clinic, mission or shelter that offers free meals ... [a]n Internet site, such as a chat room, game parlor, or bulletin board where people form a virtual community.
Activities. A citizens' volunteer program -- voter registration, public television auction, meals-on-wheels project, tutoring program ... unconventional sports event -- marathon, Frisbee tournament, chess match ... [f]olk dancing, rollerblading, rock climbing, poetry reading ... [a] team practicing ... community improvement project, such as graffiti cleaning, tree planting, house repairing, church painting, highway litter pickup ... [r]esearchers working together on a project ... [the] actia; [and usually very unglamorous] activities performed by someone doing a kind of work represented on television, like that of a police detective, judge, attorney, newspaper reporter, taxi driver, novelist, or emergency room doctor ... [a]ctivities to prepare for a particular kind of work, for example, a boxer preparing for a fight, an attorney preparing for a trial, a teacher or professor preparing a course, an actor rehearsing a role, a musician practicing for a concert.
Please note (this is important): The above suggestions are intended to get you thinking. They aren't rules. If you want to write about someone, or something that's not on the list, do so. If it interests you, it will interest your reader. If it bores you, it will bore your reader. That's not a rule either, but it works out that way 999 times out of 1,000. [...].
Please also note (and this is just as important), all of these story ideas are about people. Even the ones the St. Martin's Guide classifies lists under places or activities are about people cooperating -- or not! -- in a shared location or purpose. My first editor, who had learned newspapering the hard way working for weekly papers as a teenager in Tennessee, used to bounce my stories back at me when I got too carried away with weighty issues or lush description. "There's no people in it," she'd say. "I can't use this stuff till you put some people in the story." So how do you get people in your writing? Simple. You go out and interview them. Use their exact words. Make 'em come alive in the paper.
Gathering your information
I won't alarm you with the "r" word, but this is really about research. Journalists call it reporting. It's the same thing. "The power of [news] stories lies not just in their evocative use of language, also in the compelling power of facts," says Christopher Scanlan, director of writing programs at the Poynter Institute for journalists. "To gather these facts," he adds, "the reporter should always try to be on the scene ... [b]ut even if the writer can't be present and must reconstruct the action, specific details are needed to bring the story alive in the reader's mind" (423-24). Scanlan's advice for student writers: "Get out on the streets. Don't hang around the campus newsroom or your dorm. Storytellers aren't tied to their desks. They're out in the streets. ... In your reporting use the five senses and a few others: sense of place, sense of people, sense of time, sense of drama. How did it look? ... What sounds echoed? If music is playing, is it the lush strings of a classical piece or the head-banging clang of guitars? Is the wind whistling through the leaves? Are children's cries filling the air? Close your eyes and record in your notebook every sound you hear" (415). Take notes. What do you see? What are people wearing? Is there graffiti chalked on Gingko Square? What does it say? What do you hear (and overhear)? What are people saying? What do you smell? What do you feel? Is it hot? Cold? Get it down. Take notes on everything you might not remember later. That's what notes are for.
"We should all try to make readers see, smell, feel, taste and hear," say Brian Brooks and other journalism professors at the University of Missouri. "One way to do that is to write using scenes as much as possible. To write a scene, you have to be there. You need to capture the signs, the sounds and the smells that are pertinent" (188). Missouri is one of the best journalism schools in the country, and their advice is good: "To create such scenes, you must use all your senses to gather information, and your notevook should reflect that teporting Along with the results of interviews, your notebook should bulge with details of signs and smells, sounds and textures. David Finkel, winner of the American Society of Newspaper Editors Distinuished Writing Award in 1986, says, 'Anything that pertains to any sense I feel at any moment, I write down.' Gather details indiscriminately. Later, you can discard those that are not germane. Because you were there, you can write the scene as if you were writing a play" (189). When I started reporting for newspapers, I was told I needed to know 10 times as much as wrote in the paper. If I didn't know all the facts, I wouldn't know which ones I could leave out.
Here's the Missouri Group again: "Interviewing -- having conversations with sources -- is the key to most stories you will write. ... Information is the raw material of a journalist. While some of it is gathered from records and some from observation, most of it is gathered in person-to-person conversations" (49-50). You probably already have some of the basic note-taking skills you need from taking class notes in school.
A couple of basics from my experience: (1) take down enough key words so you can reconstruct the quote; but (2) don't take down too many. Don't get bogged down. The person you're interviewing might say, "We lived, uh, like, in New Mexico." All you need to take down is, "We lived in New Mexico" -- which might look more like "w lvd N Mex" handwrittten. You'll get in the habit of doing what experienced reporters do: Use abbreviations. Make 'em up on the spot. Write fast. Scribble. Get it down, and fill in the blanks later.
[...]
Works Cited
Axelrod, Rise, and Charles Cooper. The St. Martin's Guide to Writing. 5th Ed. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997.
Brooks, Brian, and the Missouri Group. News Reporting and Writing. 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2005.
Scanlan, Christopher. Reporting and Writing: Basics for the 21st Century. Fort Worth: Harcourt College Publishers, 2000.
Click here to return to Pete Ellertsen's faculty page. [rev. Jan. 06]
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