Journalism Summary and Homework, 10/1/12

On Monday we welcomed special guest, Janna Maron, to our class. Janna is the publisher of the quarterly literary arts journal, Under the Gum Tree, and has extensive experience in writing and editing. Janna spoke about a variety of topics and shared a web-site which may be helpful to our young writers: www.750words.com

After Janna's talk, we discussed the differences between news writing and feature writing. 

I want to take a moment to clarify what students should be doing each week. Each student has been assigned an area to cover for The Mosaic Monthly, but in addition, this is a writing class, therefore, students will be writing on a weekly basis above and beyond their responsibilities for the paper.

Last week the assignment was to write a news story -- students exchanged papers with a classmate and need to edit the story they received for content, grammar and punctuation. This week each student must write a feature article. Students were given a worksheet and a list of ideas to help them if they get stuck. We also read a feature story in class, so if they have trouble remembering the style of a feature article, refer them back to "Youth's Gone in Crack of a Bat." Final feature articles must be typed, and brought to class on October 15th. Don't forget to write a headline. We will share our feature stories and the group will select one article to appear in the first issue of our paper.

On that note, all articles and sections for our first issue should be completed by October 22nd so that they can be presented to the editors for final review. All articles and sections should be edited for publication by October 29th. Our first issue will be distributed no later than November 12th!