The Errors of My Grammer

When I signed up for "Writing for Mass Communication," I wasn't entirely aware that I had agreed to take a course on a foreign language. But on the first days of class, when people around me began throwing around crazy words like "participle," "conjunction," and "pronunverb," (maybe not that last one) I began questioning whether I really spoke the English language at all. When something called the "passive voice" was introduced, I was officially lost. However, four or five classes and several poorly received assignments after it was originally introduced, I finally began to understand what it meant. My extent of grammar experience prior to this class was limited to the five or six "Schoolhouse Rock" videos I watched in 2nd grade, so I figured that I would go back to the source material and apply it to this new material:

                                      

Notice what I did at the end there? That's a transition, because now I'm moving on to talk about an essential element of journalism that I am still struggling to work in to my writing today; objectivity. You see, my standards of engaging journalism might be a bit different from what the typical communications professor (you) might dictate are appropriate. 

                                                        Pictured: Quality Journalism

So it's still a constant fight to make sure that words that have the potential to make my writing interesting, albeit opinionated, stay out of the picture. I've found that the best way to censure myself on this issue is by sticking to the original 5 W's of journalism: who, what, when, where and why. If I view each article around this basic structure, I am more capable of telling a straightforward piece of news, rather than embellishing it to fit a particular frame. Using the 5 W's can also give the reader a quick lowdown on the information you are covering, without losing their attention by throwing in unnecessary details. To show how this principle works, I've taken one of my favorite movies: "The Lion King," and trimmed the first "act" (it is based on "Hamlet after all) down to the W's. The first 40 minutes of the movie can be summed up in 1:13 when this is completed. (And I left in extra time to show the monkeys and the elephants. Just because they're awesome.) 

                                  

Basically, the best thing that a journalist can do for their article is make is short and sweet (And not use cliches). Although sentences with enough commas to make the paragraph look like it has severe teenage acne may work in a term paper, or one of those scholarly journals that no one really reads, an excess of them in a news report demeans its overall value. One of my most notable offenses of this was in the recent assignment asking us to write a letter to the editor. I wrote a whopper 70 word, and 3 comma'ed sentence that consumed the greater part of the letter itself. By instead presenting my points one at a time, rather than in a rushing torrent of opinion, I would have made a far more effective case. 

                     Being short worked out fine for the munchkins, so why shouldn't it work for me?