The Quest Begins

Yesterday was my first experience with the conditions a professional journalist has to deal with everyday. It began at 9:30 a.m. when we listened to a panel of professional journalists tell us about their experiences and give us tips for a career in the news industry. We took notes for the duration of the talk. After lunch we went down (literally) to USM’s student newspaper printing room to write an article about what the speakers had said. Our instructor urged us to look over our notes and just “throw up” into the computer to get started. Afterwards, we could organize our facts and thoughts into a final article. We had three and a half hours to get it done. It was then that I came face to face with the concept I had always dreaded: The deadline. Any word that has “dead” in it should always be regarded with suspicion, in my opinion. I suppose this fear could be attributed to my experience with homeschooling. At home, I could more or less go at my own pace, maybe take a walk in the middle of an assignment to refresh my brain. Of course, it’s also possible that I’m just lazy. But here I found myself trapped beneath the surface of the earth for more than three hours with nothing to do except write an article from my own notes. However, something unexpected happened. I found that one of what I had considered to be my weak points as a writer helped to save me from a terrible fate.Whenever I write a speech or an essay, I always spend a long time trying to think of ways to expand on my ideas. In short, my work has always been short. Sure enough, as soon as I started writing my article, it came out in bullet points. What I discovered about newspaper articles, however, is that they are all written in bullet points; just the facts, nothing else.I managed to complete my article in a couple of hours, long before the dreaded deadline arrived. It just goes to show that even your weaknesses can be useful sometimes.