I'm quite surprised at how much I'm enjoying this semester!
In fact, this is probably the best semester I've ever experienced. After just seven weeks, I feel like I've learned so much, and developed my skills greatly.
My favourite module is NM2220 Introduction to Media Writing. So far, we have been taught how to plan and write news articles.
It's been rather eye-opening to see how news articles are composed of various elements like the lead, which is the first paragraph of the article and contains the most important information in the entire story; context, which gives the background to the story; quotes from relevant sources to liven up the story and lend it credibility; and colour, which refers to other details which help to make the story less boring, such as a description of the place where something happened.
Our lecturer, a retired Reuters veteran, shared with us the so-called elevator mental exercise, which we use when crafting a lead. We have to imagine that our friend is standing inside a lift and the doors are closing. We are outside the lift, and we want to tell our friend the news but have only a few seconds to do so before the doors close fully. What will we say in that short amount of time? That is the lead.
I daresay the elevator mental exercise is the most useful tool I have ever learned in my life. For years I've had a problem with being concise, but I think it has helped to alleviate the issue somewhat.
The other thing I learned is that I should keep my paragraphs short. In the old days of printed newspapers, text was crammed into narrow columns and if paragraphs were too long, they would flow over many lines and make the article look very unreadable. Now that people read news on small phone screens, the issue remains, so the best practice in the news industry is to limit paragraphs to one or two lines each.
You might have noticed that my paragraphs in this post are a bit shorter than the paragraphs I used to write. That's because I see the wisdom in keeping paragraphs short and have decided to adopt the practice in my own blog from now on. They won't all be one or two lines but gone are the days of the ten-line whopper too.
Such lengthy paragraphs can come across as being very turgid. Turgid. Our lecturer uses that word often, to warn us against writing in a way that will send the casual reader diving for cover. "Please ah, you're not doing academic writing ok?" she would say.
I don't know why, but that word, "turgid", tickles me no end.
Another module worthy of note is GET1031A Computational Thinking. I wasn't very happy at first when all Arts students were forced to take this module because I thought it would be just another load of baloney scaremongering us with threats of robots taking our jobs if we don't learn computer programming.
But it turned out to be a lot of fun. The two professors in charge of the module are pretty cool even though they look like they've been around since dinosaurs roamed the earth. They really make an effort to break down the concepts for us into simple bite-sized chunks that we can understand. And we get to apply our newfound knowledge through the tutorial problems and assignment questions.
For example, we learned how to write a basic algorithm, using English. After all, this is not a coding module. Then we applied it to a situation where we had to navigate a robot through a maze.
Trust me, it's not as difficult as it sounds, and is actually quite fun.
So now, at the midpoint of the semester, I'm glad to say that I'm not dreading the second half of it. To the contrary, I'm looking forward to it!
I'll publish another couple more posts this week. They're already written and "in the queue". In fact, I produced them all over the past few days. I am quite a prolific writer when the mood strikes me.
The first will appear tomorrow and it will be about media writing again because I like it so much I just can't help myself. In that post, I will show you a sample of my writing, in which I break a piece of news that you've never seen in the newspapers, online or offline, before!
And in the second post this week, which will come out over the weekend, you will get to see how my new style of writing in short paragraphs can be applied to opinion editorials too. I will dissect the new curriculum introduced recently to my old diploma, and express my utter dismay at how stupid and watered-down the powers-that-be have made the course coverage. We truly are raising a generation of imbeciles.
Stay tuned.
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