What I Learned In My Wonderful Writing College Class

Yesterday, in my Comm 160 course, I learned how a lot of words in a piece of writing is not always the answer to everything. Sometimes it's hard for me to be bland and to the point when writing a paper, or anything for that matter. It seems like extra words and descriptors are always necessary to jazz a piece up. It almost seems like it makes my papers more interesting. However, that is not true! While extra words may seem more extravagant or 'fancy' it just makes a piece of work more confusing and unclear. For example, the title of this blog post is completely unnecessary!! Why add all the extra garbage when the title can be straight and to the point? Instead, my title should read: "What I Learned". You would get the rest of the information inside my blog post like you did. This is a good lesson for me to work on because I feel like I do this a lot in my pieces of writing. Now that I know that it's wrong, I'm going to be more mindful of what I put in my papers... Starting NOW!

How to write a lead...

This week in my Comm160 class we learned how to correctly write a lead in a news story. You would assume that it was cake, well at least I did. But, it's not. At all. It's actually really difficult to decide what information deserves to be in the leading sentence of a story. Like always, you must include the WWWWH... You know, Who What Where When and How. Sometimes you aren't provided all of that information, and sometimes you have way too much information! Basically, all you have to remember is to keep it short, sweet and informative! Let everyone know what's going on, but don't bore them in the process! Apparently, a lead should only consist of 35 words, at the most! The shorter and more hard hitting, the better! It sounds awesome when you have a short lead that has you begging for more! As short as a lead could be, it takes a lot of thought and consideration to write an effective piece! Let me tell ya, it's not all that simple.