Benedictine University at Springfield
Fall Semester 2007
www.sci.edu/classes/ellertsen/comm337syllabus.html
"There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers." -- H.L. Mencken
Final Examination – Due at 1:30 p.m., Wed., Dec. 5
The Principles of Journalism adopted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, available at http://www.journalism.org/, say telling the truth “is a process that begins with the professional discipline of assembling and verifying facts. Then journalists try to convey a fair and reliable account of their meaning, valid for now, subject to further investigation.” But words like truth tend to make working journalists nervous. So they tend not to use them. In her autobiographical book “Small Blessings,” Celestine Sibley of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution said “newspapering is dedicated to something important – letting the people know.” Sibley, who covered courts, the legislature and major stories like the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, said she did it once with “a straightforward recital of the facts, devoid of feeling” (170-172). The story won a prize. And Donald Murray, author of our textbook “Writing to Deadline,” recalled his first prize-winning story, about a suicidal jumper on a window ledge: “I followed the specific detail – the terrifying chant of the crowd [‘Jump! Jump!’ Jump!’]. … I wrote the story with information – specific, revealing details and direct quotations. I didn’t attempt ‘great’ writing, I just tried to get out of the way of the horrifying information” (6). Murray, like Sibley, doesn’t use the word truth. Instead, he speaks of specific details, details and facts.
“I was told [as a reporter] and then learned by public attack and embarrassment that it was worse to spell the name wrong than to charge a person with public lewdness,” Murray adds. “If you got the name of the street wrong, no one trusted anything in the story.” So telling the truth is about getting the facts straight and presenting them to readers with enough context so they can understand them. Write a 1,000- to 1,500-word essay answering these questions:
How important is truthfulness to journalistic ethics? How do Don Murray's recommended reporting techniques, like seeking out surprise or avoiding clichés of vision, and his techniques for telling a story -- finding the “line,” explaining context and organizing a story around a clear narrative – help us get the facts straight and communicate them to our readers? How can they help you in your own writing?
What do other working journalists, or former journalists like Robert Fisk of The [London] Independent and those on the HBO show “The Wire” profiled in The New Yorker, have to say about finding and telling the truth? How can this help you in your own writing?
In reporting and writing your feature stories for Communications 337, what did you learn about interviewing people, getting the facts straight, understanding them in context and putting it all into words on paper (or pixels on a screen) so a reader could understand them? How can it help you as a professional writer?
No comments:
Post a Comment