Writer’s Fortnight changed the way I look at storytelling. The whole process, from the interviews to writing to our articles, exposed me to a new and in my case, relatively unknown form of storytelling that I can benefit from now and later in the future. I think that Writer’s Fortnight was the most dynamic and interesting unit in English this year. I’m grateful to have learnt about the diverse experiences of people in our community and about all the influential speakers and stories I got to learn about and even study.
The opportunity to listen to the diverse experiences and stories of people such as Ella Joicey in our school, or Graham Rawle’s unique take on writing, was an experience I will cherish. Listening and preparing questions for such contrasting types of stories was an important first step to prepare us for writing articles. In order to produce “authentic, responsible, and powerful” pieces we had to get into the mind of journalists, and allowing us to prepare questions and analyse real, credible articles allowed students to do so.
I feel like the aspect which I not only took most interest in but also grew and developed my skills the most in was the technical aspects of writing an article and discovering the elements of what made a good feature article. As a grade 9, I haven’t been exposed to writing anything like a news article, with the intention of informing rather than influencing, so I chose to write a feature article to be able to acquire the skills to effectively write an article. I think that the process of writing my article was really enjoyable and a good learning experience. The fact that an actual journalist came into our class and told us about their experience and also some of the key skills and qualities that journalists needed, shows how special the unit really was. Their ability to capture the essence of the speaker in an interview, and structuring points to make them relevant, informative, but still interesting were all skills that I had kept in mind during the process of taking my own interviews and writing my article.
What gave me the greatest insight into the “journalistic storytelling” experience was my topic. I chose to talk about service at our school and some of the possible flaws and did so in the style of a feature article. Service is usually something that people tend to avoid talking about, almost like they don’t want to question it, and in that sense choosing to expose some potential problems in my article made it controversial. I think that sense of having to pay close attention to my word choices and the way I used quotations from teachers and students let me understand the pressure that journalists face to make their articles truly ‘unbiased’ to avoid conflict.
A challenge during the process of writing my article was making it ‘sound’ like a feature article, which, perhaps was a problem that I faced because I couldn’t find a ‘mentor’ text or article that had a similar structure to what I had thought. However, despite this challenge, I was able to understand the mind and some struggles of journalists, and ultimately, that was one of the biggest rewards that Writer’s Fortnight gave me.