“Our student-writers rose to the challenge, producing authentic, responsible, and powerful pieces.”

This year for Writer’s Fortnight, we were meant to create a piece of journalism on a topic we thought was relevant to our audience, which was all of high school. We spoke with and interviewed several guest speakers, including Enlai Yeoh (a Straits Times journalist), Angela Noronha (an ex-Ivy League student and education counsellor), and Sergey Grechishkin (an author who grew up in the Soviet Union). I chose to write about Sergey, as his story was the one that gripped me the most and was one I felt I could write the most meaningful article about.

This process was quite a ‘challenge’ for me, since journalism is something that I’ve seldom done formally in English class before. Initially, I was daunted by the sheer amount of options I had as to what I could write about as I struggled to pin down my topic. However, after thinking back to the advice that Enlai Yeoh had previously given us, I focused on finding a topic that would be the most resonant to the most amount of people, and one that would be the most engaging to read. The whole point of a feature article is to capture the human interest, and Sergey’s story of cultural divergences and life without a ‘home’ was one I feel a majority of the student population here at UWC can relate to, myself included. The next major challenge was choosing an angle that would best communicate my message. I could have opted for a profile piece, a triumph over adversity piece, a historical piece, and so on, but I instead chose to do a piece that uses Sergey as an example of a third culture kid, and how he embodies the TCK experience. The final major challenge was choosing which aspects of the interview to include in the final article. Filtering out the great quotes and ideas from the good ones was not easy since I had to think about where exactly I want to put it in the article and how well it fits my angle. However, after gathering all my quotes and ideas and modifying my angle slightly (to better fit what I’d gathered), writing the article was a much smoother process than what I imagined it would be, as a result of having everything planned already and only needing to put everything down in full sentences.

To ensure the authenticity of my article, I tried to focus on the human interest aspect quite a bit, so that my article was more of a unique and engaging read as opposed to a bunch of facts with a person’s name and some quotes thrown in for good measure. Though I didn’t finalize my topic until later on, I treated the interview with Sergey like he was already my subject, listening attentively and thinking of possible angles. Additionally, being able to relate to the subject matter myself would’ve made the article more authentic, since I was more passionate about what I was writing about. However, one thing Enlai stressed on was to not forge evidence or make up quotes, as only irresponsible journalists do that. To make sure I was being responsible, I listened to the interview with Sergey multiple times to make sure I was getting all my quotes and facts completely right. I then had Sergey read my article to make sure that he was happy with his representation (which he was), along with a few other people (Enlai, my dad, and Ms. Wiseman) to suggest any further improvements to my article. To make my piece of work more powerful, I mainly just focused on knowing exactly what I was writing about. As I found new quotes and ideas from the interview, my angle changed accordingly. Before starting to write, I reviewed all that I had gotten from the interview and made sure all of it fit into what I was trying to say, and that I made sure I knew what I was talking about. If I was still hazy on my angle, the article wouldn’t have been powerful at all, since you’ve got to believe in what you’re writing about in order for the reader to believe it.

If anything, Writer’s Fortnight has helped me understand the true importance of journalistic language and the power of knowing your audience. If I had written about the same topic but in essay-style language and published it a retirement home magazine, it would have been clunky and horribly out of place. Going through the journalistic process has taught me how to write journalism and been a great exposure to it. More importantly though, it has taught me how to write for your audience and how to make it relevant because at the end of the day, that’s what journalism is all about.