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I just got this email from a student who graduated in May. I’m the adviser to The Setonian, the student newspaper. I think it’s safe to say that working with the Setonian helped me get the job. Several of the tests I took with the company involved me compiling given information into paragraph format, which was…
“What answer do you want?” “Just tell me what you want me to write, and I’ll write it for you!” I once had a student in a literature class who almost had a panic attack when she found out, from the mock final exam, that the final exam would contain poems and prose passages that…
I had a similar experience, with a mentor who very rarely praised my work. But when he read my first full draft of my dissertation, and along with his notes told me to schedule my defense, I knew he wasn’t being polite or friendly or sympathetic — I knew he was treating me like someone…
Headline Capitalization Generator! Simple concept. Type your headline in a box. Invisible typing fairies will capitalize your words for you. One of the settings is for AP Style. You should probably actually learn the rules for capitalizing first, but this is a useful tool for checking. Similar:Shall I Encode Thee In DNA? Sonnets Stored On…
The conscious awareness of Comic Sans promotes — at least among some people — contempt and summary dismissal. But is there a typeface that promotes, engenders a belief that a sentence is true? Or at least nudges us in that direction? And indeed there is. It is Baskerville. Believe it or not, the results of…
What does a reporter do when a source rambles, misspeaks, or otherwise botches what would have been a good quote? “Generally, I fix quotes for grammar, especially with average, ordinary people,” says Ellyn Ferguson, a regional reporter for Gannett News Service. “I am doing the interview to get information from them, not make them look…
I tell my students that if what they want is specific job skills, they should learn how to lay cable or get a Class-2 rating to drive a P-5000 Power Loader. But the specific job skills I teach a freshman or sophomore may be out of date by graduation day. Rather than teaching students how to use…
Saving this article. What a story. Nowhere does the reporter insert an opinion, but the take-away message is powerful. “I think it’s phenomenal,” Dieter said. “If you don’t think out of the box, you can’t get anything done out of the box.” Dieter and about 75 other conference delegates were clearly hoping for an entertaining…
I probably should not be surprised, but when I saw this run of several headlines on the ABC News website, I was struck by how deliberately uninformative they are. I added some useful information that could have been in the headline. A print journalist writes a headline for someone who’s already holding the newspaper, so…
What is the story behind this image? What is the source of that text? Why is that word “allegedly” doing in the headline? The image is a screenshot from Facebook’s trending news stories. Who wrote those words? I searched Google for “officer on leave after video allegedly shows him pulling gun on unarmed teens” at 10:30am…
Hermann Zapf, the designer of fonts such as Palatino, Optima, Zapfino, Melior, Aldus, and the bizarre but much beloved Zapf Dingbats, has died at age 96.The revered German typographer and calligrapher passed away on June 4. In his long and prolific career, Zapf worked on many fonts, but his personal favorite was the humanist sans serif typeface Optima, the lettering chosen for the…
Writers make mistakes. That’s why we have editors. But editors make mistakes, too. I don’t know the circumstances behind this particular error, but chances are that the reporter did not write this headline — that would have been the job of whatever local editor decided to reprint the AP story. Similar:The battle against airborne COVID…
Relaxing in bed on the first Sunday morning of my summer break, I web-surfed across the name of something I was interested in, on a “Top 5” list. I host some “Top #X Whatevers” pages on my website, but I put all the items (writing tips of some sort) on one page, and include a…
This Time magazine article is a good one, but that “what you think you know is wrong” headline is more of the same obnoxious clickbait that the article itself critiques, so here’s a bit of what I found useful. Scrolling is more acceptable behavior than it used to be. We’re all much more used to…
* The best stories are the ones you find, not the ones assigned to you. If you can keep yourself busy doing your own story ideas, editors won’t have to assign you stories. … * … and if you get assigned a story, don’t leave the editor’s desk until you know exactly what she wants.…
I have no particular opinion about how to close an email. I just checked my “outbox” and I see that I haven’t closed any of my recent messages. Several were responses to requests from other people, so “Thank you” would be out of place, and even “Here you go” would be so unnecessary it would…
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Anyone with an English degree will tell you that picking this major can lead to a lot skeptical questions: “What are you going to do after school?” or “What kind of a job can you really get with an English degree?” But the awesome part about this major is its flexibility—you’re not confined to a…
Clever little Easter eggs in this article about the history of My Fair Lady refer to lyrics from the show. I played Col. Pickering in high school 30 years ago. One night during “The Rain in Spain,” when Higgins threw the xylophone mallet in the air, it got stuck in the drapes above the stage.…
At GDC 2015, noted interactive fiction game designer Emily Short (Galatea, Counterfeit Monkey) gave a microtalk on how to create a protagonist that is interesting, engaging and will stimulate your players. —Gamasutra Similar:A Pedestal, A Table, A Love Letter: Archaeologies of Gender in Videogame HistoryA thoughtful, informative article on the…Business[E-Mail is for Old People] –[E-Mail is…