Tuesday, September 9, 2014

The Start of the Second Bend of Investigative Journalism

News stories from the first part of our investigative journalism unit have now all been submitted.  I'll start assessing those news stories soon.  You can check my progress on your own by seeing if I have been commenting on your paper and completing the rubric.

Today we had a good discussion on the Kim Kilbride article.

We discussed the effectiveness of her lead ( good specific case study story to personalize the info that followed).

We discussed the social significance of her story (it was vast!).

We discussed the ways in which it was an example of investigative journalism (too many to count!).

We discussed the bias the piece contained (hard to argue against that).

We even looked at the closing and discussed its shortcomings.

Finally, I informed you that you are going to be doing something similar.  With that in mind...

Tonight I want you to identify 5 topics that you would tend to write about if I told you you had to write about something.  For example, in class I told you the first things I would tend to write about would be my son, my daughter, and my wife (oh I have some stories to tell you about her!)

Aside from those, I would likely write about biking or running or eating ( I love eating!  Tacos anyone?)

I might also choose to write about life in a big family (five brothers and sisters), funny things (I like to find the humor in everything...it just makes it easier to handle) or teaching (it's amazing what 12-14 year olds say, do and write!).

So there you have it.  That's my list of five things I tend to write about...okay actually it's more like nine, but you get the idea.

Write these down in your writer's notebooks and bring them to class tomorrow.  We will start finding the social significance angle you could focus on and discover who might be an expert on your topic in the class.

Sound good?  I thought so too.

Until next time...

No comments:

Post a Comment