Overall I would say I am somewhere in between being prepared and being slightly behind. I have one out of two interviews done and one schedule for Wednesday. That will give me time to get a rough draft done and ready for next class and then to further edit for the peer review class.
I am thus far on track with my Feature Creature. I have conducted one interview and need one more. I am waiting for our schedules to allow me to continue this project. I have found plenty of information on the GUST program and its history, but I am now trying to work on speaking to students in the program. Before the 23rd, I hope to finish off some editing, as I know my work is still a rough draft. While I do have enough to be workshop-ready, I recognize formatting issues chronologically that need to be addressed before then.
The one interview I conducted with Dean Keristead went better than I expected, and I have more information than to know what to do with. She gave lots of beneficial information, but portraying that in print has been a bit challenging. I am more confident in my interviewing process by giving the person a few questions to ponder before our meeting. I look forward to seeing this feature come together with the other perspective of the GUST program, but I am in a good spot in terms of deadlines.
I have an interview tomorrow the 15th, with one of the other harder to track down people on campus that I need to interview. Then I have to interview a student. Then I will write the interview into the Feature. This will get me to a good stage to have the workshop on Tuesday and then the peer review one for the 23rd of February. All the way up to that point I have it on my eportfolio page. What I have so far is the pitches bit done, the first 200-300 part and one interview done. A detailed outline in my brain of what and how I am going to write this up this weekend to about 600 hundred words and incorporated the interviews into my work a living aspect and witness credibility part to the piece. So my feature creature will mostly be finished by Tuesday at the earliest, and Wednesday at the latest. Unless something unforeseen comes out of nowhere, then I should be finished with a draft by then for peer review.
Checking in on what I have done for our Feature Creature assignment, I am on track. I saved my two pitches in a Google doc from when we would have our pitch session in class, so that was a quick upload to my ePortfolio. I also started to think of questions and a focus or direction I wanted my story to take while I came up with the pitch, so I had notes and a few questions to work off of as I started my first draft of around 300 words. I had a meeting with Dean Millen set up for Feb 5th for an unrelated topic, but as we chatted about my classes, I mentioned this project, and he was more than happy to answer a few questions. Those major quotes were a great start, and I posted my second draft of around 500 words. Since then, I have been fine-tuning my questions and figuring out what angle I want to bring to this story. At first, I wanted to keep it to whether students’ feelings about the schedule changed and why or why not. However, after meeting with Dean Millen, some of his points made me reexamine what I wanted to highlight. So far, I have conducted all of my interviews – I have quotes from a junior and two seniors to work off of. Before Friday, I will post my peer review draft, as it is pretty close to ready for that now.
As a status report, I have uploaded my pitch and early draft to my website. I am unsure if we need both original pitches so I have to check in for clarification on that; I can’t quite remember what my second pitch was! My early draft sets up the basic information needed for this reporting and has a student quote to show a frequent struggle in the Mail Room. That draft has less detail and doesn’t quite hold all the elements for journalism but sets me up for my next version. For my workshop draft, I was able to interview a Senior who works at the mail room and got information like open hours, how they organize the mail, their struggles with understaffing, and how UNE could improve their mail rooms and the receiving process. This draft is a working progress as I’m trying to figure out the structure of my Feature and how I want the information to be ordered. I’m finding it’s easiest to get all the info down and then go back and shuffle the words around. With some finetuning on this step and the help of peer review there is minimal work left to do and I should be on track for the Friday 23rd deadline.
I believe I am in a solid spot with how my feature is going so far. I got a good bases for the paper that was set up at the start of writing. So far what has been working was to start with an idea and seeing where the idea went. The first draft I wrote was all about the biggening and the introduction to the idea however didn’t give a definitive answer or lead into a answer. I thought of an answer in my head but my idea of what the answer would be as well as what I want to finish the feature with. However, as time has gone on, especially with the interviews, my view and ending has changed and given me a better idea of how to wrap everything up. Other than wrapping up the whole feature, the one thing I need to do is get the last interview done and writing. The second of the student interviews has started to become a challenge sense after a week I still haven’t heard back from the club that statically is the most popular. It might cause me to take a different approach on contact or choosing a different club as it’s not a requirement to be statically the most popular but could help add more credibility to whatever I state that there is or isn’t favoritism.
So far, I am doing well with the feature creature project. I have been meeting the mini-deadlines, and everything is posted on my e-portfolio. At first, I was super excited by my idea, but I am finding that it is quite difficult to come up with extra research, as it is quite a new topic. I am still enjoying writing my article, and I am still confident that it is doable, but I will need to work a bit harder.
The only piece of my project that I still need to carry out are my interviews. I have both scheduled for next week. I plan to interview two students who recently studied abroad in a walkable city and explore the similarities and differences between walkable cities and college campuses with them. I also plan to ask them about the impact of being in a walkable city and then moving back to America where that idea is not common.
After carrying out my interviews, I will have enough material to finish my final draft. Writing the mini drafts has been difficult without this information, so having it will help me fill in some gaps. I have been attempting to imagine where my quotes will fit into my article, and I have imagined spots based on the responses of my interviewees. I am excited to see where my article ends up going, and that the interviewees might have to say in response to my questions.
I am fairly on track for the feature creature assignment and only have to make a couple of phone calls regarding my story in order to confirm accuracy. I have several hundred words already typed out and plenty of notes to flesh out into a proper article, so I certainly will have plenty of content to go off of to complete my feature assignment.
I am holding my first in-person interview directly after class today, with Dr. Tilburg, Director of UNE’s Marine Science Center, and I hope to get some crucial information, specifically concerning whether or not the rumors surrounding RV Sharkology are true or false. I have also sent a few other emails, to potential witnesses of the incident and people who have been closely involved, but I have not received an email back from some students. I have been spending a lot of time reconstructing my first draft into something more cohesive, more chronological, and less of a narrative. I am finding it a bit difficult to find certain information, considering not many students are super involved with the marine vessels on campus, but I am hoping to incorporate more opinions of students into the feature creature, as there are a lot of rumors surrounding my topic, and I’m trying to set the record straight.
The first thing that I did when picking which pitch was going to work the best. It was easy going from there I immediatly contacted my coaches that I needed to speak with for their interviews. I used previous knowledge that I new bout the programs history and fact checked it using the UNE athetics website. The firts part was laying things out and planning. Making sure proper word economy is in oorder is something that I am working on using better. Goiong over other pieces in class really helped because between writing and taking interviews really helped me ask better questions and know how to use my writers voice. Overall, the information was easy to obtain and everyone was easy going and very willing to contribute at a moments notice. Additionally I think that this is a great story of a football team with humble beginnings sheds its skin and assumes its role in the Commonwelth Coast Confrence. That Is why I decided to give this feature the tite of “Started from The Bottom, Now were Here.” I believe that it fits the story extremley well, and added a certian eye catching feeling that I was going for.
I think the best thing that I did when preparing for my interviews was having preexisting questions that I would be able to ask them, and making the interviews as short and to-the-point as possible. I ended up getting a lot of information in a very good amount of time, and my recordings were short and easy to pull quotes from. As for the actual writing itself, I tried to focus more on the actual facts to keep the paper as short and concise as possible. I did end up going over which wasn’t great, but hopefully in the peer review session I can work on amending that issue and cut down chunks of my article for the next draft. I did really appreciate how willing people were with helping me out with the interviews, the RA’s I ended up questioning were very helpful, and it seemed as though the questions I was asking were ones they’d been thinking about for some time, because they ended up coming up with answers to questions I didn’t realize I had until the interview started.
So far on the feature things have been somewhat smooth but have also been somewhat challenging. My two pitches where Une closes the dining too early on weekend and Should Une not allow freshmen to have their cars on campus. In general the pitches were easy to figure out what I want to write about and even when I have put “pen to paper” it hasn’t really been that difficult to write. I have interviews set up with students on campus in the coming days to discuss their thoughts on the feature and what they think the school could do to increase satisfaction amongst students when it comes to parking. I have had a difficult time getting a hold of security to potentially pick their brain about the situation and why they think it may or may not be a good idea and their thoughts in general about the situation. I think I need to do a better job locking in and spending some more quality time on the project because I may end up behind and that could cause more problems down the line but I’m sure I will make it work.
I believe that I am up to date and on track for the feature creature project. I have made my Feature Creature page on eportfolio and have my Pitch, my Early Draft, my 400-500 Word Draft, and my ready to be Peer Reviewed draft all uploaded to my Feature Creature page. For me this feature has been easy to focus on because the topic is something that I am passionate about. Also there are several online resources that have had a lot of useful information for me to go off of. I will include them down below. I also already had my Interview with Dr. Pam Morgan who is the head of the living shoreline project which is what my feature is all about. Hearing her perspective was great and she was quick to get back to me with a time and date for us to have our interview. Right now I am at 492 words so I still have some more writing to do. I think my piece could also flow a lot better so making those adjustments for the final draft will be key. I think I could also add some more statistics and there is one quote in my feature that I’m not sure if I still want to use. The quote talks about the fact that the gulf of Maine is warming at a faster rate than anywhere else in the world. I like the quote but it’s just really long so I’m not sure if I should replace it with a different quote.
What has been working is the knowledge I have on my topic and it feels like to me that the words just flow easier and I am able to write interesting statements. What I have left to do for next class is finish up adding in my second interview statement from a player who suffered a non contact knee injury. I also have a few little bits of information that I have to add in as well that will make the feature a strong story.
I believe I am slightly behind on my feature, I have my headline, lead, and nutgraph done. My reaserch on my topic has been going well, and I have been able to find information on why the bookstore is priced the way it is. I have to get my interviews done, I know who I will be interviewing, but just have to do them. Then I have to fininish concluding my feature.
15 thoughts on “JOURNAL # 7”
Overall I would say I am somewhere in between being prepared and being slightly behind. I have one out of two interviews done and one schedule for Wednesday. That will give me time to get a rough draft done and ready for next class and then to further edit for the peer review class.
I am thus far on track with my Feature Creature. I have conducted one interview and need one more. I am waiting for our schedules to allow me to continue this project. I have found plenty of information on the GUST program and its history, but I am now trying to work on speaking to students in the program. Before the 23rd, I hope to finish off some editing, as I know my work is still a rough draft. While I do have enough to be workshop-ready, I recognize formatting issues chronologically that need to be addressed before then.
The one interview I conducted with Dean Keristead went better than I expected, and I have more information than to know what to do with. She gave lots of beneficial information, but portraying that in print has been a bit challenging. I am more confident in my interviewing process by giving the person a few questions to ponder before our meeting. I look forward to seeing this feature come together with the other perspective of the GUST program, but I am in a good spot in terms of deadlines.
I have an interview tomorrow the 15th, with one of the other harder to track down people on campus that I need to interview. Then I have to interview a student. Then I will write the interview into the Feature. This will get me to a good stage to have the workshop on Tuesday and then the peer review one for the 23rd of February. All the way up to that point I have it on my eportfolio page. What I have so far is the pitches bit done, the first 200-300 part and one interview done. A detailed outline in my brain of what and how I am going to write this up this weekend to about 600 hundred words and incorporated the interviews into my work a living aspect and witness credibility part to the piece. So my feature creature will mostly be finished by Tuesday at the earliest, and Wednesday at the latest. Unless something unforeseen comes out of nowhere, then I should be finished with a draft by then for peer review.
Checking in on what I have done for our Feature Creature assignment, I am on track. I saved my two pitches in a Google doc from when we would have our pitch session in class, so that was a quick upload to my ePortfolio. I also started to think of questions and a focus or direction I wanted my story to take while I came up with the pitch, so I had notes and a few questions to work off of as I started my first draft of around 300 words. I had a meeting with Dean Millen set up for Feb 5th for an unrelated topic, but as we chatted about my classes, I mentioned this project, and he was more than happy to answer a few questions. Those major quotes were a great start, and I posted my second draft of around 500 words. Since then, I have been fine-tuning my questions and figuring out what angle I want to bring to this story. At first, I wanted to keep it to whether students’ feelings about the schedule changed and why or why not. However, after meeting with Dean Millen, some of his points made me reexamine what I wanted to highlight. So far, I have conducted all of my interviews – I have quotes from a junior and two seniors to work off of. Before Friday, I will post my peer review draft, as it is pretty close to ready for that now.
As a status report, I have uploaded my pitch and early draft to my website. I am unsure if we need both original pitches so I have to check in for clarification on that; I can’t quite remember what my second pitch was! My early draft sets up the basic information needed for this reporting and has a student quote to show a frequent struggle in the Mail Room. That draft has less detail and doesn’t quite hold all the elements for journalism but sets me up for my next version. For my workshop draft, I was able to interview a Senior who works at the mail room and got information like open hours, how they organize the mail, their struggles with understaffing, and how UNE could improve their mail rooms and the receiving process. This draft is a working progress as I’m trying to figure out the structure of my Feature and how I want the information to be ordered. I’m finding it’s easiest to get all the info down and then go back and shuffle the words around. With some finetuning on this step and the help of peer review there is minimal work left to do and I should be on track for the Friday 23rd deadline.
I believe I am in a solid spot with how my feature is going so far. I got a good bases for the paper that was set up at the start of writing. So far what has been working was to start with an idea and seeing where the idea went. The first draft I wrote was all about the biggening and the introduction to the idea however didn’t give a definitive answer or lead into a answer. I thought of an answer in my head but my idea of what the answer would be as well as what I want to finish the feature with. However, as time has gone on, especially with the interviews, my view and ending has changed and given me a better idea of how to wrap everything up. Other than wrapping up the whole feature, the one thing I need to do is get the last interview done and writing. The second of the student interviews has started to become a challenge sense after a week I still haven’t heard back from the club that statically is the most popular. It might cause me to take a different approach on contact or choosing a different club as it’s not a requirement to be statically the most popular but could help add more credibility to whatever I state that there is or isn’t favoritism.
So far, I am doing well with the feature creature project. I have been meeting the mini-deadlines, and everything is posted on my e-portfolio. At first, I was super excited by my idea, but I am finding that it is quite difficult to come up with extra research, as it is quite a new topic. I am still enjoying writing my article, and I am still confident that it is doable, but I will need to work a bit harder.
The only piece of my project that I still need to carry out are my interviews. I have both scheduled for next week. I plan to interview two students who recently studied abroad in a walkable city and explore the similarities and differences between walkable cities and college campuses with them. I also plan to ask them about the impact of being in a walkable city and then moving back to America where that idea is not common.
After carrying out my interviews, I will have enough material to finish my final draft. Writing the mini drafts has been difficult without this information, so having it will help me fill in some gaps. I have been attempting to imagine where my quotes will fit into my article, and I have imagined spots based on the responses of my interviewees. I am excited to see where my article ends up going, and that the interviewees might have to say in response to my questions.
I am fairly on track for the feature creature assignment and only have to make a couple of phone calls regarding my story in order to confirm accuracy. I have several hundred words already typed out and plenty of notes to flesh out into a proper article, so I certainly will have plenty of content to go off of to complete my feature assignment.
I am holding my first in-person interview directly after class today, with Dr. Tilburg, Director of UNE’s Marine Science Center, and I hope to get some crucial information, specifically concerning whether or not the rumors surrounding RV Sharkology are true or false. I have also sent a few other emails, to potential witnesses of the incident and people who have been closely involved, but I have not received an email back from some students. I have been spending a lot of time reconstructing my first draft into something more cohesive, more chronological, and less of a narrative. I am finding it a bit difficult to find certain information, considering not many students are super involved with the marine vessels on campus, but I am hoping to incorporate more opinions of students into the feature creature, as there are a lot of rumors surrounding my topic, and I’m trying to set the record straight.
The first thing that I did when picking which pitch was going to work the best. It was easy going from there I immediatly contacted my coaches that I needed to speak with for their interviews. I used previous knowledge that I new bout the programs history and fact checked it using the UNE athetics website. The firts part was laying things out and planning. Making sure proper word economy is in oorder is something that I am working on using better. Goiong over other pieces in class really helped because between writing and taking interviews really helped me ask better questions and know how to use my writers voice. Overall, the information was easy to obtain and everyone was easy going and very willing to contribute at a moments notice. Additionally I think that this is a great story of a football team with humble beginnings sheds its skin and assumes its role in the Commonwelth Coast Confrence. That Is why I decided to give this feature the tite of “Started from The Bottom, Now were Here.” I believe that it fits the story extremley well, and added a certian eye catching feeling that I was going for.
I think the best thing that I did when preparing for my interviews was having preexisting questions that I would be able to ask them, and making the interviews as short and to-the-point as possible. I ended up getting a lot of information in a very good amount of time, and my recordings were short and easy to pull quotes from. As for the actual writing itself, I tried to focus more on the actual facts to keep the paper as short and concise as possible. I did end up going over which wasn’t great, but hopefully in the peer review session I can work on amending that issue and cut down chunks of my article for the next draft. I did really appreciate how willing people were with helping me out with the interviews, the RA’s I ended up questioning were very helpful, and it seemed as though the questions I was asking were ones they’d been thinking about for some time, because they ended up coming up with answers to questions I didn’t realize I had until the interview started.
So far on the feature things have been somewhat smooth but have also been somewhat challenging. My two pitches where Une closes the dining too early on weekend and Should Une not allow freshmen to have their cars on campus. In general the pitches were easy to figure out what I want to write about and even when I have put “pen to paper” it hasn’t really been that difficult to write. I have interviews set up with students on campus in the coming days to discuss their thoughts on the feature and what they think the school could do to increase satisfaction amongst students when it comes to parking. I have had a difficult time getting a hold of security to potentially pick their brain about the situation and why they think it may or may not be a good idea and their thoughts in general about the situation. I think I need to do a better job locking in and spending some more quality time on the project because I may end up behind and that could cause more problems down the line but I’m sure I will make it work.
Journal #7: Feature Creature Status Report
I believe that I am up to date and on track for the feature creature project. I have made my Feature Creature page on eportfolio and have my Pitch, my Early Draft, my 400-500 Word Draft, and my ready to be Peer Reviewed draft all uploaded to my Feature Creature page. For me this feature has been easy to focus on because the topic is something that I am passionate about. Also there are several online resources that have had a lot of useful information for me to go off of. I will include them down below. I also already had my Interview with Dr. Pam Morgan who is the head of the living shoreline project which is what my feature is all about. Hearing her perspective was great and she was quick to get back to me with a time and date for us to have our interview. Right now I am at 492 words so I still have some more writing to do. I think my piece could also flow a lot better so making those adjustments for the final draft will be key. I think I could also add some more statistics and there is one quote in my feature that I’m not sure if I still want to use. The quote talks about the fact that the gulf of Maine is warming at a faster rate than anywhere else in the world. I like the quote but it’s just really long so I’m not sure if I should replace it with a different quote.
What has been working is the knowledge I have on my topic and it feels like to me that the words just flow easier and I am able to write interesting statements. What I have left to do for next class is finish up adding in my second interview statement from a player who suffered a non contact knee injury. I also have a few little bits of information that I have to add in as well that will make the feature a strong story.
I believe I am slightly behind on my feature, I have my headline, lead, and nutgraph done. My reaserch on my topic has been going well, and I have been able to find information on why the bookstore is priced the way it is. I have to get my interviews done, I know who I will be interviewing, but just have to do them. Then I have to fininish concluding my feature.