Editing

I really have to get used to criticism.

I've always been the type of person who never wanted to be wrong. Even if I knew in my head that what I was saying was wrong, what I was doing was wrong, or anything at all...I never want to admit it. It's downright embarrassing.

For example:

• The other week, I told a reporter that I was sure that Nguyen was pronounced just the way it looks: "Ni-gu-yen", and she pronounced it like so on the 10 p.m. news, only to exit the newsroom and get hounded by her boss who said it's pronounced "Win".
  
• Whenever there's something physically wrong with me, I frequently "wait-it-out" to see if it will get better, when I know that it won't unless I use medicine.
• And most recently, I refuse to believe that my writing is confusing, when clearly, it sometimes is...

And we talked about this in class. Editing is something writers have to deal with, even though they get "attached to their words." But I guess the problem with me, is it's not so much that I'm attached to my words. You can rip my work apart all you want. You can say I need a comma there, or that word needs to be replaced with that word. I'll accept it. I'll change it. I'll definitely do what you say...but I'll hate it every step of the way. I'm embarrassed that I'm not this writing prodigy that can spew out a miraculous article in one night. I'm embarrassed that I didn't know that comma went there, or that I didn't capitalize that word, or her title. I'm embarrassed that I forgot to look over that page, and completely missed a sentence that was about 50 words long. I'm ashamed, and I don't like being a shitty-writing spectacle for the entire class to see.

I remember one time in high school when I thought I handed in an awesome paper. Well, the next day, my teacher said exactly this, "Some of these papers were amazing. Some were not." He rolled the over-head projector to the front of the class, switched on the blaring light, and up popped my essay.
"Oh wow!" I thought. "He's going to show this as one of the good ones"
Well, he didn't make it past the first three words before he started criticizing my writing..and proceeded to allow the rest of the class to rip the entire essay apart, sentence after sentence....saying every little possible thing that was wrong with it. I felt hot in my chair, mortified that I actually thought I produced decent writing.
I went home and cried that day, vowing I would never pursue English as my degree.

Four years later, I sometimes find myself thinking the same things.

Yet, I came to this realization four years ago--and I have come to it again: I am not, nor will I ever be perfect the first time through. It's downright selfish of me to think or even expect that. Once in a while, I will get praised for my writing, and that boosts my self-esteem, and certainly backs up my career choice.
When I get bumped down, it hurts. It's not easy, but I know that I have to soak up every aspect of criticism in the next month-and-a-half. Because whoever my boss is won't accept misplaced commas, 50-word sentences, or confusing transitions. It could someday cost me my job, not just an hour of humiliation.

Updates

I'm going to be brutally honest...working as a group to write one article doesn't really work that well.

We divided the tasks. But they're not really that even. I volunteered to do the writing...but it's extremely difficult to piece together four articles on different topics, and furthermore, to have them make sense.

It turns out our thesis and angle is that there ultimately are no solutions to plagiarism. We can't defeat the problem. We can only decrease it.


On a separate, more personal note, I applied for a job today as a copy editor for a small branch of newspapers. I inquired what newspapers the company was hiring for in my application, and someone replied very nicely to me explaining what they were. I thought, okay, thanks for the heads-up. Then I scrolled further down in the email and came across a one-line entry from another source that said, "Clearly not qualified, seeing as this is not an entry level position..."

I don't think I was supposed to see that. It seemed like it got stuck in transit in my message that I received. But how would you feel if you saw a note that you weren't supposed to, clearly insulting your intelligence? Just because I'm fresh out of college certainly does not mean I'm not qualified to be a copy editor at a night-time news desk, especially with my degree and my experience at both a news station and my school newspaper.

Why should I limit myself to only entry-level positions, when I know I can challenge myself to something else?

Reject me. Don't invite me to an interview. That's fine, acceptable, and understandable. In fact, I need to get used to a lot of rejections for the next few months. I'm sure there are other people out there with better and more impressive resumes than me. But I assure you, if you graduate with a degree in journalism, I sure as hell hope you're qualified to be a reporter.

What is an entry-level position for a reporter, anyway?

....getting coffee?

No grades?

So for our first draft of our long articles, our professor is not giving us grades. She says this is a test to see if our research and theories are true--Do students do better when they aren't under the pressure of grades?

My theory is no, at least not for me personally, and definitely not at this stage in the game. I'm a second semester senior, and although grades do matter to me right now, I'm much more focused on what I already have on my resume so that I can show that to employers...not that I don't care about my grade on this first draft, I do. But the fact that we aren't getting one doesn't change my attitude towards it. In fact, it will probably just make me more worried about the next two drafts because they'll be worth more in the long run.

As far as how our article is going for group 3? A little slow. I've sort of been assigned as the writer, and all the other group members are currently gathering all the information, so I'm in the twilight zone as to where I stand personally in the project. I need to wait to gather ALL the info so I can write a superb article. That's why in class we had such a lame lead....because we didn't do all the work yet.

I have a lot of work to do this weekend. Sometimes if I sit down and think about all the work I have to do, I begin to panic. That's why I usually take things one step at a time...

If I lied and said I was someone else, I'd totally get hired...

Today was a depressing and frustrating day for me.

I spent all day searching for jobs online. All. Day. Long. I found some jobs that I'm interested in...and qualified for, but that took me hours. Most of the jobs I looked at required 2-3 years of experience in the field or a field similar to what I was looking at. Some of them even said, 1-2 YEARS EXPERIENCE, INTERNSHIPS DO NOT COUNT

What! Wait a gosh-darn second here, Mr/s Employer! I went to school for 4 years, had an internship, am totally qualified for your job, but you won't even take a second glance at my resume because I wasn't employed by some other company...doing the same things I do in school? LAME. Yeah. At this point. It's lame. My parents keep reassuring me I'll get a job even though the economy is down because employers are more willing to hire recent grads because they'll pay them less. That's crap. Because apparently my four years of experience doesn't matter.

I'm tempted to write this in my cover letter:

Dear So-And-So,

I'm very interested in your position because I have four years of experience writing and editing at my college newspaper, writing and producing my own radio shows, interviewing and filming people for a newscast, and writing for a newscast. In fact, writing is all that I usually do. I noticed you mentioned in your job description that the desired candidate needs 1-2 years of experience in the projected medium. Does all of my experience count? Are you going to toss my resume aside because I'm a recent college graduate? I know I'm not supposed to ask questions in my cover letter, but, I'm biting my nails over here wondering if I have to make stuff up just so people will look at me.

Did I get your attention? Can I work for your company based on my superior-eye-catching skills based on this cover letter?

Thanks for not deleting this message! If you would like to set up an interview, I can be reached by cell phone or email. I check them constantly.

Sincerely,
Megan

What do you think? :-/

I wouldn't be surprised if people did make up things in their resume just so employers will look at them. Not exactly plagiarism, but cheating and lying none-the-less.

I would never do it. Not even out of desperation.


In other news, I got rejected as a reporter again today. If you're a student, seriously, you get the shaft. I was out trying to get interviews for another class. But I still think it's relevant to put on here because I'm assuming my other classmates run into similar issues that I did today.

I'm doing my audio documentary on running for my seminar, and I thought it would be a great idea to get people in the industry--selling shoes and apparel for runners, and who are runners themselves. I went to a small specialty store near my town. With my notepad and recorder, I walked in with a smile and went up to the desk.

"Hi! I'm a college student and I'm doing an audio documentary on running," I said.
"Yeah..." said the owner of the store.
"I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions about running," I inquired.
The store owner didn't look at me when I said this, but looked at his customers instead.
"I can wait for when you have time," I said, noticing his haste.
"Yeah not today," he said quickly and threw me his card, brushing me aside to get to another customer...

I said I could wait! Or better yet--interview you while helping a customer!
I didn't bother him after that. He looked thoroughly annoyed that I even approached him without a $100 pair of shoes to purchase in my hands.
Next time, I'll call first. But I really didn't think it would be a problem. Like I've said in previous posts, I go out with reporters all the time and people never brush them aside like they're a hassle, especially when they're getting publicity about their company.
But hey. I'm a student. I'm just a college student trying to build up my portfolio so I can get hired by a company.

Maybe I'll go back when I'm working for NPR. I wonder if he'd throw me his card then...

Anyway, I guess my point for this post is don't pretend to be someone you're not. Don't lie about who you really are on your resume just to let people find out you're a cheater.
Be yourself.
Right now, I'm just a student. I might get rejected, but sooner or later someone's going to take a glance at me and notice that I do have some serious potential and a great asset to their company.
It might take a few months, but I'll get there.

Pondering...

I just finished re-organizing the re-write of my feature article for class. I like it a lot better now.

Now I have to start thinking about my group project and how we're going to combine all of our ideas into one kick-ass article. At first I thought, "Wow, this is going to suck. How in the hell are all of our brains supposed to magically work together to punch out a beautiful babe of an article?" Then I thought, "Well, self, it may not be that bad after all. Two (or three, or four) minds are better than one."

So we'll see how that works out. My group has the solutions aspect. And quite frankly, I'm tempted to type out in size 72 bolded font, THERE ARE NO SOLUTIONS. Because there aren't. We can pretend that there are solutions. We can tell kids to wake up in class and cite their sources right. We can give them a slap on the wrist and say, "Hey, do you think that you're going to get anywhere in life if all you do is cheat?" But it won't stop it.
It's going to be hard to work back down to a clean slate in the plagiarism bubble.

Erica messaged me and told me she had an interview with Donald McCabe this week. He conducted a study on plagiarism on college campuses a few years ago, and I took a lot of my facts in my article from that study. I think it's awesome that she found him and talked to him. When you see names on a study or an article, sometimes you forget that they're real people--not just words on a screen/piece of paper. That's why interviewing people is so amazing. You get to talk to real people. Why in the world would people ever want to make stuff up like that? Or copy and paste from someone else's interview? It's so much cooler to do it in person.

For example, I was at a press conference last night at the Worcester Police Station to cover the hit and run accident that happened in Worcester last night. I was there with all the other big-shot reporters from the other stations, observing them ask the questions about the accident. Nothing is more exciting than to stand there with actual reporters and get quotes from a police officer about a crime that happened a few hours ago. What was more interesting was going home to watch how each station covered the story. They all put a different twist on it and used their own words, clipped different sound bytes from the press conference, and had different video of the accident.
Where's the fun if only one reporter showed up and all the others took the story from that reporter?
It's much more interesting to get five different accounts of the story and five different angles. You learn more that way.

Ah. I get it now.

We're all investigating plagiarism. But we all have different angles on the story.

We learn more that way.

A variety of things...

Going over my article in class yesterday gave me a better angle on my story. Although I already knew I wanted to focus on intentional plagiarism as a moral issue, I didn't know how to go about that in the best way. So my article ended up being much longer than I intended. I just had so much information that I wanted to put in it.

Now I'm really going to zone in on this as a moral issue. Personally, I don't think that plagiarism can ever be solved. Students are going to be lazy, no matter what. Plus, plagiarism is easier to do--but also much easier to catch. Some of the professors I talked to blame it on the internet. Back in the day, people didn't have access to fully-written papers so easily, Wikipedia, or other online sources to copy and paste. They actually had to sit down with a book and do the reading.

People seemed shocked yesterday at the quality and depth of my interviews yesterday. That made me proud. My article may have been long and in need of better organization, but I have all the information. I put in a lot of effort for this, and I proved to myself I can investigate and report. I think students need that confidence and reassurance in their work. I don't think a lot of students in that class feel confident contacting people they don't know and interviewing them. A lot of them just want to do the email-easy-way-out. I can sympathize with them, but they should know--you feel much more accomplished when you put in that extra push to get the good quotes. Then the story will just write itself. All you have to do is narrate it.

The issue doesn't disappear with reporters. I mentioned in an earlier post that a Telegram writer got fired for plagiarizing an article almost word for word from Sports Illustrated. But look at this: http://www.observer.com/2009/media/fortunes-barney-gimbel-leaves-magazine-amid-plagiarism-charge A Fortune writer resigned from his position because he was accused of plagiarism. His case isn't as bad as the writer from the Telegram. In fact, I see reporters paraphrase like this all the time, especially in the TV business. They'll get a wire or a press release, and simply re-phrase the wording much like Gimbel did in Fortune. It's an iffy issue, but it's clear that Gimbel didn't do the research and interviewing/investigation that he needed to do for an original article. Plus, the one he plagiarized from was written so long ago. I'm going to go with the assumption that he was too lazy to do the work himself. Since he didn't do the work and a deadline was coming up...he had to come up with something.

This class is pushing me. Sometimes I hate it. Sometimes I just get overly frustrated at how much work I have on my plate. But I have to wake up, and other students do too. Life is going to be frustrating with the amount of work that will always be piled up on my plate. I'm almost positive it will never be cleaned off.

This semester is just preparing me for that.

This stuff is tough

People are freaking out around me.

My classmates have constant looks of terror and anguish on their faces when they discover they need to go out and get more interviews, meet more deadlines, yadda yadda yadda.

I'm with them. At the same time, I have to constantly tell myself not to be the biggest baby on the planet.

"This class is Jouranlism 2? Not Magazine Writing? What? I wanted to take this class because I want to learn how to write for Vogue! or Cosmo! or People!"

Surprise kids. Should've gone to beauty school for that. Or, "How to write celebrity gossip 101." They might offer that at some other school.

I think the problem with college journalism classes is that a lot of students take them, thinking they'll have to write easy feature articles about book reviews, movie reviews, or any of that other "entertainment" reading. Especially at Assumption. People don't want to leave this pristine bubble to go get "real" interviews with "real" people and "real" professionals. The ones on campus won't cut it because we're familiar with them.

Hey. I'm to blame too. All I want to do when I get back from my internship or from my classes is sit down with a 3 Musketeers bar and watch the Gilmore Girls gossip about going to Yale and Lane's latest crush, not make a few phone calls to other professors at other campuses, or hunt around online for better interviews. I have to resist the Gilmore temptations because those are never going to get me anywhere in this world. It'll just give me a few extra pounds and bad grammar.

Our feature articles were tough to do. I went home last weekend so I could concentrate on how I wanted to pitch my story. I knew if I stayed on campus my roommates would bug me to go out drinking, or to push my work to Sunday night. I know it's not perfect, and I know that because I sat in class nervously tapping my shoe on the ground, waiting to see if the professor would call my name next to have my article be peer reviewed in front of the whole class. One girl had already gotten ambushed for not having a great lead. I was next on the chopping board.

Thankfully my wrath might not come until tomorrow....

Anyway, I can't say that I'm not learning. All my life I've been pushing myself to be more outgoing, to get out there in the world and uncover something incredible, dive deep into a story someone's been too afraid to do. I want to hide behind a curtain way too much, and my classes and internship this semester are finally telling me to brush my hair out of my face and look people directly in the eye and ask them the important questions.

"So tell me, why do you cheat and lie?"