Making 'em care

Here's what I'm going to be telling my students when they are trying to write an opinion piece next year: don't wait for the lightening to strike. You gotta write SOMETHING, so find it and run with it. This is a bit of the barfing оut what needs to be  written, but working with other ideas from Sarah Garrecht Gassen has really got me thinking about advising my opinion writers.

Learning from a professional-- a columnist from The Arizona Daily Star-- gave me ideas on how to help my students polish their writing. My staff this year made an editorial policy that every paper would have an editorial, a column and a review. The editorial was the editor-in-chief's purview, but the column and reviews would often be up for grabs at the EB meeting. Sometimes the newer and not as strong members of staff would go for the opinion pieces, and they would often run up against a wall. Often, it would either be a question of "so what?" or a question of "wait, what are you even saying?"

 Listening to Gassen talk gives me all sorts of questions for me to ask to my students when they get stuck. I love the idea that you have to a good reporter before you can be a good opinion writer. Often students thought they could lock themselves away in the lab and write a beautiful piece in isolation. Nope! It's also a great exercise in empathy: as a writer, you gotta make sure you're seeing it from all viewpoints. As advisers, we can help them through it. This brings me back to what Steve has been saying. If you want to be good, you need to read and write as much as you can.

Sarah-Anne Lanman
Munster High School
Munster, Ind.