As a teacher, having a class full of students write opinion pieces scares the pants (and skirts) off me. Last year, we were sort of a club and I had a few students who wrote through the year. One was a young man who never wanted to report. He wanted to write opinion pieces.
However, his opinion pieces were never interesting or fair or even readable. And I felt bad for nixing piece after piece. I even ended up going to our retired adviser (not advisor) and asking for her advice, and she said she would never run the piece.
But I really didn't know how to help him fix things.
That's the problem with asking a non-journalism major to take the newspaper. I think my young man's problem was that he wasn't a reporter first. He supported himself with himself. But as Garrecht Gassen said, because I said so is never okay.
He needed research. He needed facts. He needed to be a journalist first.
Live and learn.
Lyn Cannaday
Greenway High School
Phoenix AZ
H.L. Mencken said this: "It is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not sufficient to exhibit the true; it is also necessary to expose and denounce the false."
ReplyDeleteSarah Garrecht Gassen did a fantastic job of showing us why opinion writing is just that -- exhibiting the true, exposing the false, and showing the thought process that leads to some conclusion. I appreciated her even-handed approach to argument. It is not enough to believe; one must have some logic behind that belief and the ability to convey it rationally and with a measure of control. I found this very useful.
I am not proud to admit it, but we rarely have editorial pieces in our publication outside of movie, book or music reviews. I think going into the process with the mindset of being a reporter first might help in getting our staff in a position to tackle this in the future.
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