Friday, July 6, 2018
By:
Reading this, you may be wondering: what happened to Week 4? The truth is, I completely forgot to write a Week 4 blog post. Forgive me, James!
Fortunately, despite that one glaring exception, the past few weeks have been extremely good ones for myself and writing. At FYI, I am receiving some of the best writing instruction of my life. So far, other than notes, I have written a number of short blurbs and two full-length bulletin drafts (one currently in progress). Everything’s gotten extremely heavily edited. But that’s a good thing. It’s not like I was a bad writer going in; I’m just working alongside extremely good writers. And, honestly, getting your writing heavily edited by extremely good writers is one of the best things that can happen to it. There’s also a very specific straight-news style that FYI uses that I’m still getting used to. Among other things, I’ve noticed my writing become far more straightforward, with fewer commas and clauses per sentence. There’s definitely a style element to that – all the social science papers I was reading a few months ago were full of flowing descriptions and complicated sentence structure. But while I don’t necessarily want to use super-clear journalistic writing for everything, I certainly appreciate learning how to do it.
In addition to the content of my writing, my ability to sit down and actually put thoughts on paper (or computer, or whatever) has gotten way better. Nonetheless, this remains what I struggle with the most at work. Producing content on a consistent timeline seems to be at least as important as speed, if not more so, so I have lots more room for improvement. Since I have been improving, though, I feel pretty good about it.
Finally, there’s one kind of writing I should be doing much more of. Job applications! They’re somewhat tedious but undeniably rewarding.
Nathan Foster