Sept. 13, 2010
Round 1
Monday, Sept. 13
• Spend about 15 minutes interviewing your assigned classmate. Be sure to get basic biographical info, such as age, hometown and family members. Try to get your classmate to volunteer something revealing about herself or himself.
Pay attention to descriptive detail, such as appearance and mannerisms.
• As you conduct your interviews, try to develop a good human-interest angle as the central theme of your story. (Look at the list below, copied from “Vieth’s Six Secrets,” for examples of the universal themes that make people stories more interesting.)
Round 2
Wednesday, Sept. 15
• Begin writing a minimum 300-word feature story about your classmate, with a top and billboard based on your human-interest angle. (If you got much information from your classmate, you may find that it’s easy to write a longer story.)
• Re-interview your classmate as needed to double-check information and fill in details.
By midnight Sunday, Sept. 19
• File your story in the Classmate Story dropbox of D2L. Email a copy to your classmate. (That means you’ll need to get her or his email address.)
Good writing connects with one of the big themes that resonate with readers:
-turning points -epiphanies
-life and death -love and loss
-winning and losing -alienation and reconciliation
-triumph and tragedy -underdogs and long shots
-heroism and villainy -kids and animals
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PROFILE ASSIGNMENT
Sept. 13, 2010
PROFILE— Report and write a minimum 750-word biographical story about an interesting person you don’t already know. The subject does not need to be rich, famous or powerful; some of the most compelling profiles focus on ordinary, overlooked people. Unless I agree in advance to an exception, profiles of close friends or relatives are not allowed. Your finished story must contain original, current reporting and quotes from a minimum of three interviews. It must be suitable for publication with all sources fully identified. Your story must be accompanied by a publication-quality photograph and a source list.
Deadlines:
• Sunday, Sept. 19: Post story proposal on class website.
• Sunday, Sept. 26: Post billboard on class website.
• Sunday, Oct. 3: File first draft in D2L dropbox.
• Sunday, Oct. 17: File revised profile in D2L dropbox.
Stories must contain:
• original, current reporting.
• quotes from a minimum of three interviews (in addition to the profile subject, a mix of friends, family, associates, competitors, critics, experts and others, depending on the subject matter and type of profile).
• biographical and historical information, as needed.
• supporting facts and statistics, as needed.
Stories must not contain:
• profiles of roommates, friends or relatives (unless approved in advance and disclosed in story).
• quotes from any of the above.
• quotes taken from other stories (unless approved in advance and fully attributed).
• information attributed to other news media that you could have reported yourself.
Grading criteria:
• idea (originality, scope, difficulty).
• reporting (effort, resourcefulness, difficulty).
• writing (creativity, structure, style, errors).
• mechanics (spelling, grammar, style)
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IMMERSION STORY ASSIGNMENT
Assigned Aug. 23, 2010
Final draft due midnight Sunday, Nov. 21
Pick a person, group, organization, project or process you can track for the remainder of the semester. I recommend that you have one central character in your story. Spend several hours every week or two making contact with your subject, conducting interviews and research, and recording your subject’s progress over time. Write a minimum 2,000-word feature displaying your mastery of in-depth reporting skills and descriptive, narrative storytelling techniques. Submit at least one original photo with your first draft. For extra credit, include other multimedia elements. Include a source list with names, email addresses and phone numbers. For this story, you should interview a minimum of five people and incorporate a variety of source material. You should include a minimum of five scenes or chapters describing what you observed and learned at different points of time in your reporting. The story must be suitable for publication with all sources fully identified. This is your biggest assignment of the semester and has the highest point total.
Deadlines:
• Sunday, Aug. 29: Proposal
• Sunday, Sept. 5: Revised proposal
• Sunday, Sept. 12: Scene 1
• Sunday, Sept. 26: Scene 2
• Sunday, Oct. 10: Scene 3
• Sunday, Oct. 24: Scene 4
• Sunday, Nov. 7: Scene 5
• Sunday, Nov. 14: Billboard
• Sunday, Nov. 21: First draft & photo
• Sunday, Dec. 5: Second draft
• Sunday, Dec. 12: Final draft
Stories must contain:
• original, current reporting.
• minimum of five scenes describing what you observed at different points in your reporting.
• quotes from a minimum of five interviews.
• supporting facts, statistics, historical information and biographical data, as needed.
• list of human and data sources used, including email addresses and URLs.
• at least one original photo.
Stories must not contain:
• anecdotal examples using roommates, friends or relatives (unless approved and disclosed)
• quotes from any of the above.
• quotes taken from other stories (unless approved in advance and fully attributed).
• information attributed to other news media that you could have reported yourself.
Grading criteria:
• Idea (originality, scope, difficulty).
• Reporting (effort, resourcefulness, difficulty).
• Writing (creativity, structure, presentation)
• Mechanics (spelling, grammar, style).
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STREET STORY ASSIGNMENT
Assigned Aug. 23, 2010
First draft due midnight Sunday, Sept. 5
STREET—Pick a street. Any street. Go there and find a good scene story. Write a minimum 750-word story based on real-time observation of a person, event or process as it is occurring. The objective to transport your readers to the scene of the story by capturing its sights, sounds, smells, characters, voices, atmosphere, mood, color and action in vivid descriptive detail. As a general rule, busy scenes with lots of action and dialog work better than tranquil sites where nothing is happening. Unless I agree in advance to something else, your story must contain the voices of one or more real people, and you must identify them by their full names. Don’t write in the first person unless I give you prior approval. Don’t write an OU campus story. Don’t write about someone or something you already know. Submit at least one original photo with your story. Include other multimedia material for bonus points.
Deadlines:
• Sunday, Aug. 29: Proposal (class website)
• Sunday, Sept. 5: First draft & photo (D2L)
• Sunday, Sept. 12: Final draft (D2L)
Format: On this and every other writing assignment in this class, create a Word document with your last name in the file name, like this:
ViethStreetStory.doc.
At the top of the first page, put your name, the date, the assignment and the word count, like this:
Warren Vieth
Aug. 23, 2010
Street Story
999 words
DOUBLE-SPACE the text.
Filing: Place your story and photo in the Street Story dropbox in D2L.
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SELF-BIOAssigned Aug. 23, 2010
Due midnight Sunday, Aug. 29, 2010
Write a Self-Bio of 500 words or more. Write it like a feature story. Use a creative lead. Make it revealing. Tell me something distinctive about you. Your story doesn’t need to focus exclusively on your interest and experience in journalism or your career goals, but mention them in passing so I’ll know where you’re headed. Format your story as a Word document. The filename should start with your last name, like this: ViethSelfBio.doc. Double-space the text. At the top of the first page, include the following information, substituting your name, etc.:
Self-Bio
Warren Vieth
wvieth@ou.edu
Aug. 20, 2010
523 words
I rue the day I was born…
Upload your Word file to the Self-Bio Dropbox in D2L by midnight Sunday, Aug. 29.
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