Project 3 Meta-text

For project 3, I decided to take something that is a constant in my life and turn it upside down. As this is my third year working for The Daily Athenaeum, I've gotten to know what is frowned upon in journalism. So I took this opportunity to channel what would be considered a problem in one context (journalism) to something that could be appreciated in another context (creative writing).

The three methods I chose were decided for the above reasons -- I tried to consider what would be most frustrating from a news editor's standpoint. These things consist of excessive use of adjectives (which often leads to editorializing and wordiness), cutting up text to create disorganization and sentence fragments, and careless typing with zero proofreading and misspellings made worse by Microsoft Word's spell check tool.

With the first story about the false alarm at the Rec Center,I used the adjective generator form this URL: http://watchout4snakes.com/creativitytools/RandomWord/RandomWordPlus.aspx, to insert random adjectives before every noun. The adjectives make the story ridiculous. The most bizarre work the adjectives do is when they are placed in front of proper nouns. The last phrase in the story is "almighty Vrana said." That is so opinionated and sounds either sarcastic or exaggerative in terms of describing Vrana. I also found it hilarious that the adjective "bellied" came up toward the end to describe "Rec Center employees." It is ironic that such an adjective would be used to describe workers of a wellness center/gym. This is why journalists are encouraged to omit unnecessary adjectives from stories. Doing so helps to eliminate any words that come across as biased.

For the second story, I chose to use the Lazarus cut up because it severely messes with the organization and sentence structure of the story. I covered environmental stories for the most part during my time writing for the DA, and this one was especially controversial in consideration to the region. The story dealt with a bill that was proposed to end mountaintop removal coal mining. Environmentally, this bill was an applaudable one, but when looking at the economic implications, as West Virginia relies much on coal mining for income, there is another side to the story. Being that the subject matter is controversial, messing with organization sentence structure, or quotes could potentially cause confusion or even libel, which would invite lawsuits. This is why in journalism, such a method of writing would be unjustifiable, but for creative purposes, it is interesting to see what implications the story has after it has been reordered.

For the third story, about the Sierra Student Coalition traveling to Meigs County Ohio to protest the building of another coal-fired power plant, I retyped the story quickly without looking at the computer screen. I then selected proposed corrections supplied by spell check. This made the story very inconsistent. Meigs County, as well as proper names of people, changed throughout the story. This made ideas hard to follow. This would make a story very unfriendly to a reader who is trying to sort through a lot of information.