Task 10: Writing Complete News Stories
Date: 2015-10-07; view: 399.
Task 9
Task 8
On how she spent her first acting paycheck
Elizabeth Banks: “My student loans. It's completely unglamorous. I was so happy I could make student loan payments, just get rid of that debt as fast as possible.”
If you were asked to write stories on the basis of these interviews, which information would you choose? To represent the discourse category intertextuality in the text of your stories what ideas would you select?
As future journalists you participate in different projects and activities carried out at your faculty. One of them is to issue a faculty newspaper. The next edition will be devoted to a group portrait. More than that, it will be published in English. You are given an assignment to write articles about your peers. Before writing a story you need to conduct an interview with your groupmates. Think about questions you would like to ask them about. Conduct the interview, choose the suitable information and on the basis of these facts write a story. Don't forget about your audience and other discourse categories.
!WRITING ACTIVITIES 3
You are a journalist who works in a local editorial office. Your editor-in-chief has asked you to write a news story based on the suggested information. Choose any situation you like and write a complete news story. First of all critically examine the information language and organization, improving it whenever possible. To provide a pleasing change of pace, also use some quotations in your stories. Assume that you have enough space to report every important and interesting detail. Correct any errors you may find in grammar, spelling and punctuation. Don't forget to take into consideration discourse categories you are familiar with. If you have forgotten some information about the structure of a news story, then you may come back to the texts about the story structure you have studied in this unit. All these tasks are taken from Reporting for the Media.
| 1. It was almost like a popular movie titled “Home Alone”. It involved an 11-year-old girl in your city, Andrea Jones of 4851 Edmee Cir. When you interviewed her today, Andrea said she doesn't feel much like a hero. “I was scared,” she said. “I thought he was going to see me and beat me up or something if he got in, so I tried to hide at first.” In fact, Andrea used her imagination and a baseball bat – to thwart a would-be burglar who tried to break into her family's home when she was home alone. The incident began when Andrea was home alone, watching television at approximately 6 p.m. last night. Her parents and 3 sisters had left the house to go pick up a pizza for dinner. They had been gone for only a few minutes and were due back very shortly. Andrea told you that she was | watching television and heard a noise. “I saw a man at the window and ran to my bedroom to hide in the closet,” she said. “Then I remembered the bat there. I went back into the dining room and saw this guy opening the window. He put his hand in first. He was coming in the window, and had his left hand on a table there. I took the bat and hit it as hard as I could. I, uh, really smashed it hard. He screamed like real loud, man, and ran away. Then, uh, I called 911.” Police Detective Jack Noonan was at the scene and, when questioned by you, commented on the case, stating that: “Preferably, we would like to see someone in an incident like this call 911 first. It's safer that way. Someone could get really hurt in a situation like this. In this case, the girl was lucky. She kept her head, and she was really brave | about it. She was home alone and decided she should protect herself and her house. She must have really walloped the guy. There's a lot of blood on the window and table, so now we're looking for someone who's injured.” Police found the bad guy later last night. After the break-in, they notified hospital emergency wards to be on the look-out for a man suffering from trauma to his left hand and, shortly after1 a.m., received a call from the Regional Medical Center, where a man matching a description Andrea gave the police came in for treatment of a very badly cut, broken, swollen, and painful left hand. He has been arrested and charged with attempted burglary. Police identified the man as Steven Jabil, 23, of 800 Crestbrook Loop, Apt. 314. |
2. Some said she shouldn't be charged with murder. She wasn't. She's a doctor. She had a patient with leukemia. She admitted helping her patient commit suicide. Today she was cleared by a state board of charges of misconduct. The 7-member board – your states Board for Professional Medical Conduct – could have revoked her license to practice medicine. Instead it concluded that the actions of Dr. Catrina Lowrie were “legal and ethically appropriate.” Lowrie is an internist at the Regional Medical Center in your city. No one might have known what she did, but she described it in a public speech sponsored by your city's chapter of the Hemlock Society, and an anonymous caller called the police about what she said. In the speech she described how she prescribed barbiturates for a patient and made sure the patient knew how many to take to kill herself. The patient, who has since been identified as Irma Cain of 427 Hidden Lane, was 37 years old and, her husband and parents said, in terrible, hopeless pain. They supported the doctor in the matter, their attorney said, but they refused to talk to you about it. Cain decided to commit suicide rather than undergo chemotherapy for cancer which would have given her only a 25% chance of survival. Her death occurred six months ago. Last month, a grand jury investigated the matter and then cleared the doctor of criminal responsibility for the woman's death. Now the board, which issued its ruling late yesterday, said that the doctor did nothing medically improper in prescribing the barbiturates because “she could not have known with certainty what use a patient might make of the drug she prescribed, and which was totally appropriate and needed by her patient.” Lowrie said in a statement that the ruling “seemed like a very thoughtful decision.” The members of the board stated that they were not condoning “so-called assisted suicide.” They added that this case differed from other recently publicized cases in that Lowrie had a longstanding relationship with her patient. In addition, she did not directly take part in ending her patient's life. Rather, she prescribed pills needed to alleviate the patient's pain, and the patient, by herself, took them all at once in a successful attempt to terminate her own life and very painful suffering from the deadly disease.
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| On when she decided she wanted to be an actor | | | Task 11: Reporting Controversial Stories (Quoting Opposing Viewpoints) |