Insights into the 13th October Journalism Tutorial

By: Nicole Twaddle

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We did not have anything to prepare for this tut, which is a norm for this terms work. However upon hearing about what we would be doing from a friend attending a Monday tut, I admit that I was dreading it. I found that determining the people closest to us, aka my mom, and the person most far away from us and out of our zone, aka Oprah, had little to do with anything journalism based. So we discovered our inner circle, very insightful indeed.

Then came the daily rituals of the various people in the circles’ layers. Now for the inner most person this was an easy feat, but when it got to the outer layer, it became a guessing game, of general things that people normally do, such as eat breakfast, go to work, etc. But I guess that this exercise gave light to the fact that the closer a person is to another, the more they will know about that other person, such as their daily rituals. In my case, I placed my mother in my innermost circle, as I know her the best, and therefore know her daily ritual.

Next was writing about the issue that we were most passionate about. I thought that this was a good exercise in freedom to write expressively about a topic or issue that as an individual feel most passionate and enraged about. It was different for each person, which is the beauty of individualism. We then had to sum up our raged, expressive paragraphs with one metaphor. One strong metaphor that could hold the feeling of anger and frustration felt about the topic or issue.

Lastly there was the punctuation of a short paragraph, which was discovered as having two contradictory meanings if punctuated correctly. This was a fun exercise in realizing the power of punctuation, and how a well punctuated piece of writing makes more impact to the audience.

Although I did find the tutorial quite pointless, there were some moments that made me realise why were doing such activities, because in journalism knowledge, powerful writing and details are great tools any good journalist possess, which is what we, as journalism and media studies students need to realise, in order for us to become great journalists.