Interview two people and write their speech as a news report.
- a. Interview two people you know about the topic “The things that are most important to me”.
- b. Write a short news story (posted to your blog) based on these interviews (no more than 500 words).
- c. Then take a photo of each of your interviewees and post a photo of each to Twitter with a one sentence grab from the interview (eg. Tweet: Mum, Sally Doe, 48 – “You had all this hair, and your face was scrunched up.”) Link these Tweets to your blog and reflect on the activity generally.
ALEXANDRA - AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW
By Victoria Muller for STUDENT MEDIA NEWS
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| Dressing up as a Fallen Angel for Halloween, Alexandra shares a laugh with her Mum. |
She's a school student and she knows exactly what she likes and doesn't like. After cleaning her teeth and brushing her hair, I had the chance to chat with this young lady about what is most important to her.
I asked Alexandra what the most important things in her life were and she listed her Mother, her sister and her pets.
She spoke very highly of her Mother.
"She reads me a story every night. She is really sweet and kind," she said.
Another thing Alexandra confessed to loving most in all the world is Halloween. She said every year her family goes out to the Heritage Village for night of Trick or Treating.
They have a gory meal then head out into the darkened night to go trick or treating at all the cabins on the grounds. Volunteers dressed as witches, wizards, zombies and all things monstrous, scare the party goers as they make their way around the village.
Alexandra said the best part of Halloween was dressing up and going out for a fun night with her friends and family.
“Dressing up and putting on make up is the best part of Halloween,” she said.
And last but certainly not least, Alexandra loves acting. She has attended acting school at BelCanto, taken singing lessons and is currently learning the guitar. Because her mother is a Digital Media student at CQUniversity, Alexandra has put her acting talents to good use. Her most recent production was a sixty second segment where the assessment required an army scene shoot. The only requirements for the scene was that the footage included sound and visual special effects.
Alexandra said she enjoyed partaking in the making of this film and would love an opportunity to work in the movie industry.
"Making this movie segment was a lot of fun.
"I scrapped my knee a couple of times jumping into the ditch; but it was worth it," she said.
Ali, 11: “Dressing up & putting make-up on is the best part of Halloween.” http://t.co/Vib6bzCnB6 #ProfCommCQUni pic.twitter.com/SGuivDkxaW
— Vicki Muller (@Vicki_Muller) August 13, 2014
REFERENCES
Ames, K., 2014 d. Module 5: Voice, Attribution and Acknowledgement, Course notes, COMM11007 Media Writing: CQUniversity e-courses, http://moodle.cqu.edu.au.
Ames, K., 2014. Module 3: Identifying News, Course notes, COMM 11007 Media Writing: CQUniversity e-courses, http://moodle.cqu.edu.au/.
Ames, K., 2014. Module 4: The Basic News Story, course notes, COMM11007 Media Writing: CQUniversity e-courses, http://moodle.cqu.edu.au/.
Hicks, W., 2013. English for journalists. 4th ed. New York: Routledge pp 93-98.
Whitaker, W. R., Ramsey, J. E. & Smith, R. D., 2012. Meda Writing, print broadcast and public relations. 4th ed. New York: Routledge pp 161-186 & 297-318.
Hi Victoria,
ReplyDeleteI loved reading your 'Exclusive TELL ALL INTERVIEW with Alexandra'.
That photo really captured my attention straight away and made me want to read the story. Well done on finding a great source to work with and producing a nice, friendly story.
If would like to give you some feedback on your writing. First thing that I noticed was the double spacing after a full stop. It's what I describe as 'old school'. I was taught this when I learnt typing on a typewriter. Yes, that's right! Sounds like I'm ancient :) It's pretty much obsolete now.
With your quoting just remember that when you quote a sentence and add a 'tag' after the end, e.g. she said, there should be a comma then a quotation when the quoted sentence is finished followed by the tag with no upper case. I've corrected one of your sentences to read - “Dressing up and putting on make up is the best part of Halloween," she said. The tag (she said) replaces the full stop in the sentence.
I would make a correction in your first quote. - "She reads me a story every night. "She is really sweet and kind to." She said.
Should read - "She reads me a story every night," she said. "She is really sweet and kind too."
The speech tag (she said) is at the end of the first sentence and before the subsequent sentence, which means the speech tag ends with a period (.) and the subsequent sentence begins with a capital letter (Whitaker 2012, p. 192).
To should also read as too.
Overall I really enjoyed reading your piece and how you captured characterisation throughout the story. Well done.
Amanda
Thanks Amanda,
DeleteIt’s unfortunate that you found these posts this week. They are only up because Kate is having a look and giving me some feedback. To be honest they were not quite ready to go but that's okay.
The double space is unfortunately an old habit of mine. I was taught to type on a manual typewriter that had all the keys blacked out. Ha ha, what a challenge that was! We had to look up to the board at an image of the key positions - YUK! It was terrible at the time but I appreciate the solid grounding now. As I became older I LOVED electric typewriters and then of course the progression to computers, and best of all after that, windows was an automatic installation on all new PC's. When using word I usually do a ‘find and replace’ on all my double spaces but I must have forgotten with this post.
I have read the speech tag examples in the text (thanks for the page number) and will try and keep that in mind. What I was trying to demonstrate here was my understanding of voice that goes into a second paragraph. Perhaps I will add in more voice so that the demonstration is clearer to visitors to my blog.
Thanks again for your feedback. It really helps.