Fluff or No Fluff, that is the Question.

Just a thought:

Through my college career, I have had to take a few journalism classes including news writing and feature writing. In feature writing, we had to write about something relating to journalism every week.

I found myself struggling each week, trying to find a topic to write about that I can relate back to journalism.

So as I was sitting there trying to think if what to write about, I started to break down the word Journalism, and connect it to what I have learned so far.

Journal…When I think of a journal, I think of people writing down their experiences, opinions, and thoughts. Much like a Diary.  With that being said, I think it’s kind of funny that when writing for my journalism classes we’ve been told to leave out our opinions.

I think this is what I find so challenging about journalism. I’ve spent majority of my time with my writing, working on elaborating with descriptions and opinions to bring the piece to life. Ever since I can remember I’ve been told to be descriptive with my writing up until my very last english class at NKU.  Now that I’m taking journalism and PR classes, I’m being told to leave a lot out. More information and less fluff.

Even though it’s a bit frustrating and a little contradicting, I understand why it’s like that. When we’re writing an article about something that happened, like a crime, a news release, or we’re writing a how-to, our readers just want the straight facts. In today’s busy world, people don’t have time to read through half the article to get to the actual news or main points.

So here are two main tips:

-Keep your opinions, descriptions, thoughts, and feelings in your diary entries.

-Keep it clean and straight to the point with your news articles.