Headlines

If I've learned one thing this week, it's that writing headlines is hard! Before this unit, I hardly even looked at the headlines when I read the newspaper, much less pay attention to how well they're written. I have much more respect for the people who write these now! At first I didn't think it would be so hard; all you really have to do is summarize the important stuff in the story, right? What I didn't realize is that there are many restrictions placed on what you can write when you only have so much room and a specific amount of space that you need to fill. I'm not sure if I really did a very good job of it on our assignment, but it sure did help me to learn a lot. I had to be a lot more creative than simply stating the important ideas of the story. A couple of times I had to go to a thesaurus to find different words because the ones I was using wouldn't fit. A couple of times it was just a matter of rearranging the words I already had to make them fit better.
Even though I probably won't be writing headlines in my future career, I felt like this was a valuable skill to know. It tested my writing ability much more than I thought it would (or could!) and forced me to think outside the box. I've mentioned before that I'm kind of long-winded, so maybe this assignment was much harder for me than it was for anyone else, but I'm kind of glad it was hard for me because I feel like I was able to learn and grow a lot from it.
And now for the editing mistake. This is a sign that was found in an antique store. This is one of the most common editing mistakes I think. For some reason people just can't figure out the right 'your' to use!