Know Your Stuff

I really liked the assignment involving learning how to become a better writing coach. Coming up with my own five tips was educational. I need to work on a few of them myself.

Being a good writing coach is really important. To accomplish this, you must know how to write. These are my five tips.

1. Know your stuff. Know the basic mechanics of various aspects of writing such as editing, grammar and punctuation.
2. Offer to help. Offering to edit other people’s writing will keep you on your toes and help them with their writing abilities.
3. Read. Read material from different forms of media. This expands your personal vocabulary and writing style.
4. Write. How can you be a writing coach if you don’t write?
5. Keep up. Keep up with the changes going on around you. As a journalist, I rely heavily on the AP Stylebook. I have to keep up with the changes made in the Stylebook.

My editing mistake for the week is actually a mistake I made. A few weeks ago, we had an assignment dealing with headlines. I wrote this as one of my headlines: "Bill Proposes Allowing Concealed Weapons On Campus Grounds." Dr. J reminded me not to capitalize the first letter of each word. She said to use downstyle. Her exact wording was: “Use downstyle where you capitalize words as you do in a sentence. Don't do what the stodgy New York Times does.” Her response was helpful and educational. Thanks Sheree!