Explode?

Again, writing headlines can be pretty difficult! I haven’t had time to do much news reading yet this week but I did come across a pretty good headline a few minutes ago. On MSN there was a spotlight article with a headline that read: “Cute Toddler Sings Bieber; Hearts Explode.” I previously had no desire to hear Bieber, let alone a toddler singing Bieber, but this headline definitely caught my attention. The “hearts explode” part of the headline was the most eye catching and emotion triggering part of the headline. The use of “explode” demonstrates the use of a good, strong verb. I did find it almost too strong. I thought to myself “Explode? I’m not sure I want my heart to explode…” Yes, it’s an extremely strong verb. Yes, it may be a little too strong.

My editing mistake of the week happened at work…as several of them have. This time I was editing a letter for a friend of mine and noticed two typo errors. One was “universities” instead of “University’s” and the other was “mother in law” instead of “mother-in-law.” He was very accepting of my critiques, a nice change seeing as last time I edited something I got told it didn’t matter if it was wrong, it sounded better the wrong way.

Headlines

As a reader, I can tell you just how important a headline is to a story. They are written in big, bold writing to grab the reader’s attention. When I pick up a newspaper or browse a news site on the Internet, skimming through the headlines is one of the first things I do. I am sure a good number of other readers do this same thing.

That really illustrates the importance of a good, solid headline. Not only is it written in big, bold writing to grab attention but it also needs to be well-written in order to spark interest in the reader. Why should I read this story? How is it relevant to me? What is the key point in this article? These are all questions that an editor should keep in mind when coming up with a headline. Not only that, but you should not give away the most important parts in the headline. Otherwise the casual reader may also choose not to read because they feel they already have the whole scoop.

And now my editing mistake for the week. Unfortunately it wasn’t found in a headline but here it is:

About 7:45 p.m. Saturday, police responded reports of shots being fired at the Far West Motel, 410 N. Main. Officers arrived to find that 52-year-old Gregory Nance had been fatally shot. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

Just leaving out the simple word “to” is very noticeable in this article.

Struggles of Headlines

The struggle to capture the entire essence of a story in a headline is something I learned this week. The headline has to be precise, concise and attention grabbing. Using strong verbs is essential to capturing the reader's attention, and keeping the headline clutter free is also required. If a headline doesn't use those things or have those things then it flounders on the paper and is ignored by readers. I write headlines by truncating the main elements of a story into a few words that describes most without telling all. This way the reader knows what the premise of a story is about, but still has to read the lead to absorb all the information within. I also learned how to find good headlines. Finding good headlines is much easier than making them. But newspapers and online sources are littered with great headlines, and until this week I took it for granted. Although, it's easy to find terribly written headlines. An editing mistake I found this week was on an old Idaho Magazine I browsed through on accident. An article read, "They toke the bike uphill." Toke is supposed to be took, in case you missed it.

Important Headlines

To me, the headline is the most important part of the story. If a story features a good headline, either I end up reading the story, or just reading the headline and moving on. There are bad headings, however. Cliché headlines have got to be the most awful things to appear on a piece of paper (or computer screen). I remember seeing a headline that said, “Her Worst Nightmare: Mother loses child in store.” Come on! This lead is pathetic. Of course it is every mother’s worst nightmare to lose a child (my mom should know), but isn’t it unnecessary to have that as a part of a headline? I don’t think so. Some might say the headlines are unnecessary. I say “nay.” For those who are lazy like me, we all know how important a good headline is. It keeps us from reading the whole story. It takes three seconds and we are done reading! It makes it even better when an author will include a deck. It adds more information to the headline and only increases reading time by a few seconds. To rectify my increasing use of passive voice when I write, I need to make sure that I read my writing after I am finished, but also think about what I am writing when I write it.

I was watching the Arnold Palmer Invitational today when I heard the worst commentator on TV, Johnny Miller, say something that made my ears bleed. He said, and I quote, “Irregardless of the results, Spencer Levin can walk away from this tournament beaming with confidence.”

Headlines: Proceed with caution

An often overrated aspect of writing, a headline is one of the most important dimensions of a good story. After all, the headline is the first thing a reader sees. If the headline does not captivate the potential reader, the odds of your story being read dramatically diminishes. In my opinion, there is no such thing as a perfect template for writing a good headline. There are many factors that can affect a headline such as culture, audience and tone. Writing a headline for the New York Times front page is much different than writing a headline about the same thing for an adolescent audience. The one piece that I can give is this; when I write a headline I try and forget that I wrote it, in order to remove my own bias. I then read the headline and ask myself if I would read the story because the headline captivated me and forced me to read it. If the answer is no, I write the headline all over again. I usually write three of four headlines and then ask four or five people to vote on which one they would be more likely to read.

For this weeks editing mistake, I found an improper use of the past tense version of the word grow. I really hope that the editors did this on purpose. I remember this movie, Adventures in babysitting. She is all grown up, or all growed up!

Headlines can make or break a story

Writing headlines is hard. It became even more difficult when I realized those first few words will determine whether or not the rest of the story gets read. I found the tips on the EReserve handout to be helpful with the headline assignment this week. The most beneficial tip for me was to read the story all the way through before writing the headline. It's nearly impossible to write an interesting and relevant headline if you don't know what the story is about.

I am used to writing teases for broadcast news, which try to convince the viewers to stay through the commercial breaks. I find it a lot easier to time a tease than fit words into an exact amount of space on paper. One thing I've found that helps with teases and headlines is using a dictionary. It's good to mix up the words you use so people don't get bored. Plus, some words will fit better with the space you have than others.

An editing mistake I found this week was in a text from my friend. It said, "Oh my gosh i cant believe he wont leave me alone he needs to understand im done." There is no punctuation in this text. I know it's just a text, but I would have liked to see some apostrophes, periods, and capitalization. It would have made the message a lot easier to read.

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!

It’s a tough job, but a good headline knows how to do it!

We learned last week about writing leads. This week, it was nice to add headlines to that. A good lead probably doesn’t go anywhere without a good headline first; especially when reading online. News websites like KSL, KUTV or the New York Times online all have headlines with links to the actual story. If t he headline isn’t interesting, a lot of readers won’t even try the link and the lead won’t ever be read. Headlines are extremely important.

I’ve actually never written a headline before so it was really fun to do the headline writing assignment. It was hard to try and pick a few of the most important words in the story to form a headline. A headline has to do so many things! It must catch the reader’s attention, tell enough about the story to be interesting, not tell too much to give it all away and ultimately get the reader to click the link or read the story. It’s a tough job, but a good headline knows how to do it!

The editing mishap I found this week was actually on a Daisy Maids van. I tried to take a picture but it turned the corner before I could…and it’s illegal to drive and text so I imagine it’s illegal to drive and take a picture…shhhh. So, anyway, the Daisy Maids slogan is “you're gonna love us, we're your daisy maids.” Yes, it’s obviously intentional that they put “gonna” instead of “going to” but it’s still a grammatical error. Also, the van advertisement was missing the all important comma!

Leads

After reading the eReserve article about leads and doing research by searching for leads, I really understand the importance of a good, concise lead. It is very rare to find a bad lead, but I find uninteresting ones all of the time. I don't think it is bad writing as much as it is a boring topic. Boring topics can be a death sentence for a writer and their story, but it is always up to the writer to make a boring topic sound interesting. Even if there is nothing the writer can do to make people want to struggle through a piece that has no relevance to them, the writer still needs to include the story's relevant information. There are times, I believe, when a lead can be too good. I have read some stories that have leads that are so informative and well-written that I don’t need to read on. Good for lazy people like me, I guess. To make myself a more successful writer, I should first focus on what constitutes and good lead and try to answer as many of the 6 questions in my lead as possible (who?, what?, when?, where?, how? and why?).

This week’s grammar fail comes from a cameraman who was lucky to catch this vigilante grammar corrector.

Transitions

The topics we went over this week were, in my opinion, two of the more difficult ones when it comes to writing. Introducing your article with a great lead is extremely important. A well-written, attention grabbing lead that makes the reader want to continue on should be the goal of any writer. It is something that takes a lot of skill, however, I have found that transitioning well between paragraphs can be a difficult skill to master as well.

As with anything else, whether in writing or not, learning to transition well can come with practice. What a good transition does is makes the entire article flow together in one piece. Without it, the reader may become confused or worse-- lose interest in the article and stop reading.

Although learning to transition well can be challenging, there are a few simple techniques that can help you to make good transitions in your writing. One of these is to use pronouns. If a paragraph is talking about a specific noun then it provides a good transition to use pronouns of it in the following paragraphs. A common transition device to use would be transitional expressions. There are many options available as transitional expressions. For example, using additives such as also, in addition, and, again, etc. They link ideas together from sentence to sentence and paragraph to paragraph.

Editing mistake this week: An advertisement in the Sunday Standard-Examiner said this-

Bring your prescription vial to us and

You will get the hometown service you've come to expect.

Good leads

This unit was much harder than me than I thought it would be. I haven't taken a whole lot of media classes, so I didn't really know much about what makes a good lead, and I had never put much thought into it before. This unit really opened my eyes to the challenge that journalists and other writers take on when they write a lead sentence to a story. It has to be simple yet engaging, understandable, yet entertaining. And that's hard! As an English major, I figured that this would be pretty simple for me as just another form of writing, but I was wrong. English majors generally tend to be long-winded, and I definitely fit the bill as a typical English major. So trying to learn how to write good leads that were short and to the point was a growing experience for me.
It helped me to analyze the stories and find exactly what information would be the most important to the reader, whether it was the "who" "what" "when" "where" "why" or "so what." Then make sure that this information was part of the first and last information revealed in the lead to hook the reader and entice them to read on.
Even though I'm not going into journalism, I feel like this is the kind of stuff that any writer should learn. We should all know how to write long-winded sometimes, but we all should also know how to dive straight into the meat. Every piece of writing needs a hook, whether it be journalism, novel writing or even technical writing.
I wasn't able to find an editing mistake this week, but I'll be looking extra hard over spring break to find a couple for next time!

Leads

Writing an adequate lead is much more complicated than most people realize. It must captivate, inform and intrigue with the least amount of words possible. Writing a lead in my opinion is much like writing in general. Some people have it and some don't. When I am writing a lead I try to include who, what, when, where, why and how if possible. When writing for The Signpost I attempt to capture my audience within the first two sentences. If the reader does not like the first few sentences, the chances of that particular reader reading the whole story are slim to none. With that being said, the lead is one of the most important pieces of journalistic writing.
This weeks editing mistake is a common one. February is probably the most misspelled month. I can understand why it is commonly misspelled. When someone is pronouncing it fast, it does not sound like there is an r in February. There are many words in the English language that have letters in "weird" places, so it is best to double check spelling before you plaster it on the side of a wall.

Great Leads

I had a hard time reading the assigned attachment for what constitutes a great lead because I am just so sick of hearing it. While writing for the signpost in the mandatory class, I am so sick of hearing phrases like "soft leads" and "attract the reader". There is a reason I am not going to be a journalism major. I am not good at it. But after reading the explanation given in this text and the examples they used, I am not so sour on the subject now.

I found it even more interesting when looking for ten examples of great leads. When I read the first 30 sentences of stories online, either I wanted to continue reading or not. The ones I wanted to read, I put in the list of ten we were to submit. (The articles caught my attention so much, this made for a time consuming assignment.) But now I can relate to all the badgering about good and bad leads.

Editing Mistake of the week.

While reading different articles and news stories and searching for great leads, I came upon this small mistake. But I found it really annoying because it was on the Washington Post website, a well-established newspaper. And one that should catch mistakes like these.

Leads

The process of creating a great lead is the most vital aspect of journalistic writing. Or, for that matter, any writing period. If you can't draw the reader into a story, then the story is irrelevant and quickly inconsequential. This week I learned great leads don't necessarily tell the most vital information first. Many types of leads can be deployed effectively besides the inverted pyramid lead. A question lead draws the reader in without relaying any vital information in the first paragraph. My favorite lead I learned about this week is the anecdotal lead. This lead doesn't give away the purpose of the story in the initial paragraph. Instead it delves deep into a personal story using concrete details. This allows the writer to reveal many intimate details of what is being written about and have a literary story instead of a dry and vapid business piece where you don't have to read past the first paragraph.

This week I found a sign that said, "Woman shoes 10% off." The woman should be women's since I'm assuming it is not 10 percent off for one woman.

Great Leads

Constructing the perfect lead has always been a little bit of a struggle for me. I have trouble with sounding too corny when trying to get attention. The online PowerPoint tips were SO helpful! Breaking down the typical size and structure of a lead was incredibly helpful. I’ve noticed that my leads tend to be too long as well as corny. This does NOT make for a good lead.

The leads assignment also helped me understand what to look for in a lead. As I went through and read a few leads I was able to pick out which ones were well written and not so well written. Taking the opportunity to really analyze leads helped me understand what most readers really want out of the first paragraph of a story.

I couldn’t really take a picture of the editing mistake for the week, but I can certainly tell you all about it! As I’ve said before, I work as a secretary. Yesterday, one of the ladies I work with asked me to read over a page of information and tell her if it sounded all right. I read it and found SEVERAL mistakes. I corrected each and re-typed it for her. I presented the typo-free information to her, to which she replied, “No no no! I need these in question form!”

“OK…but this sentence here,” I pointed to the sentence, “does not lead in to questions…it leads to bulleted ideas. Questions don’t make sense with this sentence.”

Several minutes of futile effort later, I wrote the bullets in question form for her. Ugh. Though it didn’t make sense, I was tired of trying to show her the logical way to present the information only to be ignored and told I was wrong.

Strong Leads

Completing the assignment about leads brought me back to my Signpost days. I wrote for the a&e section for two semesters. When I reported for The Signpost, I didn't really know anything about journalism. Now that I've taken several journalism classes and have more writing experience, I am embarrassed by some of the leads I wrote. I wish I could go back and redo some of them, but since I can't, I'll just focus on leads more in the future. I used to always write the summary lead, stating the who, what, when, where, why, and how. This lead is appropriate for a hard news story, but not so much for a feature piece.

Some tips I know now about writing leads are as follows. Avoid posing a question. Avoid starting with a quote. Grab the reader's attention. Start with the most interesting information. Try to keep the sentence under 30 words. Also, remember not to cram all the summary lead information into the sentence. I can honestly say that I wish I had learned more about leads a long time ago.

Now for the editing mistake I found this week. I found this article on The Signpost's website, and I shall leave the reporter nameless. I would like to add, though, that the reporter is DEFINITELY not me. But if it were, it would be one of the first articles I ever wrote. Here's the lead: Weber State University's Department of Performing Arts will present the Symphonic Band, directed by Dr. Thomas Root, on Tuesday, Nov. 10 in the Browning Center for Performing Arts' Austad Auditorium. The reporter got the summary lead correct, but considering this is an a&e story, it should have been more creative.

Appropriate and Sensitive Language

Based on the reading assignment this week, it wasn’t hard to notice how much insensitive language is used on television alone, even the news. I was watching the evening news yesterday and they mentioned how a black man and a Hispanic woman had abducted a man. I don’t know if this would be considered insensitive language. It did make me think of whether it was necessary for them to mention their race at that point. It was not like they were giving a description of the suspects to the public, otherwise they should have also mentioned their approximate heights, ages, what they were driving, etc. Some may have interpreted the reporter as implying that black and Hispanic people are more likely to engage in criminal behavior like that.

The other thing I noticed was how some of those on television seem to have different rules. Kenny already mentioned in his blog Tosh.0, which is a show on Comedy Central featuring comedian Daniel Tosh. I think if you watched a few full episodes of him you would easily find –isms in all of them and maybe all of the –isms that we have talked about this week. Of course, he is on Comedy Central, so he can probably get away with a lot more than a broadcast or newspaper journalist.

A simple editing mistake I found this week from the Standard-Examiner: “That one, is seems, has everyone voicing some sort of an opinion.” I caught this one very easily, not sure what the editor saw. The sentence is very awkward to read as it should have the word “it” in place of “is”.

Sexism and Ageism

Sexism has been a rampart part of many cultures I have studied. It doesn't seem to matter what time period, there is always some form of sexism somewhere. As a passive and mostly tuned out radio listener I browsed radio stations for examples of sexist language. The radio didn't fail me. A car commercial came on saying, "Hey guys, come on down..." which is classified as sexist. The "Hey guys" section is only addressing men when women also buy cars. The people who wrote the commercial just cut half of their audience out. They should have done the commercial by starting with "Hey everyone..." which would eliminate the sexism.

One thing I learned this week is the concept of ageism. I always knew that yelling age specific insults at the elderly would be considered bad. But it never crossed my mind that saying, "She is still vigorous at 70." is ageist. I always thought it more of a compliment, but apparently it is a very subtle insult to the elderly.

Tosh.0: Is It Racist?

For those of you who watch Tosh.0, you will understand the title. For those of you who have never seen it, viewers beware. Daniel Tosh is a comedian who focuses on the -isms we learned about to make his audiences laugh. His humor consists on jokes about African-American males jumping higher, dancing better and being more well-endowed than their White brethren. Tosh's justification for poking fun at African-Americans is, "Oh, I have black friends." Unfortunately, this is an excuse used by many who engage in racial humor. I think there is a difference between racial humor and racism, but the line dividing the two is razor thin. I make wise-crack jokes to my friends who are another race, and we have had lengthy conversations about what is acceptable racial humor. All of the friends that I have had these conversations with have all said the same thing, "Would it bother you if I said it to you?" I have caught myself numerous times using this method, and after thinking about it, I realized that it would have bothered me. I am fortunate to have a racially diverse group of close friends, and very rarely, if ever, do we offend each other with our racially charged jokes. In our time, racial humor is prevalent in more places than we think. Movies, news broadcasts, Internet chatter and even in sports. Film director and actor, Mel Brooks, wrote the book on making racism funny and in a demented way, acceptable. If you have seen "Blazing Saddles," you know what I am talking about. I personally believe that if we can laugh at the stereotypes placed upon us, then we are making great strides to making racism a thing of the past. In order to make sure my writing never contains racial undertones, I should try to stop using racial humor in my conversations.

I was driving through Bunkie, La. and came across this sign hung on a restaurant door. Underneath it "CROSED ON MONDAY" was scribbled in sharpie on a piece of paper.

Avoid Being Racist

I found this chapter interesting because it made me think about some new ideas. The section about avoiding racism particularly stood out to me. Don't identify people by race unless the person's race is essential or interesting to the story. If it's not, leave it out.

Also, avoid using the term non-whites. I hate when people use the word non in front of words, especially when they're trying to describe my personality. I'm a lot of things, so there is no need to say the things I am not. For example, don't call a brunette a non-blond. You can call them a brunette instead. I'm 20 years old, not a non-teen. It's equally important to be careful with how you use the word minority. In some parts of the United States, whites are the minority.

In conclusion, don't stereotype people and remember to describe people accurately. If you wouldn't say someone's race if they weren't of a certain ethnic group, leave it out.

The editing mistake I found this week was online. I was looking at the Seattle Times at the article named, "Judge Holds DSHS Trim of Benefits to Disabled Children and Their Families." After reading the "isms" chapter, I knew this was an able-bodiedism problem. A disability doesn’t mean someone is a disabled person, so the sentence should have said the children who have disabilities.

oh the isms!

While working on this weeks homework, I couldn't believe how much insensitive language I found! Here are a few:
Sexism
I subscribe to the Writer’s Digest magazine, and it’s interesting that in it, there’s a lot of sexist writing. Whenever they refer to “the writer” they almost always use the pronoun ‘she.’ It’s probably true that there are more female writers and aspiring writers than men, but to always use the pronoun ‘she’ would mean that they’re assuming all writers (or at least all subscribers) are female. To fix this problem they could either use ‘he or she’ or they could rewrite the sentence so that the pronoun doesn’t appear, or so that it’s plural and becomes ‘they.’
Heterosexism
I was listening to one of my friend’s songs the other day called ‘Emo Kid.’ Although the song isn’t really meant to be taken seriously, there’s a lot of insensitive language in it that I could see offending people. One line reads, “Our guys look like girls our girls look like dykes.” The term dyke is demeaning, and could be offensive to some people.
Racism
For this one, I was watching the show Castle when one of the characters said a comment that could be considered racist. They were watching a basketball game and one of the characters commented saying, “What do you know, I guess white boys can jump.” This could be considered racist because the term “white boy” sets them apart from others, and the comment implies that the speaker doesn’t believe that white people can jump and is surprised when one can.
Ageism
I saw an example of this in one of the other blogs that I read. In it the author was talking about her daughter and said that, “Even though she’s a teenager, Becca is always so mature.” Even though this statement isn’t demeaning to Becca, it implies that most teenagers aren’t mature, and that Becca is seen as an exception, when really there are lots of teenagers that are mature.

And here's a funny spelling error:

Sexism

I would like to focus on sexism in this blog because as I was searching for examples, I was bombarded with horrific sexist advertising!!! And to thing that is my major. It is interesting to point out that most of the ads are from the 40s and 50s that really ticked me off, but even though there are less and less ads today that aren't politically correct, the content is ten times worse. Those ads won't post on here, but I want to share a few of the ones from earlier days.

Ok that is all I am going to post because I am just getting annoyed. As a PR major it is crucial to be aware of the sensitivity of your audience and the effect your words, actions and advertising could have on your company. As an editor is crucial to be able to point out these mistakes and prevent them from being put out in public.

Grammar mistake of the week...

Okay I cheated this week and just googled an image but it fits with what we learned about redundancy. See for yourself.

Style

I have found my problem with grammar. I have too much "style" in my voice. I want my writing to come off just how I sound and how my personality is and that, my friends, is where my grammatical errors get the best of me. A style reveals the writer's personality or voice, but it also shows how she or he sees the audience of the writing. If this is a true definition of style, then I have found my problem. But there can be balance when writing with style and with grammatical grace. Part of the problem with style is that it's subjective. Different readers have different ideas about what constitutes good writing style. So basically, if you have a problem with my style, get over it. Now, of course, since we are in school and writing to be graded by certain professors, I now find it a challenge to switch styles between classes. For instance, my creative writing teacher would like free-flow and imaginative writing, while my PR writing professor would like the facts with no fluff. Can a girl catch a break? So this chapter was a lesson well needed.

Grammatical error...

This was in Wal-Mart. Enough said.

-isms

I found an example of a billboard that an individual perceive as racist. The billboard has a message of std prevention and testing on it, but the individuals on the billboard are African American, as if to say that anyone who has Syphilis is African American. Whoever made this billboard needs to be more culturally sensitive.

Next is an example of a product called Glutamax. The slogan reads "I feel whiter and Gay each day." I have absolutely no idea what this means. This -ism obviously pertains to sexual orientation but it does not make any sense to me. It seems to promote homosexuality while demeaning heterosexuality. What does sexual orientation have to do with the product?

I found one that made me laugh because it is so ridiculous. This ad said " Are you asian and don't want to be," "theres HOPE for change," truth ministry.com. That is as racist as it gets in my book.

I found an example of ageism in a Snickers commercial. It's a bunch of middle aged guys playing football and someone states, "your playing like Betty White out there." Betty White suddenly gets tackled and everyone has a laugh out of it. This seems to state that getting old is a bad thing and old people cannot do anything productive. That is obviously not the case.

Able-bodiedism is a term that irritates me. Some people have physical or mental limitations but ideas or articles point it out, when it's unnecessary or inaccurate. There are reminders every day. A handicapped sign is a good example. I know people who rightfully own a handicap sign, but that has nothing to do with them being confined to a wheelchair. In my opinion, there should be a Physical limitation sign, not a wheelchair sign.

For this weeks editing mistake; This Chinese food sign had the worst grammar and sentence structure I have ever seen. This picture is self explanatory.

-isms

I learned a ton about -isms this week. I decided to take Dr. J's advice and use the -isms assignment in this post.

I ran into a “generic he” issue this week. I was speaking with a friend of mine about a job I was hoping to get. He asked me who the owner of the business was, to which I responded I was unsure. He then said, “Make sure the business he runs is legitimate.” Later in the week I did some digging to find that the owner is, in fact, a woman. Most officials in the organization are women. The “generic he” is more of a habit than I realized before.


I have a few friends that still use the word “gay” to synonymously with “lame” or “crappy.” This is inappropriate and offensive but it’s also a habit. I’m sure they mean no serious disrespect by it but I do have to remind them that their language is offensive.


Last semester I took an intercultural communication class that really opened my eyes to the diversity around me. I never realized that “Latino”, “Hispanic” and “Mexican” all describe different areas. Previously I referred to anyone who appeared “Latino” as “Latino” or “Mexican.” This is wrong because clearly not every individual is actually from Mexico.


Until reading the chapter, I never realized how stereotyped older people are. As the book says, “Our language is not kind to older people.” Just the other day I had a nurse ask me how my mother is doing. I relayed her progress to which she responded, “She’s not that old is she?” Implying that such bad health only comes with age.

I definitely learned this week to write sensitively and kindly about other people. Always use the golden rule when writing about anyone.



As for the editing error of the week, I saw this written in my bathroom stall (of all places). First, it made me chuckle, second I noticed an error. The writer signed, "The Unicorns" but spoke in first person. So either it should start with "We" instead of "I" or it should be signed "A Unicorn." Also, Noah built an "ark" not an "arch." I hope this made you smile!