On Monday July 29, 2013 I attended Newsweek/Daily Beast's Women in the World Foundation's Next Leadership Academy on behalf of the Barnard Department of Communications. (Yes that's a long sentence with a lot of organization titles.) This summer I've been interning at Communications and they sent me to the conference to write a reflection piece on the conference.
True confession: I tried to write for my high school newspaper in 10th grade. It seemed that journalism was not my thing. My mother told me I should have stuck with it, and that any writing experience is good.
Enter the rain of laughter I got when I called my mom bubbling with excitement after the conference. I was inspired by the stories of women doing great things for other women and thrilled that I got to write an article to reflect about my day. Keeping a journal has always been a way for me to download my thoughts and a reflection article seemed to be a more formalized way of doing just that. My brain was full of thoughts, ideas, and even a bit of worry all of which made their way into the article.
Fact- writing an article, even one that is a reflection, is not the same as blogging, which was as close as I've gotten to writing a news article before this. As I've told people before, I like making things up so journalism hasn't meshed with my interests. But this opportunity was amazing so I figured that writing is writing and I could learn on the fly.
Journalism is different than any writing I've done before. During the editing process my boss helped me to change conversational phrases and make them more formalized, to find the right quotes to fit my story angle, and to keep everything as tight as possible. (Being succinct has always been a problem.) The whole experience was eye-opening and will definitely improve my writing overall, as well as exposing me to wonderful people and new possibilities.
P.S. random thought: in an attempt to be clever my titles are getting longer and longer. (sorry not sorry?)
