By Hannah Sievert
At ONA, I learned a lot about the future of technology, the importance of networking and how to be a better writer.
One of my favorite and one of the most useful sessions I went to was a session on how to be a stronger writer. The speaker gave out a sheet that had 50 writing tools on it from “Writing Tools” by Roy Clark. The examples she used in the presentation were, to me, amazing. She shortened down complex ideas into understandable phrases.
A few memorable writing tips from her presentation:
-Keep key elements at the end of a sentence. She used the example of “The queen, my lord, is dead” from Shakespeare. He could have written the sentence a number of ways but kept the key concept at the end, which keeps the reader’s attention throughout the sentence.
-Spread gold coins throughout the story. She said she keeps a bag of gold coins on her desk to remind her of this idea. The key is to reward readers by reading through the whole story by including interesting tidbits, an interesting detail or a sharply written sentence in the middle of the story. So many people always focus on the start of the story, but a great detail and a well-written bit of info in the middle of the story will continue to hold the audience’s attention.
-Keep subject and verb together near the beginning of the sentence. Don’t overcomplicate the writing process – make sentences easy to understand.
-People don’t like reading big numbers, so lift out heavy number cargo, like data, into a chart, map or graph so it’s easy to see.
-When editing: cut big, then small. Reconstruct the organization and the structure of the piece first, then go through and cut commas and shift words around.
The second most interesting presentation I went to was about the future of journalism jobs. A study on journalism jobs found that in the past few years (since 2015), news media organization jobs have dropped by 31 percent. This is during a time period when jobs in the U.S. increased by 5.7 percent overall.
The research then studied what skills were most sought after in the media job postings. They noticed that technology skills are sought after everywhere. Bilingual skills are becoming more and more sought after. And there is a big demand for skills in SEO writing, understanding of analytics, HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Premier Pro.
Multimedia and video production skills are increasingly being sought after in positions for TV, radio and print newspaper companies. Even though jobs are down, Anna Lyn Kurtz mentioned that “the storyteller is needed everywhere” in plenty of other jobs, like marketing, movie production and in business. There will always be jobs that need strong journalistic skills, like critical thinking, writing, editing, communication and storytelling.
Finally, on the last day, a session speaker reminded us of Mary Oliver’s “instructions of living a life,” which include: pay attention, be astonished, tell about it — a message for us writers to take back to the newsroom and into life.
