Students getting down to business

Students in my Advanced News and Feature Writing class are once again blogging on their beats. I have assigned the blog for a few years now. Besides teaching students how to blog, it gets them working on two important tasks. First, it gets them writing about their beat on a regular basis. Second, it allows them to reflect on their reporting and writing. Check out what they have to say by clicking the links at right.

Worst error ever?

If this copy editor didn't lose his or her job, I'll eat a newspaper.

Students blogging again

My Reporting Contemporary Issues students are creating blogs. They will cover Greeley City Council twice a month and write about what happens on their blogs. Tonight we went over the agenda for the last meeting, and nothing stood out as especially interesting. I hope they don't all drop the class after that.

Pictures, words and women

I taught the Mass Communication and Gender class this spring. It went really well. Students did some interesting projects and seemed to learn a lot. But when it comes to comm and gender, some people still have a lot to learn.

My son got a neat game for his sixth birthday. It's called "Guess Who," and he really enjoys playing it. I am troubled by it, though. The point of the game is to use guesses as clues to find out who your opponent is. The board features 24 faces. Five are female. This just doesn't seem right to me. About half the population is female. Children learn a lot by playing games. What are they to learn when only five out of 24 faces are female?

If you care about issues of fairness in communication, you should check out the writings of Kate Swift. Swift, who died in early May, did a lot of work on sexism in language. As she and her co-author Casey Miller wrote in Words and Women,

everything we read, heard on the radio and television, or worked on professionally confirmed our new awareness that the way English is used to make the simplest points can either acknowledge women’s full humanity or relegate the female half of the species to secondary status.

Swift and Casey called attention to some of the blatantly sexist phrases in English and helped change the way words were used. For instance, they pointed out that when women were talked about, they were usually talked about in terms of their looks. The use of "firefighter" instead of "fireman" can be traced to their work. Read the New York Times obituary.

Did you really make the finals?

More on quotation marks. They should only be used when QUOTING something. This means they should be used when you're using someone else's exact words.

The quotation marks on this trophy are unnecessary because nothing is being quoted. The quote marks actually make the trophy look stupid because they imply that the winner was not really a finalist. I guess it could be a trophy presented to someone who played a tennis player in a show.

My first podcast

I decided to enter the 21st century and recorded a podcast. Let me know if you think I should stick to print.

The media get their due

The semester is winding down, and the grading is heating up. I'm almost through with my second group of papers of the day. I've run across many errors, of course, but two stand out because they are so common.

The first is the misuse of the word "media." It's an important word for us journalists, and when students mess it up we tend to get angry. "No, no," you say. "The Cranky Copy Editor gets angry?" It's a fact. I do. On with our post.

The word media is plural. This seems to be a difficult concept for students to grasp, but it's true. Contrary to popular belief, the following is grammatically correct:

The media are quite influential.

Media is the plural form of "medium." So this is also correct:

My favorite medium is newspapers.

This is confusing because most English words are made plural by adding "s," and this is an exception. But it's one journalism and mass communications students should know.

The second error I've encountered a lot today is noun-pronoun disagreement. In English, pronouns must agree with the nouns they follow. For instance, in the following sentence, the pronoun does not agree with its noun:

A reporter needs to keep their opinions out of the stories they write.

We're only talking about one reporter, so the word is singular. Therefore, the pronoun that follows should be "his or her," not "their." An easy way to fix this is to change "reporter" to "reporters," as in the following:

Reporters need to keep their opinions out of the stories they write.

I tend to suggest this change to avoid the cumbersome use of "his or her," as in the following:

A reporter needs to keep his or her opinions out of the stories he or she writes.

I tell my students to avoid the use of "he" when gender is not known because it's sexist. But that's a topic for another post. ...