Writing My First Article

 

        I wrote this when I was writing my first pitch article for the newspaper I currently write for. 

        It is hard to write am article about something you don’t know about. Firstly, you have to research your topic. Researching a topic is a rather tedious task, and different search questions give different results. This makes the process not only hard, but different websites can give you different results, especially when you are looking for facts.

        I was writing a research essay on chocolate. When you go on the internet and search about it, there is enough information to write a book. What is the most interesting facts for my article? What do I want to say? I made an outline that seemed to immediately go into my subconscious brain, as I didn’t refer to it much after writing it, but I think I actually went off the outline for my topic.

        The websites I read were exceedingly boring, most of them, and starting to write an interesting article from a bunch of boring facts is really hard. I wrote for a little while, then started over, deleting what I had started with. I know that the first bit of writing is not usually what you will end up using, so I knew that anyway when I started. Then I wrote the introduction.

        The introduction to my article sounded like I had tried really hard. It was starkly different from what I had first been writing, which could have been a page from my history or geography textbook—cold facts lined up in a row. I departed from the textbook writing, but my first try was a bellyflop. Mom and dad both suggested that I change it. So, I started off with: Imagine if… Get other people’s brains thinking, not just yours and you will get off to an interesting start.

        Perhaps I didn’t mention, but I was writing as a kind of starter for a job. The kind of writing I was supposed to do was different from anything I had ever really written, aside from a research report I did on water when I was thirteen. Being thirteen and writing a research report is different from researching an article for a bi-weekly newspaper.

        The newspaper examples that I was going off of were boring to say the least, and I had a really hard time following them. I read part of one to my mom and she was done listening by the time I was one third of the way through. I didn’t want that for my first article, so I did my best.

        With researching on the internet, sometimes you see a sentence that sounds really good, and you want to put that information in your article. The problem is the sentence sounds so good you don’t know how to change it. There was one such sentence off the web which said, “patented a method.” I couldn’t think how to change it so that I would not plagiarize. The sentence I wanted to go off of was a statement of fact, and I wanted to transfer that fact to my article. I slept over the article, and the third day I worked on it, I came up with “invented.” Why do I even need to say he got his method patented? The important fact is that Joseph Storrs Fry invented a method for using steam engines to separate chocolate. The word invented solved my dilemma.

        Some people say that you should research things and then close the research and write. Of course, that is right. I need to ingest the facts before I can present them in an interesting way, but I have a unique memory. I remember things verbatim often, and so in order to not write what the other person wrote, I need to have the thing in front of me or memorize what I am not going to say.

Overall, it was an interesting process, and I hope that I get the job. (And I did)