My afternoon: Organizing, Interviewing, Organizing, Writing, Organizing and Rewriting... oh, and did I mention organizing?
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| Writing materials, names, phone numbers and tape recordings pile up as I try to make sense of it all. |
This week is no different. Despite being presented with a large orderly 3 ring binder with all the necessary information, I look around my hotel room to collect my notes and interviews and find piles of information scattered all over the floor, on my bed, and on various surfaces. My writing process typically involves collecting interviews and information in various locations. I have notes on my computer, notes in a small note pad, some on the back of my syllabus and a few on the back of my agenda. I also have a few tape recordings on my phone. Then, I put it all together and organize the info into something coherent. After that, it is all about organization! I highlight the concepts that relate to my angle or main idea, I begin writing, changing around the order of my words. I definitely do not write in a linear fashion - which often messes up my organization as I will have 6-7 random paragraphs written that are necessary but may not yet relate or tie together. Then it's organization again.
You might be asking, why is this post even here? Is Sarah just telling us how she writes? In a way yes, but what I am really getting at is the type of organization journalists need to have. Journalists constantly have to take large amounts of quotes, interviews, research and information and organize it thoroughly. This is a lesson I want to ensure I teach my students this year. How do we organize our information? How do we determine what is important and what are some good ways of sifting through that material?
Perhaps I can model to my students. My first thought would be to video tape myself in the process of collecting information, organizing, writing, organizing and rewriting and then using that time lapse feature mentioned several times in institute already. We've talked a lot about modeling the process of reading newspapers and we've talked about modeling writing, but have we thought about modeling the PROCESS of writing? We should show our students that it's not just throwing information on a page. There is more to it and organization is key!
Sarah Noah
Goshen High School
Goshen, Indiana
Hi Sarah,
ReplyDeleteThere's a famous CEO named Harold Geneen who took the helm of ITT, which was at the time a $500 million campany, and turned it into a $5 billion conglomerate in little more than a decade. He was a management genious. He also was notoriously disorganized to the point that his office was a disaster area of papers strewn everywhere, including sticking out of his numerous over-stuffed briefcases.
He tells the story of how a visiting CEO took a look around his office and said, "You know what they say about a messy desk." Geneen responded, "Well, what do they say about an empty one?"
There are two sides to every story, huh!
-- Steve Caswell
P.S. A video on being organized still sounds like a very good idea though, although I might stress more about having the right tools instead of making sure it's all neatly organized.
I think the photo you took for this story was right on. It captured so many different views of your story and you can totally tell the anticipation going on through your picture. You captured everything spot on!
ReplyDeleteHeather Jancoski
Desert Sands Middle School
Phoenix, AZ
I hear you Sarah - totally. Some of us were talking about the writing process yesterday and decided that it's best to just get the writing out onto the paper. (In my mind I think of it as vomiting out the information because that's what it seems like to me). Get the information out onto the paper and then organize away like you said.
ReplyDeleteMaybe that isn't the best thing to do for our students who may have even more information to sift through. I don't know. I'm curious to hear the review of your process - how it worked for you and how it came together!
Hannah Sagaser
Mandan High School
Mandan, ND