Surreal Ledes

Where did Fall go? It is seriously frigid outside at the moment, and I'm not digging it. At least it seems to have stopped raining for the moment.

Class was kind of... surreal today I guess. I mean it went well, but it was just kind of strange. In my JRN class we have started practicing lede writing, which is essentially writing introductions to news articles. They are the portion of the article that actually leads into the news. So typically the way it plays out is that at the end of a class we write practice leads, and then we spend the beginning of the next class reviewing what people in the class have written.

Essentially we end up critiquing our peers work after our teacher has posted select pieces on the class blog. There is nothing to distinguish them in anyway, so really the only person that knows who wrote the lede is the writer themselves.

This is all fine and well of course, and really it helps a lot. The strange part comes in now though. So we were going over ledes and we got to this one post, where the last one on the page was one of mine. Guess who he calls on to discuss the lede...

Bingo. I got to discuss why I felt that the lede I wrote was effective and I apparently was the only one in the room that was aware that I had written it. That was a little strange. Thankfully though my conclusions were similar to the teachers, so it all panned out.

Lede Writing

My JRN 200 class seems to be going well. Today we went over the 'ledes' that we were assigned to write at the end of last class. He put up examples from what people in the class had written, with our names stripped from them. It was a really good way to get an idea of what to shoot for and what to avoid.

Although it was a little embarrassing that one of mine ended up on the screen, because I accidentally typed in lighting rather than lightning. Thank God it wasn't a graded assignment, because that mistake would have gotten me a zero.

At the end of class we did another writing exercises where we wrote more 'ledes'. I think that went well, but I suppose I'll find out next class. The really strange thing was, that I e-mailed my work in to Omar but it didn't register in his e-mailbox. Then the computer wouldn't let us go back and make sure that it was in my sent messages folder.

Once I got back to my room though, I was able to confirm that it was sent out. I guess other people were having a similar problem last class, and their e-mail ended up getting to him a half an hour after they had sent them. It's a little nerve-wrecking when you aren't sure an assignment has sent, and you're in a class with really strict deadlines.