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 This is my first blog post on Blogger!

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Review is Invaluable (+ Grammarly Video Intro)

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Note: This post was edited using Grammarly . I made a video of the editing process which you can watch here:   Dr. White, my journalism professor, gave me an editorial writing assignment. I decided to write about recruiting black engineers for graduate school. The high concentration of black engineers graduating from HBCUs means it will be more efficient to recruit black engineers for graduate school from HBCUs than from PWIs. I worked diligently on the assignment, even going as far as creating a word cloud image to include as a graphic. When I had completed the first draft, I submitted it. A few days later it was time to submit the final version. I edited it a bit before turning in the corrected version of my editorial. At the time I thought it was pretty good; boy was I wrong. As part of the peer review, a classmate reviewed my editorial and stated that she was unsure if I was arguing for or against black engineers going to HBCUs for graduate school. As I re-read my editorial, ...
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For God’s sake, don’t bury the lead!

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I’m one of those people. You know, the kind who has to be told something important multiple times. I hope you’re not like that. This week, Dr. White, my journalism professor, told our class that when you are writing an editorial you should begin with a hard-hitting, active voice, eye-grabbing statement that follows the inverted pyramid model. In other words, you present the who, what, where, when, and how of the story before you get into its details. The statement that does all of this upfront, grabbing the attention of the reader before he is presented with a bunch of details, is called the “lead”. In effect, a writer should not bury the lead! Right there it hit me. I’d heard this somewhere before.  Last semester a graduate student asked me to review a research paper they had written. As is always the case, there were small grammar errors and word choice issues to correct. More importantly, there was a style problem that was only revealed when I asked the student to explain a poin...
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