Nerves of Steel/Steeling the Spotlight (or other lame and cliche steel pun of your choice)

My feature article was published!

I've been working on it since before winter break. We originally did the interview with this particular professor in the beginning of September, and between the transcription of the hour-long interview (which was hired out to someone else, and took several days to get back), the analysis and picking apart of the interview, and all the separate research it took to put into it, the whole thing took about a month when you subtract winter break. It was a very involved article--and I'm so proud.

The most significant help in writing this article was actually my first feature article when I first started working here in October. It was about an alumnus who had decided to bequest money to the university in his will. I looked over the interview, wrote the article, and gave it to my boss to edit. He just finished editing it recently (no rush on this one, apparently), and I was astounded by the edits he had done. He had almost completely rewritten the article. He used the same quotes, but in a different order, and the whole thing was almost utterly unrecognizable.

I tried not to let it get to me. It was one of my first articles on the job, anyway. My personal attachment to it wasn't unbreakable. With it, he had attached a small guide on how to write a good AP-style feature. I cross-referenced the guide and his work--sure enough, I could see the parallels. The story running through the whole thing, the transition from one idea to another until you reach the proper conclusion. It made sense.

Then he handed back my steel feature, and told me to edit it according to the guide. That was the only instruction I got from him.

And I discovered he had been right. I looked at the alumnus article, the guide, the steel article, and saw what I needed to do. Instead of piling on details, I needed to make them flow. One idea led to another until the reader doesn't even know they're being guided. And then at the end, you reach a point: a culmination, so to speak, of why the article is important, and what made it so worthwhile for the reader to take time out of their day to digest.

So I did what he asked. I cut and pasted paragraphs in entirely different orders, sometimes even splitting them or omitting them. I wondered how I hadn't seen this before, why it hadn't occurred to me before that this article had sounded wrong, had read wrong. If you read it from top to bottom, you were saturated with information. If you read my edited draft from top to bottom, you would hear a professor explaining his work, and why it's important. For the next draft that I sent Bill, he had no edits.

That feature article was probably one of my most educational experiences here to date. There's no better way of learning than being forced to work on your own project, separating the pieces and then putting them together the way the reader likes to see them written, even if they couldn't tell you why.

I am getting better.