Writing Process: First Article

My first writing assignment for the Inkwell was for a Volleyball game that had already taken place. I had no prior knowledge of Volleyball and did not understand the game much after I finished with the article.

Since I knew almost nothing about the sport or the team, I did my homework online.  I researched the team’s stats on the Armstrong.edu webpage. The Athletics department has extensive profiles and brochures available in .pdf on the page.

I wrote this article almost completely without quotes. I wrote about the information that I gathered from the website and emailed a few of the girls for little updates.

Writing this piece was very hard for me. Not only was it my first journalistic writing since high school, it was about a subject that I was not familiar with.

I began by gathering all of my information in front of me and outlining what I wanted to cover in the article on a piece of paper (because I am old-school like that). I put in those few quotes to transition between main ideas. I stared at the computer screen and typed up everything that I had.

300 words.

I needed 500 words.

What do you do when you’re only 60% done and you’ve used all the information that you have. I used my extensive creative writing skills to fill in the other 200 words. I found another angle in one of the quotes that I explored.

I definitely had to use my creative writing skills after all my information was tapped out.

My editor had a few suggestions for me to use more quotes next time, but there weren’t many changes from my original draft to the print copy in the Inkwell.