Writing was the reason I joined the staff of the Crossed Sabres in the first place. It has been a strong suit of mine since I was little and would spend my free time writing fictional stories. I had never been as good at nonfiction writing, but even in the first few months of my freshman year, I could notice the improvement.
At my first JEA/NSPA event, the 2018 Fall National High School Journalism Convention in Chicago, I entered the commentary write-off. I had never written a commentary piece before, but my adviser had recommended the category to me. When I was writing my piece for the contest, I didn’t realize until my third draft that I needed to use first-person pronouns because I was so used to writing in the news style.
The write-off was exhausting, and my hand was cramping by the end of it. I had written multiple drafts of my story, and even though I wished I could keep editing it, I was proud of the final copy I turned in. Apparently I was right to be proud – I won a superior award for the commentary category. Though I never published the story with the Crossed Sabres, it’s one of my favorite pieces I’ve written. My final draft and rubric are attached below.
The best story I think I’ve written, though, and one that sets the bar high, is a long feature piece I wrote for the September issue of my senior year. The story, “Making a difference: Life as a first responder,” was about the firefighters, emergency medical technicians and paramedics of the Arlington County Fire Department (ACFD). I spent time with a crew at the firehouse near my school and went with them when a fire call came in during an interview.
The article really began a year earlier, though, at the JEA conference in Chicago where I entered the commentary write-off. During a speaker presentation on Pulitzer Prize photographs, I got the idea to do a photo-based story on the ACFD. I never got the chance, though, until the September issue. My schedule over summer gave me the flexibility I needed to be able to do the story justice.
Since I had spent so long thinking about it, I put a lot of pressure on myself for this piece. It meant a lot to me because of personal connections I have to the fire service, and I wanted to make sure that I did the story right. The first draft document I turned in was a full six pages long, about three times longer than my typical story.
The length of the story wasn’t intentional, but I felt like it was necessary. We had to cut it at first because the full story wouldn’t fit in the print issue, but when it came time to publish online, we decided to post the full story. There wasn’t one part of it that I felt should be left out. I spent my free period one day designing the story in Adobe Spark. I wanted the photographs I had taken to be involved in it and fully integrated to best covey the story. Click on the image and headline below to read the full story.
https://spark.adobe.com/page-embed.js
