Editorials, everyone's favorite section of the newspaper. Well, not everyone. My grandmother has some weird fascination with the obituary page, something that I'm sure has to do with her age. Regardless of that, I'm sure that Editorials and Op-Ed pages have made more people laugh then Family Circus and Dilbert put together. Editorials have also sparked anger, fear, and tears.
This week my Writing For Change teacher has assigned me the task of writing one of those feeling inducing editorials, in five hundred to a thousand words no less. Short pieces aren't my strong point, I tend to blabber on, trying to squeeze everything I want a person to know into my work. So, for me the challenge was to hit the high points while keeping it snappy and engaging.
I did this by asking myself what the key points of my non-profit were. There is no point in throwing in every fact and statistic that I have on New York Says Thank You. For one it's boring and way over whelming and for two they don't mean much to anyone who isn't invested in the organization and their problem. My job was to begin to get them invested so that they wanted to search out those facts and figures. My first draft had two thousand words, my second somewhere around seven hundred. Learning to use one word instead of three and to take out frivolous sentences allowed me to reach that five hundred to a thousand word goal while still creating an editorial I am proud of
Mission Accomplished.
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