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A picture I took to let our adviser know the first issue of The Claw had been delivered while she was absent.

news

student features

opinion

sports +
Entertainment

Writing

I've always thought of myself as being a pretty good writer. No amount of natural skill could have prepared me for this journalism program, though. Sometimes it feels like I haven't stopped writing at any point between my first Journalism 1 assignment as a sophomore to the article I'm working on at this very moment. Our staff may only have ten people but we produce more work than some publications twice our size, which our fast-paced program is entirely to thank for. With ever-multiplying opportunities to apply the skills I've learned through this class, my writing style and process has gotten much stronger than I ever thought I'd be able to achieve during high school.

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While nearly everything I've ever published is available on different parts of this website, I decided to pick out a few highlights for this page.

news

Since joining our newspaper staff, I've enjoyed writing about topics that students my age might not care much about, especially when it comes to politics. My parents encouraged me to be politically aware from a young age. Now that I'm in a position where my words are read by my peers, I try to use my platform to inform my classmates about things that will effect them whether they know about it or not.

This piece about the SAFE-T Act was a part of our first Tiger Times Online update post-winter break, when everyone in our staff was tasked with writing two stories. I spent a lot of time researching American politics that week, with my other piece being a column about the Speaker of the House.

In light of the White House telling Congress that public health emergency declarations would be allowed to expire this year, I thought it was a good time to write our first "COVID piece" in a few months about how students had seen their habits and anxieties change over the past year.

When I wrote this piece last year, my biggest challenge was finding sources; no EHS representatives of our teachers union were interested in speaking with me. I was able to write the piece by using public statements I'd come across during my research and, for the sake of honesty, leaving a comment at the end of the article about the problem I'd had.

student features

When I was first introduced to the idea of journalism as a career, reading professionally-written features terrified me. I was intimidated by how masterfully these writers were able to bring people to life on the page. I couldn't imagine how extensive the interviews, how long the hours spent building a narrative must have been. I was scared of trying to do what they did. But I wanted so badly to be able to do it myself.

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If I could go back to say one thing to my pre-journalism self, it would be "talk louder." Long before I was running into stands and conducting interviews on the spot, I was a shy underclassman who often struggled to speak up when they had something to contribute. Journalism, by providing me a platform to share my thoughts and giving me the tools to hear from others, gave me the confidence to translate experiences into something that could be shared with the world.

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The shorter-form features in this section are evidence of some of the ways I've grown since my journalism "baby steps." One day, hopefully, I'll look back on them after I've grown even more.

See a larger version of this article in the "senior year" gallery on my "The Claw" page. This photo will link to it.

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The most memorable part of this piece was, for me, the work that went into writing it. I was worried that, writing about robotics, I'd be in over my head as a non-programmer and I wouldn't be able to write coherently about my topic. But I was lucky enough to be met with incredibly kind subjects, who invited me to see what they were doing and were eager to explain everything.  Because of them, this piece remains one that I've most enjoyed writing.

Though this piece received some very positive feedback from students, I was always somewhat unhappy with the way I executed its scene-setting --- I think the switching between tenses was more confusing than I realized while writing it.

I recently attempted that same style of scene-setting again. With a year's more writing experience and more time spent in the environment I was describing, I found that my scene-setting was much clearer, which I'm happy with.

Opinion

The summer before my first year taking Advanced Journalistic Composition, my adviser encouraged me to apply for an editorial position in journalism. I had two years of yearbook experience and had taken Journalism 1 --- and, as the only junior in my class, I knew my adviser was preparing me to take over as editor-in-chief next year. I decided I was at my most helpful as our opinion/views editor. As someone who has always been very opinionated, I was happy to have a platform where I could work with my classmates to share diverse perspectives while finding a valuable outlet for my own thoughts.

supreme court editorial.png

See a larger version of this article in the "junior year" gallery on my "The Claw" page. This photo will link to it.

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When this editorial was originally proposed, my class was planning to write about the challenges Ketanji Brown Jackson faced in her appointment as a Supreme Court Justice. But, when documents were leaked that discussed the Court's plan to overturn Roe v. Wade, I led the writing of a new editorial that combined both topics. While the article received some praise from my peers when it was first published, it got more attention after the Dobbs v. Jackson decision, when I re-shared it on my personal social media accounts.

In writing this piece about the Speaker of the House, I wanted to incorporate literary devices, like the "haunted" theme that repeats throughout the article. I'm happy with the way this piece turned out, and I think the end of the story does a pretty good job tying in the metaphors with the real point of my article.

Though this piece came at the peak of a national campaign to ban certain books from schools, I wrote it in response to a local event. A school in the nearby St. Louis area had just voted to remove "The Bluest Eye" from its library, and I wanted to discuss the dangers of taking diverse stories away from students.

I wrote this piece shortly after taking the ACT, and realizing how prohibitively expensive many of its services were. I was relieved to get a good score on the test without having to drop hundreds of dollars preparing for it. I saw, in researching this piece, that most people didn't get that lucky.

sports + Entertainment

On a staff of our size, there aren't enough people for anyone to specialize in one topic. Everyone takes turns writing about everything, something I've come to be grateful for. In this section there are examples of me writing about music and culture, something I've always been very passionate about. There's also sportswriting, though, something I was initially hesitant about when I joined journalism but have grown to enjoy tremendously.

SPORTS

My favorite part of sports journalism is always the stories of the people behind it. Much of what I write about with sports focuses on team dynamics and how the players are impacted by what happens during their season.

See a larger version of this article in the "senior year" gallery on my "The Claw" page. This photo will link to it.

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Our girls basketball team is one of the more reliably successful at our school, but as this season began, there was a worry that they wouldn't be able to live up to the victory they'd accomplished in the 2022 school year. Team members had graduated with D1 offers, leaving the EHS team with a lot of underclassmen needing to step up. I wrote this article in October, right as the team was getting ready to start practices, to see how they planned to adapt to the changes.

Below is an example of a game piece I wrote about a girls volleyball postseason game, and though it was an end-of-unit project that would not be published, I'm really proud of how it turned out.

If the Google Drive embed doesn't work, try to see the document here.

This is a link to a sports commentary piece I wrote about how Eastern European NHL players were being treated by their American audience when war between Russia and Ukraine broke out. Though it received an honorable mention from IJEA, I revisited it for a semester project and expanded on the subject. My "editing" page contains more information about the revision practice we do in AJC in place of a semester exam.

ENTERTAINMENT

While I tend to gravitate towards writing news and politics stories for our weekly newspaper, I'll jump at the chance to pick up an article about music or art whenever I find something interesting to write about. I usually experiment more with my writing style in these pieces, trying to fit the tone of the article with unique sentence structures and word choice.

This is an article I wrote about St. Louis Shakespeare and its TourCo program, which brings scaled-down productions to host Shakespeare in the Park festivals in towns across the STL metro area. The article received praise from a social media manager with the program after I shared the article to our publications Instagram account.

It wouldn't be right to create the entertainment section of my portfolio without including this review of an ABBA album that, while it isn't winning any awards, quickly became infamous among my classmates for its sarcastic writing style and the fact that it's more than 1,000 words long.

I enjoyed writing this (mostly) satirical piece about Spotify Premium a great deal, even though I wrote my first draft while in an urgent care being treated for pneumonia.

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