Final entry!

Throughout the duration of this course, I learned a lot about the freelancing process and lifestyle, writing for publication, and tailoring pieces to be sellable.

I was pretty pleased with my performance in this course. I feel that the pieces I wrote and revised were nearly publication-worthy by their final drafts. I really enjoyed doing the piece on wine because I got to learn more about wine and talk about it with others, which was fun. I also enjoyed doing research about Lansing City Market. I probably would have never gone there had it not been for the Capital Gains assignment.

What I found to be most difficult in this course was tailoring articles to have a more pronounced, distinct hook that is appropriate for the context it will be published in. I still have a hard time identifying and perfecting a hook, but I now have techniques I can use to develop a hook. Examining the audience demographic of a publication often leads to ideas that can be integrated into a potential hook in order to make an article more specific to a magazine.

I learned that research isn’t easy. There are either a ton of sources, or only a few sources, and finding the information you need, by either sorting through a glut of information or trying to find any information at all, can be challenging. I learned to give myself more time¬—for everything. Researching, developing a hook, drafting, editing, revising, and polishing all took more time than I thought they would for all of the assignments. I also learned that if I’m running late for a deadline, it’s better to tell the editor that I’m running late and give them an expected completion time than to just submit it as soon as possible. Everyone likes to be in the know.
I learned that I’m not as good of a writer as I thought. My sentences and word choice are great, but I have real issues trying to organize information and develop an argument. As soon as I know what I want to say and in what order to convey the information, I’m okay; but until that happens, I find myself just free-writing and then reorganizing sentences to “make them fit.” I feel a “success” of this class was identifying this problem, but a “failure” is realizing that I still have this problem and I’m not quite sure how to make it better. I often solicit the ideas of others in order to remedy this problem, but I feel I need to find better strategies and techniques in order to prevent this issue from occurring.

I really enjoyed reading my classmates’ work and discussing with them different aspects of their writing style, angle, hooks, and organization. I think that this exposure to pieces written by different authors will serve me well when I am editing in the future. I also enjoyed learning about the subject matter my classmates wrote about.

The most important thing I learned from this class was the process of freelancing. I had no idea how to pitch articles, write them, or sell them. This information will be very useful to me as I pursue freelancing projects in the future, which seems to be the path I may be taking after graduation. =)