Week 12, Derrek Ballard

I loved this week's assignments!  I felt it was kind of a puzzle to fit words into a designated space.  I used a thesaurus often to find synonyms for words I wanted to use but couldn't because of their length.  I think the hardest part of the assignment was writing the deck because I'm not as familiar with those.  In browsing news articles online, there aren't too many with decks.

When writing the headlines, I answered a few questions in my head:

• What's the who, what, when, where, why and how of the article?
• What's the most important aspect of the article?
• How can I capture the reader's attention in so few words?

After answering those questions, I put that information into a short sentence, then took out some of the extra words to make it a headline.  After I figured out the gist of the headline I wanted, I had to pick out different words to make them fit into the designated area.

The editing mistake I found this week is an example of a poorly-written headline from Fox News:

I don't like this headline for several reasons; these are the things I would have changed:

1. I would have only capitalized the first word of the quote.
2. "What's said is more important than who said it."  I would have put "Trump adviser Conway" last.
3. I would have spelled out "Democrats".
4. It looks like "quit" should be "quiet".  I'm not sure if this is a typo - if not, I would have changed the wording to make it more clear.