Editing
Writing
Dillon Worral shares that his passion for haunted houses comes from 1. watching horror movies. His all time favorite horror film is 2. scream. 3. He has already been able to 4. make connections with Brad Tucker 5. ( a haunted house designer for Busch Gardens hollow scream event) 6. and has given him valuable information and advice about becoming a haunted house designer. He was advised to gain experience and to 7. get into theater 8. as two of the most important things. As of now, 9. Dillon is in theater class and has begun writing stories for his haunted house designs. Dillon 10. describes the key to having a memorable story as, 11. "if you come up with a story that can have people go into that world for a few minutes while they are in the haunted house, it makes it that much more believable and you get a better reaction." Furthermore, he emphasizes that experience is everything. 12. He is aware that nobody starts immediately from the top about progression in the way that he will work towards it is first working behind the scenes too soon 13. being front and center of his creations.
1.This is a good spot to talk about his first time watching a horror movie, or when his revelation came about wanting to be a haunted house designer
2.What is this movie about? What about it inspired him? And, Capitalize proper nouns and place quotation marks around movie titles: "Scream"
3.New Paragraph
4. How did he do this? Where did he meet him? What did he learn? This could be a good part of your story.
5. Take this out of parentheses and end the sentence after "Busch Gardens"
6.Delete and replace with "Tucker advised Worral to.."
7.Why is theater important to haunted house design?
8.Delete
9.Refer to him by his last name
10. Replace with: "...says that the key is to have a memorable story. "
11.New sentence for quotes and new Paragraph before quotes
12. This sentence doesn't make sense, re-read it
13. How will he be the front and center of his haunted houses? Maybe instead end the story discussing what his plans are to begin his career? What are his major goals? His next steps?
This story was turned in to be published in the most recent US Magazine. Because it was turned in last minute, and I believe there is potential to the story, I decided to not publish it in the magazine. Instead I wanted to work on the editing with the writer and eventually publish it in the yearbook.
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I teach the basics of writing to the whole class three times throughout the year: once during the bootcamp we host before the school year begins, once during the first or second week of school, and once right before we begin the Us magazine. Each time, I emphasize throughout the lesson the that journalistic stories should not be one long paragraph. We look at examples, I explain why not. Still I receive stories that resemble more of a Wikipedia biography than a story.
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Sometimes, I receive stories that are just one long sentence.
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But part of being a leader is cherishing every single contributor, and that means publishing their stories, even if its going to take work on both sides.
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On the side of this first draft story, I included a few of the comments I discussed with this writer.
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Along with editing stories, I make sure to show the designers how to change their spreads to make them more appealing or to fit the style guide. This allows the designer to improve for the next time they make a spread, making less work for me and them.
Design
This is a video that my coeditor and I made to send to a new designer in quarantine after he made his first spread. When the video was too long to send, we just waited until alter and showed him the edits we made.
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When I was a sophomore I became a page editor for the newspaper. While my Editor-in-chief at the time was excellent at editing writing, she never corrected my designs, she just remade them on her own. So, after working for 5+ hours on my page, I would open the newspaper each time to find it completely changed. I knew it looked better how she did it, but I didn't know why or how. It wasn't until I took some design courses later on that I learned there were rules. Now, I try to have people fix their own spreads. While its harder to explain, it will be easier on my and my staff members in the long run.