Writing With Dignity and Precision

This webinar taught a multitude of important lessons that I will absolutely be able to utilize in my future career as a journalist. To begin, it spoke about sources, and how they have a right to identify themselves within a story. The webinar explained that sources are closer to their audience when you are writing a local story. Someone reading your story might know the person, might work with them, even be friends with them. You are far less likely to see things like this when you are writing a national or global story.

Secondly, the webinar explained the importance of your wording as a journalist. Within the field, you are typically supposed to be unbiased toward the issue you are writing about, unless you are writing an opinion piece. With that, you should always make sure your wording does not cause the audience to lean a certain way or assume anything.

Tying those two together, you should always be careful to use your source's exact word choice to preserve dignity as a writer. They worded it that way for a reason, it reflects their world view. To change that, you could ultimately cause the reader to see the source differently.

All around, there were many other lessons the webinar taught; these are just a few. However, they were the ones that I felt held extreme importance as I begin my journalistic career.

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