I was thinking about my future this morning! Mostly about my dream of going to Oxford University (Exeter College to be precise haha - I'm soo bad!) and doing an internship at Vogue before getting a job there. Yes, that future. One thing that came to my mind as I thought of this was my KS3 tests. Now, I really want to do good in them because I want to go to a top girls school for sixth form and they ask for these results. My KS3 English test struck my mind though. We had to write a short writing task as if we were a journalist whom had gone to a talent show. When I got this test, I was just super excited to write because this what what I wanted to do when I was older. The thing that sort of made me a little wary was the different writing styles I could use for this task and how on earth a teacher could mark it when if came to that.
Now in magazines, you normally get three different types of writing.
- There's the real life features where the writer is telling the story but without putting much input if you know what I mean. They only interject in small parts to give out small detailed facts like "Marie is now living in Scotland with her husband, Jake, and their two dogs, Tillie and Arthur". Other than that, everything else if in like speech marks and the person is telling their story, with biggish quotes from the text, here and there.
- Then there's the interviews where you sort of see the journalist asking the question and the celebrity answering with the odd (her publicist tells us we can't discuss Peter) or something along those lines. There's also an intro at the start too all about the celeb and then an ending telling you just how amazing or awful (mostly amazing) they are.
- Lastly, you get the writing when it's sort of like the journalist is talking to you. There's always the ones where they start off with something that's happened to them that relates to the article in some way or the other. I think this is the way I write most of my articles just to practise my soon to be Vogue magazine writing!
- There's the big features, the ones that make front page news, which have a bit of everything with quotes from people at the scene to the journalist really telling the story and giving you the facts and the different points of view. I don't really think journalists give their p.o.v when it comes to the big features. They normally have two different arguing points from really important people in like little boxes or whatever.
- Then the smaller stories are still written in the same way as above but with less of the quotes out in big and what not.
- The pop culture columns, however, tend to be more friendly, haha, in a sense that they tell their point of view (especially reviews) as well as writing in that sort of formal journalistic way.
And blogs? Most bloggers write as if they're writing a diary, I think. Though sometimes it's like they have a magazine column and they are writing to the readers. Yes, actually, I think that describes the way most bloggers write. I know I do a bit of both. It's a bit of a diary as well as a "magazine column" this blog is and I absolutely adore it and you, my followers!
Hope you didn't find this post too boring haha!
Umauma
xo
