Brainstorm
Our next writing assignments will be for the opinions section of the newspaper.
Because of our renewed effort to publish your work on thedispatchonline.net I want you to pick your topics for this assignment. But there are some guidelines we have to follow.
First, you cannot pick something that we just aren't going to convince someone to believe in. For example, the death penalty - people are either for it or against it....pretty much across the board. Other examples include abortion, immigration, drug use, etc. Now there are certain parts of some of those examples that might work.
Second, we need to LOCALIZE every opinion piece. That means we need to make sure every story idea is of interest to Bowie students, explains the subject in a way they will understand, and that we try to relate it to something local or near us. Be very specific and pick a topic that is local or can have a local slant or angle to the writing.
First, you cannot pick something that we just aren't going to convince someone to believe in. For example, the death penalty - people are either for it or against it....pretty much across the board. Other examples include abortion, immigration, drug use, etc. Now there are certain parts of some of those examples that might work.
Second, we need to LOCALIZE every opinion piece. That means we need to make sure every story idea is of interest to Bowie students, explains the subject in a way they will understand, and that we try to relate it to something local or near us. Be very specific and pick a topic that is local or can have a local slant or angle to the writing.
That is how you pick a story that is localized, impactful, and has two sides to it.
In my newspaper class, I often have my students answer some questions to help them create ideas. I will give them a document like you have in front of you that you got when you walked in the door called "Everyone's a writer - Part 2 of a continuing series" - Take 15 minutes to fill this document out. Make sure to put your name on the top because I will be collecting these after the brainstorm is over.
Now, just like last class, please use the information you created above, combined with what you did last class to come up with THREE new story ideas. On the back of your paper please give me a story idea and make sure to write at least a sentence to help me understand what you want from this story. Hopefully what you wrote above, will help you. My hope is to have these ready by the end of the period so you can sign up for one of these ideas. Some of you may have had some ideas from the last time you looked at the Dispatch - you can use those, but you need to make sure you write a little bit about those just like any other new ones you have thought of (write a sentence or two explaining your idea)
You may not use the following ideas:
1. School closures and consolidation
2. Cell Phone Policy
3. Advisory FIT
4. AC
5. Electronic Hall Passes
6. Safe space or see something, say something
7. Construction
8. AI use
When you are finished with this task, you have the rest of the period to write your Opinion Story #1, make sure your Google Doc is shared properly (so anyone with the LINK CAN EDIT), and make sure it is linked on your Google Site on a new subpage called Opinion Story #1.
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