What I Have Learned

Barry Bonds, my uncle and Major League Baseball’s Home Run King, said, “If we are not evolving then we are stuck in time and that doesn’t make any sense and is just crazy.”

While trying to write this final article, I reached a point where I was stuck and it was driving me crazy.

My original article was about how even though our views on baseball may change as we grow, our fiery passion never fades. While finding interviews and other information was easy enough, writing the article was a completely different story. After realizing all the problems, I changed my topic to all the things I have learned about journalism and writing an article through this final assignment.

Starting with the long list of problems, one of the first was the possibility of so many ideas. The freedom to choose their own topics may seem like a blessing to some. For myself however, my mind began to race with all the ideas and possibilities. Without taking a deep breath and a second to think, I chose a topic last minute that I believed I would be able to write the best final article about.

After being overwhelmed by hasty decision making, the second problem arose. While first getting started on the article and reviewing back to my notes, I noticed I had a serious problem awaiting me

While interviewing Travis Conroy, Division I student-athlete, for my original article he stated, “I mean I started playing because I wanted to play sports and my dad was a baseball player in high school so he got me into it first. Then I began to enjoy it so much it became my dream to do this forever.”

It was the baseball legend Barry Bonds who said, “I just wanted to play and have fun.” Having made false pre-made assumptions about the responses to the interview questions not only caused problems, but shook the foundation for my article. This is the point where the despair set in and I was beginning to go insane.

Further down the road, I realized that I should have listened to all the advice and tips from the professors. When the professor advises you to ‘Ask a question’ or ‘Learn something new’, listen to them. By doing this you are learning something new, giving yourself more to write about, and are able to write about the information in a way that is more easily understood and enjoyed by readers.

The second piece of advice that I regret ignoring was that it is important to not write about anything that you, as the writer, have too much personal connection to. Working on my first article idea about baseball would be a perfect example of this for myself. I often found myself adding my own opinion or sounding too factual, which took away from presenting the reader with the relevant information in an enjoyable way. Not to mention that writing about a topic that you are too close to can lead to having your article sound too factual and read like a research paper.

And even though this last problem is not one that I was personally faced with, falling behind on the work really seemed to affect some of the other students. Whether it was students waiting on interviews that never fell through or lagging on assignments, those who fell behind seemed to be in much a deeper hole than the rest. By doing the simple assignments and staying on top of everything, it allows for a lot more flexibility and less stress when comes down to crunch time.

In baseball, coach Mark Obenour used to preach, “Failure is not bad and there is always ‘another day.’” It is important to keep this in mind when draft after draft seems to be driving you further insane.

This article may have started off as a joke to make myself feel better, but along the way I understood the bigger picture. I wanted to show all the different aspects of journalism and writing that I have learned while struggling to write this single final article.