+1 862 207 3288 Instructions
For this assignment, you will compose a query letter and copyedit a feature article. Use the pages provided in this document to complete each activity, and submit your work via the Moodle Assignments tool.
1. You are a features editor at a new regional magazine for high school students. The editorial staff decided to seek a feature article describing how students can better cope with the stress and challenges of being a teenager. One of the freelance writers, a college junior living his semester abroad in Cameroon, comes up with the following article. It’s getting near deadline time, and you’re pretty well stuck with this piece and now have to salvage it. Luckily, you can communicate strengths and weaknesses in the piece and request changes via e-mail.
Using the space provided, compose a query letter to the writer. You can offer general comments?but be specific about problems. Consider the tone, the language, the audience, and the content.
2. Although you might not copyedit the piece at this stage in real life, for the purposes of this assignment, go ahead and revise the piece as best you can. Watch for obvious grammatical errors, wordiness, unnecessary passive voice, and the like, and emend accordingly. The piece may be no longer than 800 words. (Hint: There’s at least one factual error.) You can embed comments in the piece, write separate queries with references to specific paragraphs, or do some combination of the two (or create some other system).
Draft Article
Being Proactive or Reactive? It’s No one’s Choice But Yours
by Chris Edwards
¶ 1 Each and every day you and I have literally hundreds of chances to chose whether to be pro-active or re-active. In any given day the weather forecast is bad. You cannot find a job. Your bike gets stolen. You miss a bus, or you flunk a test, or get busted for drugs. So what are you going to do about it? Are you in the habit of reacting or being proactive? The choice is literally yours. It really is. You don’t have to respond the way everyone else does. How many times have you been driving your car or truck down the road when someone cuts you off and then you have to go and slam on your car brakes? What do you do? Flip ‘em off? Cuss them out? Accelerate and try to run them off the road?
¶2 My dad’s idea that you are responsible for your life as a teenager was hard medicine for me to swallow. But in hindsight I see the wisdom in what he was doing. He wanted me to learn that there are two types of people in this world. The pro-active and the re-active. There are those that take responsibility for their lives and those who blame, those who make it happen and those who get happened to. Being proactive is the key factor. Being proactive means “I am the force. I am the captain of my life. I can choose my attitude. I’m responsible for my own happiness or unhappiness. I am the driver, not just the passenger of this car.”
¶ 3 You see, growing up in my house was at times for me a big pain. Why? One of the main reasons were because my dad was strict and had high expections for me. Second was because it was his expectation that I take responsibility for everything that happened in my life.
¶ 4 Oftentimes I said something like “Dad, my friend makes me so mad,” and without failure the come back from my dad would be something like, “Now come on, son, it’s your choice. You choose to be mad.”
¶ 5 Or if I said something like the following, “My new algebra teacher is horrible. I’m never going to learn anything,” my Dad would say, “Why don’t you go to your teacher and giver her some suggestions. Change teachers. Get a tutor if you have to. If you don’t learn Algebra, Chris, it’s you’re own fault. Not your teachers.”
¶ 6 Lettting me off the hook was something he would never do. He was always challenging me, making sure that I never blamed someone else for the manner in which I acted.
¶ 7 I often screamed back, “You’re wrong. I didn’t chose to be mad. She MADE me mad. SUPER MAD. So just get off my case and leave me alone.”
¶ 8 Some people suffer from a disease I call victimitis. Perhaps you’ve seen it. People who have it think the world is out to get them and the world owes them something. Reactive people blame others, are easily offended, get angry, complain, and rarely change. Pro-active people are calm and do not get easily offended. They bounce back when the chips are down. Their focus is on things they can do something about and ignore things they cannot.
¶ 9 Which way do you want to be?
¶ 12 You no doubt have heard about the story about Charles Whitely. He was a high school basketball star in East St. Louis, Missouri. He came from one of the roughest neighborhoods among all the bad ones in that depressed town.
¶ 11 One day, Charles was in his house, reading the sports pages of his newspaper. An article appeared that day touting the chances of his school in the state basketball tournament.
¶ 12 At that exact moment, a neighbor boy, Jared, burst through his front door and yelled, “Charles, you got to come outside. Your brother Nicky been shot!”
¶ 13 Charles ran outside, where he found his 12-year-old brother, Nicky, had been brutally assassinated by a crack dealer.
¶ 14 Charles knew what he had to do. He waited in his house for several hours. Then, quietly he walked down the street, passed the grocery store where only that afternoon he and Willie had purchased ice-cold lemonades, and saw, sitting in the front seat of a parked, expensive car, the crack dealer, “Big Tony” Manich.
¶ 15 A small gun that Charlie had acquired was in his pocket, at the ready.
¶ 16 Taking aim at Tony from across the street, the possibilities ran through Charles’ mind. He could react to Willy’s death, seeking revenge, and spend the rest of his own life in prison.
¶ 17 Pausing, Charles listened to his conscious. “I’m holding a gun. The state tournament is a week away. I can end this idea now, or I can throw away my life for good.” Using raw willlpower, Charles turned away, tossed his gun down a sewer pipe, and vowed he would finish high school and college in honor of his fallen brother.
¶ 18 Some 30 years later, Charles, now the President of one of the biggest sporting goods firms in Williamsburg, Va. He sheds a tear as he recalls that story.
¶ 19 “Proact or react? You tell me, guys,” he says.
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