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Samuel Mungai

Dr. Mark Finney

MCOM-202-01

April 7, 2018

Final Reflection

If I were to find three words that would describe my journey in MCOM 202, those words would

be empowering, eye-opening and triumphant. These three words symbolize my entire experience

thus far in MCOM 202 this semester. Looking back into the semester I feel like I have set the

solid foundation for the required writing skills needed to achieve successful and efficient

journalist writing. Although the journey to get to where I am now in my writing and news

analysis wasn’t easy at all, due to the fact there were a lot of grammar barrier that I had to cross,

in the end, it was all worth it.

You may remember at the beginning of this reflection; I had mentioned three words

(empowering, eye-opening and triumphant) that I used to describe my journey in MCOM 202

journey. Now am going to tell you about how these three words have represented some of the

many stages of my journey in my MCOM 202.

Empowering [ Assignments]
During the semester, Dr. Finney gave us different assignments to target different styles of

journalism. These areas include hard news and reporting writing, feature writing, personal

reporting, pitch story writing and obituary writing among others. Although to some these

assignments may have looked like a piece of cake to some of my classmates, they were most

certainly not as easy for me. But, I was up for the challenge anyway.
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These different styles of journalistic writing taught me many lessons in terms of analyzing news

from a professional standpoint as well as looking at the different angles from which a story could

be told from. This helped me develop new skills, such as, writing in short informative sentences,

giving the reader only the most important bits of information and engaging the reader with

stories that hit homes, such as the issue surrounding guns and the 2nd amendment. In addition to

this, it taught me how important it is to stay neutral when writing and always to cover the facts

even though I may not always agree with the topic being covered.

As well as accumulating new skills, I noted that there are still areas in my writing that still need

improvement. One of these areas is staying within the word count. It’s not always easy to stay

within a specific word count especially when you are writing a news story that you find

interesting.

Another area that needs improvements is keeping to the strict AP writing rules. Although AP

style is still a new writing style that is still coming to terms with, I still struggle with some of its

rules and concepts especially when it comes to the little specific details like numbers and other

specifics. All the areas of improvement mentioned will be areas that I hope to improve on in my

next mass communication writing class.

To conclude this section, all the assignments that Dr. Finney challenged us with, were to give me

and others in class an idea of the power in which writing has in communicating a news angle.

Eye-Opening [the interviews I had to conduct]

This semester in all assignments that Dr. Finney gave us to do, there was always certainly an

interviewing component that came with it because in order to get perspective about a certain

news angle we had to interview people who were experts in that field.
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I understand that not many people feel comfortable interviewing someone that they are not

comfortable and familiar with, especially about news topics that are hotly contested such as the

controversy with between the 2nd amendment and the right to own an assault weapon. However,

to me personally interviewing different people came very easy because am extrovert and I work

part-time at WEHC 90.7 radio station as a student worker, so meeting and talking to different

people come as second nature to me.

Interviewing different professionals who are knowledgeable about a news angle was the most

eye-opening experience that any mass communications major can have because it gave one in-

depth insight into a topic.

One of the topics I found I had most success and fun in interviewing personnel was my pitch

story on the impact of the World Metrological Organizations(WMO) Conference in South Korea

on Southwest Virginian Agriculture. In this story, I had to interview Geneva-based United

Nations staff about the conference that they will be attending in mid-April. As well as this I was

able to get unprecedented access to information that is not always available to the public.

The only thing I could find that came as a weakness to me while interviewing people is for one

keeping people that I am interviewing on track with the question that I have asked. There have

been numerous times during an interview where the person I was interviewing didn’t not always

answering the question I asked. In most cases, the information that some of my interviews gave

me was completely off and in rare cases a bit false. One such instance was when I was

interviewing Professor and National guard Adamson regarding his experience and his

professional stands regarding gun control and the use of assault weapons. When I asked

Adamson the question regarding the availability of guns, he started off on the right track in terms
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of answering my question, but for some unknown reason, he went completely off on another

tangent.

Despite all these mishaps, the interviewing process was still an enjoyable and eye-opening

experience that I personally don’t take for granted because it gave me a deeper insight into topics

that I knew about.

Triumphant [Grammar and SAE Style]

Grammar and SAE style has been an area that I have been struggling with during the entire

semester. This is due to numerous reasons, one, am used to writing in British English so having

to change to the American style was a struggle and secondly am bilingual in English and French

so sometimes I get confused between the two languages grammar styles.

Despite all these difficulties, with the help of our SI (Abby Hathorn) I was able to overcome

these difficulties and improve greatly in various areas of my Grammar and SAE style writing,

which for me was triumphant.

To conclude, despite the numerous hurdles I crossed over the course of the semester, I feel proud

of myself because I feel like I went above and beyond my limitations and took assignment and

feedback an aspect of personal growth. I look forward to the assignments and challenges that

await me in the fall in MCOM 202.