From Mommy:
When I worked for the Washington Bureau of the Kansas City Star I wld use certain words that the veteran reporters in our office have never heard of. We wld all laugh this off when I told them this is because I learned English as a second language. In college, I was an English major but my minor was Journalism -- two opposite ways of writing. Journalism focused on the 5 Ws — Who, What, Where, When, What — in the simplest 3rd grade English. “No million dollar words” was a cardinal rule in Journalism. As English majors, we had to do the opposite: write using million dollar words that had “resonance” and “reverberation.” Once I attended a writing workshop and the class critiqued a feature article I wrote for a national magazine. Everyone was critical of the lack of reverberation in my piece. I laughed this off, saying if I wrote in the “reverberating” style that they favored, the news editor wld throw my article in the trash. And the clincher: I was paid a thousand pesos.
Comment from Narra:
Love this story, Mommy! I just got the book World War Z for Kai and reread the intro last night. Has anyone read it here? Such a good book, and so different from the movie (which I also love. Hi I’m Narra, I love a lot of stuff.) The book premise is that it’s 12 years after the Great Zombie War, and in the prologue, a UN investigator explains what the book is. He has decided to amass the 10 years of post-war interviews he did for his UN report on the war and publish the interviews as a book. He was shocked that maybe 90% of his reporting was not included in the final UN historical report, and thought the stories should be captured somewhere. He was told by the UN that the majority of his reporting was too emotional, too personal, too human. In voicing his frustration to his supervisor, he argued that the human and personal element was essential for the human historical record. You can’t report on a war without including the humanity! But the UN disagreed. In the end his supervisor recommended he write a book to capture the collected stories, and, for the reader, that’s what the book World War Z is.
The difference of language used for reporting vs language used in telling the human story is almost exactly what Mommy is talking about - and I just read this last night! Cool coincidence.
To go along with this story I'm posting the message and photo I shared on Instagram for Kai's 13th birthday last year. We watched World War Z as a family - Kai's choice. That movie will always be interesting to me. Every time it's on, I just stop and watch.
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