Coming up are a couple of opportunities:
- If you're interested in sacred music or the roots of gospel, the Illinois State Convention of Sacred Harp singers will be at the Christian County Historical Society, at the intersection of Ill. 29 and Ill. 48 in Taylorville from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.
- Sparky and Rhonda Rucker will perform old-time, Appalachian, blues and other Ameican roots music at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday night at the Abraham Lincoln Unitarian Universality Church, 745 Woodsie Road, Springfield. Admission is $5 for students (which would be you).
In addition to the discussions we're posted to the blog on how to write about music - tempo. rhythm, melody, feeling, emotion, etc. - here are some tips on how to write a profile from my faculty website:
"Profiles - A guide for freshman English (and journalism) students. Here's something I wrote then that is still good advice now.
I won't alarm you with the "r" word, but this is really about research. Journalists call it reporting. It's the same thing. "The power of [news] stories lies not just in their evocative use of language, also in the compelling power of facts," says Christopher Scanlan, director of writing programs at the Poynter Institute for journalists. "To gather these facts," he adds, "the reporter should always try to be on the scene ... [b]ut even if the writer can't be present and must reconstruct the action, specific details are needed to bring the story alive in the reader's mind" (423-24). Scanlan's advice for student writers: "Get out on the streets. Don't hang around the campus newsroom or your dorm. Storytellers aren't tied to their desks. They're out in the streets. ... In your reporting use the five senses and a few others: sense of place, sense of people, sense of time, sense of drama. How did it look? ... What sounds echoed? If music is playing, is it the lush strings of a classical piece or the head-banging clang of guitars? Is the wind whistling through the leaves? Are children's cries filling the air? Close your eyes and record in your notebook every sound you hear" (415). Take notes. What do you see? What are people wearing? Is there graffiti chalked on Gingko Square? What does it say? What do you hear (and overhear)? What are people saying? What do you smell? What do you feel? Is it hot? Cold? Get it down. Take notes on everything you might not remember later. That's what notes are for.
"We should all try to make readers see, smell, feel, taste and hear," say Brian Brooks and other journalism professors at the University of Missouri. "One way to do that is to write using scenes as much as possible. To write a scene, you have to be there. You need to capture the signs, the sounds and the smells that are pertinent" (188). Missouri is one of the best journalism schools in the country, and their advice is good: "To create such scenes, you must use all your senses to gather information, and your notevook should reflect that teporting Along with the results of interviews, your notebook should bulge with details of signs and smells, sounds and textures. David Finkel, winner of the American Society of Newspaper Editors Distinuished Writing Award in 1986, says, 'Anything that pertains to any sense I feel at any moment, I write down.' Gather details indiscriminately. Later, you can discard those that are not germane. Because you were there, you can write the scene as if you were writing a play" (189). When I started reporting for newspapers, I was told I needed to know 10 times as much as wrote in the paper. If I didn't know all the facts, I wouldn't know which ones I could leave out.
Here's the Missouri Group again: "Interviewing -- having conversations with sources -- is the key to most stories you will write. ... Information is the raw material of a journalist. While some of it is gathered from records and some from observation, most of it is gathered in person-to-person conversations" (49-50). You probably already have some of the basic note-taking skills you need from taking class notes in school.
A couple of basics from my experience: (1) take down enough key words so you can reconstruct the quote; but (2) don't take down too many. Don't get bogged down. The person you're interviewing might say, "We lived, uh, like, in New Mexico." All you need to take down is, "We lived in New Mexico" -- which might look more like "w lvd N Mex" handwrittten. You'll get in the habit of doing what experienced reporters do: Use abbreviations. Make 'em up on the spot. Write fast. Scribble. Get it down, and fill in the blanks later.
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