Sample Master's Project Evaluation 1

FINAL EVALUATION

CLASS: MS PROJECT 

PROFESSOR: XXX

STUDENT: Janet J-Schooler

DATE: XXX

Janet came to me with an idea to do a project on youth activism. When she didn’t find much going on, the project morphed into one about youth doing activism through religion. 

She chose three religions: Islam, the Jewish faith, and Catholicism via the Catholic Worker, the old school Dorothy Day group dating to the 1930s.

Janet rapidly found a great character at the Catholic Worker. But she had difficulty locating similar kinds of people in the other religions. The story stalled. I had mentioned that perhaps you go deeper with Hagerman, your main character. These comments are from my January edit,

We need conflict. Maybe it’s the secular activists that Hagerman knows, who she has rejected. How do they feel about her? Does she stay in touch with them? Has she rejected them, and they her? 

If your story is going to be about religious activism across several religions, you will need to develop a sense of the conflict that each faces. And then you will have to report out of the characters to make it work. 

Maybe some of the conflict is also with Hagerman and her roots. How does her conservative family feel about her “radical” way of life? Maybe interview the mom, dad, a sibling.

There is a larger societal conflict, that of doing nothing, and doing something. You can get at this through the characters, but I don’t have as easy a solution for reporting it as with some of the things mentioned previous. But we need this larger societal conflict.  

All journalism needs conflict, but especially so in long form journalism like Janet was trying to do here.

Anyway, it rapidly became clear that Janet was not going to get the other religions. I urged her to look at why the left was failing to become active on a wider basis, using Hagerman as a vehicle to show one kind of “left” activism. 

In the end, the story came together as a mishmash of Hagerman tagged on at the end, with this story on the front--but the two never melded.

And the front story was not quite where it needed to be. It was too broad. We have campus activism, some material on the SDS, some on religion. There is a drifting point of view.

In hindsight, it’s clear the real story is in what happened to the “revived” SDS movement and how it is stalling. 

Or she should have just focused on the Catholic Worker.

Before I go into this, there are some good lessons in doing this project for Janet. She learned a lot about the approach to long form journalism. This is good! And there are some other lessons that she must keep in mind as she goes on with her career. Some of these bullet points may seem small, but they are huge with some editors.

--Janet MUST always format her stories properly. Even after an admonishment with each edit, her stories came in with weird spaces between the paragraphs. A small detail? No. This means she will make an editor have to re-code and format the copy. This will drive many editors into anger mode and she does not want this. A busy editor doesn’t have time for such things.

--She MUST greatly limit quoting from other writer’s books and stories in her journalism. Ditto for press releases. She should CALL them on the telephone and get fresh quotes. An armchair blogger can do this, but Janet must not be an armchair blogger. She cannot “recycle” material that has been published elsewhere. Nothing new is created and this make her story seem old. This will harm her if she does this when she gets a job at a publication that expects fresh material.

--Janet needs to read her copy aloud. At least until she gains more experience. Her early drafts were full of awkward sentences. The final was a bit better, but in many places, thoughts were not fully spelled out. 

--Also, Janet MUST print out her stories and edit on hard copy. It is amazing the goofs one sees doing this, as opposed to simply always working on the screen.

--Janet must tighten her writing. I strongly urge her to read a writer like Joan Didion, especially her collection, Slouching Toward Bethlehem. Didion is a master of saying a world of ideas in a few paragraphs. On page 2 of Janet’s final story, she goes on and on about the left and its absence and nascent activism, versus the Tea Party movement. This could have been done in half the space and it would have been better.

--She must keep her story moving forward. Stay on point. The reason the Tea Party movement must be in this story is to contrast it to the left. That is the point. It’s not a story about the Tea Party. We had a lot of information on the TP folks, but very little from them on what they think of the left. Why are those folks rocking out and getting headlines, and the left is moribund? Stay on point. Always.

In closing, when one has 2,000 to 3,000 words, a writer cannot say six to eight things. In other words, there cannot be six to eight major points one is trying to make. At best, a writer can properly address two or three points in a story of this length.