midterm fiasco lessons

I suppose we can blame it all on the blog.

A well-intentioned comment on my last post indicated that my writing had reinforced the commenter's conviction that Oregon's Measure 49 must go down. This is not in line with my beliefs and was certainly not the intention of this blog. I made a mental note to research the matter further and give a well-reasoned argument for the measure on my next post.

Then midterms hit, and I never got the chance to work on it. But, because of some poor scheduling on my part, I ended up switching my midterm story topic assignment for Reporting from football to Measure 49. Never have I felt so gleeful about a project that would determine a good part of my grade and require the sacrifice of my entire week.

I got started on Friday, talking to campaign representatives in Salem because I happened to be there and calling people I knew who might have Measure 37 claims. I finished my interviews by Monday evening and on Tuesday consigned myself to the library for most of the day (leaving to take a midterm exam that I probably didn't do so well on, considering I only studied for about half an hour). On Wednesday, I struggled with the conclusion until about 1 pm but turned in my 2000 words on time, without a hitch. I was exhausted from the effort and lack of sleep, but satisfied.

Yes, there were a couple times in that period that I complained to myself about the story's length. Last spring, I took an Environmental Writing class that required a 2000-word feature as a final project, and we had all ten weeks of the term to work on it. This summer, I completed a similar type of story in three months. But mostly, I found myself pondering the philosophical questions that my interviews brought up, calling a cagey logging company repeatedly, reading and re-reading legalese, and happily typing away through the night and day as I sipped hot tea to keep my strength up.

The moments surrounding the time that I realized I had written almost three times as much as I needed to are slowed down in my memory and riddled with gaps. I remember printing out the story in the Journalism school's computer lab, then standing in the hallway waiting to go into the classroom to turn it in. Then the record skips to the student who placed her assignment on the pile on top of mine. I remember noting how un-harried and calm she looked - but something marred the surface when she looked down at my first page. She said something like, "Wait, we only had to write 750 words, right?" Everyone standing around nodded their heads. "Oh good," she said, "I thought I saw it say '2000 words' at the top of that page." I had faithfully recorded the word count at the top of my story - and it was actually 2100 because I can never seem to hit those right on.

Now, everyone's probably had an experience like this, so I don't need to detail the mixture of remorse, anger, frustration, and - eventually - amusement, I felt upon learning this. I sputtered a few words, found my way outside, then I sat and stared at the fine detailing of the cement wall outside the J-school for quite a long time.


Lessons learned from the past week:

1. If something doesn't seem right, it's not.

2. I like writing features way too much.

3. Somewhere along the line I decided that I'd attained perfection and that I don't ever make mistakes. As a result, I also started not bothering to check on whether I've made a mistake, and that in itself was the biggest mistake of all.

4. Blogs are dangerous things.