All creative work is based on the art of omission. "There is but one art: to omit," R.L. Stevenson wrote. "Newspapering is knowing what to leave out and condensing the rest," said the editor of a major daily newspaper. "Broadcast writing is compressed, a shortened version of our world," says the news editor of a major TV station.

Here are excerpts from two interviews and two talks. Try your hand at writing brief news stories from the material.

Print out your work (using the Print button on your browser's toolbar) and hand it in to your instructor.

1			Domestic Violence Summarize in a news story of 150 words for print, the newspaper's website, or broadcast the following interview with Donna Ferrato, a photographer who for the past 20 years has been documenting domestic violence and its effect on women and children. Although there was a growing body of printed material about the subject, no photographer had documented the violence. One of her photos accompanies Grammar Exercise Eight: Dangling Modifiers. Ferrato is in the your city to open a week-long show of her photographs. Here are some excerpts: When I set out to do this work, publishers told me that domestic violence was unphotographable. Finally, Life magazine advanced expenses for an investigation. After some women's shelters turned me down, I found one in Pittsburgh that gave me permission. I moved in, gained the women's confidence and was able to photograph them. Then I worked with police investigating domestic assaults. Although books and sociological papers on the subject were being published, few editors considered the situation newsworthy. They said domestic violence wasn't important. The more I saw, the more I knew that I had to get their stories out so that people would care about them. I published a book "Living with the Enemy" in 1991, and later created the Domestic Abuse Awareness Center, a nonprofit organization that provides photographic exhibits for fund-raising purposes. I see the children as the ones who suffer repercussions more strongly than the women do. In my experience, women who've been abused by their husbands, if they can get away from him, get into a shelter and start going to support groups, they heal. They are able to make sense out of what happened and go on with their lives. But the children I usually come in contact with, they are like time bombs. I think that a photograph of a face that's been through a lot, a face with emotion, tells more than pages of words. The photograph makes people identify with and often feel something for the person because they can see that person is real. We can never quite tell if the story is real when it's an essay without photographs. The photographs give it reality.
2			Writing - 2: Memorable Teachers A reporter has interviewed Mildred Farnsworth, who has written a book about teaching, "The Art of Teaching." In her book, Farnsworth interviews a dozen men and women of accomplishment and asks them to recall the teachers who were most memorable. Here are some of her comments about those recollections. Write 150 words for a broadcast or print feature. Ms. Farnsworth is quoted: First, all of the people to whom I spoke said that as students — whether in grade school, high school or college — they had the sense that their instructors knew their subjects. Not only were they masters of the subject matter, whether it was grammar or French literature, they loved it. These great teachers were able to communicate the subject matter and also their love for it. They made classes exciting. Now, you say, how can you make students in grade school leap with excitement about making a verb agree with the subject of the sentence. I know I could not do it. But they did. And they did it so well some of their students went on to teach grammar, went on to become English teachers because of the love of language that their instructors instilled in them. One Spanish teacher told me that he decided to become a teacher because he remembered the songs his Spanish teacher taught his class to sing. Those songs taught students pronunciation as well as vocabulary. All of them were worried about present trends in teaching that neglect subject matter in the interest of emphasizing what the new educationists call "the process of learning." Subject matter becomes secondary to skills. Yes, critical thinking is essential as a tool in our society. And so is the analytic ability. Those I interviewed were highly skilled in the ability to analyze and synthesize. But they all worried that subject matter may be ignored or watered down in the process of teaching such skills as critical thinking. In other words, there must be bodies of knowledge on which to apply such thinking, subject matter. Also, without exciting subject matter--whether it is solving algebra problems or the plot of a Dickens novel or a Shakespeare play--critical thinking isn't spurred on, excited. The good teachers these men and women recalled were good at managing large numbers of students in a classroom. They could keep order and they could inspire. They were sympathetic and understanding. But above all, they knew their subjects, loved them and communicated that love to their students--the wonder, marvel and excitement of learning.
3			Writing - 3: Making Choices From a graduation address by Joyce Purnick, metropolitan editor of The New York Times, at Barnard College. Write a 150 word news story for radio or print. I always worked nonstop, found a profession that encouraged good writers and workaholics, and, starting out as a clerk, moved up in classic newspaper style from clerk to reporter to columnist to editor — from the New York Post to New York Magazine to The New York Times. Along the way, without realizing what I was doing to myself until it was too late, I forfeited the chance to have children.... So, what can you learn from this? One thing is this: You cannot have it all…All along the way, you make choices...I wish I'd thought earlier about having a family, because then I probably would have done something about it.... My perhaps unwelcome advice to you is the same I give to young women in my family:...Don't pretend you don't have a biological clock, because you do. Things happen. There are family illnesses, maybe even your own, time moves along-and then the window closes. The flip side of my experience is that I am absolutely convinced I would not be the metro editor of the Times if I had had a family.... With rare exceptions — in nearly all competitive professions — women who have children get off the track and lose ground. I see it all the time in my business. There is no way, in an all-consuming profession like journalism, that a woman with children can devote as much time and energy as a man can.... If I had left the Times to have children, and then come back to work a four-day week the way some women reporters on my staff now do, or if I had taken long vacations and leaves to be with my family, or left the office at 6 o'clock instead of 8 or 9—I wouldn't be the metro editor... I am the first woman to run the largest department at The New York Times, not only because I am qualified-which I confess I am-but because the course of my career allowed me to become qualified and stay competitive.... There's a larger question for companies and for society: Should women and men who have taken the detour of the Mommy/Daddy track be as far along as those who haven't? Would that be fair? I reluctantly have to say that it would not be fair.
4			Writing - 4: From Mastery of Subject To Mastery of Writing Write 100 words for www.freenews.com, print or broadcast use based on a talk given last night by the president of Mallory College, Ruth Pitts Renaldi, at the annual Alumni Federation dinner on the campus. She spoke on "The Aims of a College Education." Here are excerpts from her talk: We can say that education has six purposes or aims that the university and its students cooperate in achieving. First, we expect students will graduate with a mastery in a subject of their choosing, whether it is engineering, English literature or journalism. This mastery should enable them to engage in the practice of their subject or go on to further study. Next, we expect our students to develop an analytic ability, which goes along with the necessity to think critically. These days of advertising, marketing, political propaganda, salesmanship call for analytic skills, the imposition of critical thinking on the barrage of information thundering at us. After analysis and critical thought comes synthesis. We expect adults in our society to have some sense of the whole, an ability to put together from the incoming matter an integrated concept or idea that will form a personality, an ethic, if you like, that will carry them through their lives. One of the marks of the educated person is his or her ability to defend conclusions, assertions, even a way of life with logic and proof rather than with emotion and bombast. Finally, and perhaps as difficult to achieve in these days of passivity before the entertainment giant, we must have graduates able to write clear, logical, grammatical prose so they can communicate the knowledge they have gained.