The Use of an Accuracy Survey to Improve Student Writing

Instructors who teach beginning media writing courses must help students learn a writing style that is new to most of them. College students in beginning media writing courses often have excelled in writing essays for English classes or library-based research papers for history or science classes. A few have experience writing for a high school publication. But for most students, writing objectively, conducting interviews and writing for readers other than teachers require new skills. Students who take journalism classes must learn to approach their writing from a different perspective. These beginning media writers must learn to set aside their opinions and include only those opinions of the persons interviewed. In addition, the emphasis on accuracy in mechanics of grammar, usage and punctuation comes as a surprise to many beginning media writers. Beginning media writing courses often include the use of "fact sheets"-lists of information and, in some cases, direct quotes from sources. The students use the information from the fact sheet as the basis for a story. Fact sheets enable students to learn the fundamentals of story organization without requiring them to collect the information themselves. Because instructors control the facts, verification of the articles' accuracy is straightforward. Students gradually move from simply reworking provided information to collecting their own information. With this advance, students move into a vast array of potential errors, from not selecting the most appropriate sources to inaccurately quoting a source. Helping student journalists and professional journalists be accurate in their writing is an on-going concern for journalism educators and the commercial press. Accuracy in media writing has been the focus of research for more than 60 years. Charnley (1936) began the practice of sending articles to sources quoted in stories to determine the accuracy of the stories, with the goal of finding ways to eliminate errors. Whereas the errors Charnley identified were limited to errors in facts and typographical errors, Brown (1965) and Berry (1967) developed lists of the kinds of errors reporters typically make in their articles. Lawrence and Grey (1969) conducted in-depth interviews to clarify differences in subjective interpretation of articles. Ryan (1975) developed a checklist of 17 specific errors. Meyer (1988) developed a system for newspapers to use in monitoring their own performances. Journalism educators, too, have been interested in the potential of source surveys for improving the accuracy of student writing (Ryan, 1975; Weston,1981; Dodd, et.al., 1995). Method Stories were written by students in an introductory writing course required for majors in advertising, journalism and public relations. All 260 students were in the course during the same semester. The course is divided into two lecture sections of approximately 130 students each, taught by the same instructor, and 13 writing labs, taught by six graduate teaching assistants and two adjunct faculty members. The students typically were sophomores or juniors, the majority of whom had no previous media writing experience in high school or university publications. Approximately half had taken no previous college media courses. The other half had taken one or two introductory survey courses, such as Introduction to Public Relations or Introduction to Advertising. The prerequisite for being in the media writing course was completion of six semester hours of English, including one general writing course, or testing out of these courses through high scores on the Advanced Placement English exam. A grammar course or an entry grammar test was not a prerequisite for the course. For the assignment used in this study, students were to develop a news or feature article with an environmental angle. The assignment was introduced in week six of the 15-week course. …