This time last week I was on a ship, watching as chief scientist Bob Cowen tried to wrangle science equipment back onto the deck, fighting against the wind and the waves. This week I’ve been sitting hunched in front of my computer sorting photos to edit. It’s been a pretty dramatic change of pace, but one that has allowed me to absorb and put into perspective what I experienced aboard the RV Sally Ride. It took me a couple days into the cruise to realize that the experience I was having was pretty rare—a very limited amount of people get to participate in the type of field work I was immersed in. But once you’re in that environment, it starts to become normalized and things that you originally thought were super exciting and unique turn into your daily routine. Now that I’m back on land and returning to “normal life,” I’m able to get back to that initial perspective of recognizing the cool things that happened on the ship. Instead of prodding pyrosomes and working on my sea legs, I’m going grocery shopping and packing up my apartment and recognizing that my time on the cruise was pretty spectacular. I’m really grateful that I’ve easily returned to an awestruck mindset in which I can recognize the unusual and intriguing aspects of what I experienced because that’s how I can write the most accessible story for a general audience. The real struggle now is editing down 10 days filled with action and excitement, failure and triumph into a single piece of writing. I’ve been getting caught up in the terrible trap of editing as I write—starting a sentence and then immediately deleting it because it’s not quite right—which has left me with fragmented bits and pieces of narrative and exposition. After meeting with my journalism mentor, Mark Blaine at UO’s School of Journalism and Communication, we decided that it’s time for a vomit draft. I’m hopeful that once I “vomit” all of the words in my head onto a page, I can have a clearer idea of what absolutely must be included in the final product and what will remain as a fun story to tell at dinner parties.
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Donna Cassidy
7/27/2018 04:41:42 pm
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AuthorI am a third year journalism student at the University of Oregon with a focus in traditional written journalism and interview techniques. Science communication is an underrepresented field of journalism that I’m excited to explore and produce content for through this internship. Archives
August 2018
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