Matt:
I think this is a very niche but interesting topic. I myself am not a student who has many labs, only one my freshman year for introductory biology. It never crossed my mind that the approach was drastically different from normal due to Covid. the audience for this piece may be small, mostly STEM students would relate, but others may from past experiences with Covid in general. Content wise, I think something that also makes this piece niche is that it is only with one professor. Obviously this may be the purpose but I wonder how other lab instructors approached this issue, or maybe even the sciences director. There are not really any formalities to fix within this piece, it reads well and it doesn’t feel blocky and/or squished.
Transferring:
I genuinely enjoyed this story a lot. It is neutral in the angle almost, not saying UNE is amazing but also not saying its a dump. The topic itself is something that anyone whos gone through transferring can relate too. Therefore, the audience for this piece is not huge but it is also not necessary for your purpose. I think you used quotes very well and dispersed them well formatting wise. The transitions for them were smooth and I didn’t feel a sense of chunkiness when reading. Having someone from the Transfer office on campus is what really sells this piece, especially the honesty. One thing for you to improve or check on is to just read through it again for grammatical errors or sentences that maybe could be combined/split. There’s one example I will share in class. Overall, very good work.
Madi:
I think this is a very soft news piece. It’s good and something many athletes can relate to. I wonder the direction it would go if you included coaches or athletic training faculty, they could have an interesting input on this. One thing that will be really important is to remove yourself from the story. We understand you’re an athlete too, but in traditional journalism it is a credibility/bias conflict to speak in first person. If you included more interviews with more information I think it would eliminate the use of first person. The casual-ness of your writing could also be fixed up a little bit because it’s leaning towards almost a little too casual. There’s just some sentences that could be more concise to get your point across and not have it sound as casual. Formatting wise, you imbedded and transitioned quotes really well and there really isn’t much to fix there. I would read over it again just for some grammatical/punctuation things. You’re on the right track!
