Kevin Moore

Fa9785@wayne.edu
313-522-8522
In-class assignment
April 21, 2016

Alicia Nails is the professor of COM 4250 Reporting on Race, Gender and Culture class
at Wayne State University.-C/K
The winter 4250 syllabus for this class states that the class will focus on the most
sensitive issues in our society, which are race, gender and culture.
The syllabus states that students in the class will be able to objectively report
facts/opinions, support each sentence with attribution to a source, and distinguish how
and where opinions are inserted into news copy.
Throughout the course of the class, students had to write a number of assignments that
required multiple sources, as the syllabus states.
In the COM 4250 course writing guidelines, which Nails provided to her class, it states
that there should be more than one source per article and those sources can be a
combination of person, article, research, reports, etc.
Professor Nails holds classroom discussions with her class and the primary focus is on
objective writing.
Nails says she has her class refer to numerous articles and handouts to help them
understand more about objective writing.
The course writing guidelines handout states the entire point of this course is that no one
should know your opinion.
There are different ways and tools a writer can use when checking for objectivity and the
guidelines handout is a good source.

The guidelines handout states what to do and what not to do when writing assignments
for this particular course.
The handout states the assignments should not include Your point of view OR
observations that highlight your experience or place you in the story.
By following the syllabus and guidelines, Nails says students will do well in this course.
Working With Words, which is a book that Nails recommends for her students, gives an
insight on how to better your writing skills as a journalist.
One thing that Nails touched on throughout the course was how to objectively write using
adjectives and modifiers.
Working With Words, states you use adjectives to modify nouns or pronouns.
Adjectives can be helpful in objective writing because they can simply describe or limit
subjects, objects or verbs states the Working With Words book.
There can be ways in which adjectives can be misused.
Working With Words states not to mistakenly use an adjective when an adverb is
required to describe the manner in which something happens.
The book states two words, says and said, are what good reporters should follow in
objective writing and if those words arent present in the writing, reporters seem to lose
their objectivity.
Different aspects of writing were discussed in Nails COM 4250 course.
When writing on marginalized groups, Nails said in one of her class discussions, you
should focus on the background of that groups culture and not assume certain things
based off the medias depiction of that certain group.

For this class, Nails wanted her students to focus on mainstream news only, which was
listed in the syllabus.
The syllabus states point-of-view publications have bias in them and the whole aspect of
this class is objective news reporting.
The syllabus states that at the end of the class, students will host a panel on different
cultures and are required to bring in a panelist.
Nails said throughout the course of the class the goal for the student is to go out and find
their own panelist so they can get credit for that assignment.
Objective writing is the focus in this class stated in the guidelines and when the journalist
is quoting others, that is their way of creating writing making sure the journalist voice is
not heard in the article.