Jacqui Banasznski – Parables, Profiles and Facebook Posts: The infallible truths of effective writing

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Wednesday

9:00 – 11:30 AM & 3:15 – 5:30 PM

Location: Gateway 1

Let’s leave the big mysteries to God. But when it comes to good writing, God helps those who helps themselves – with hard work and a strong grasp of mechanics. This day-long master camp will be jam-packed with practical tools any writer can employ, whether working on an elegant essay, a substantive issues piece, a compelling personality profile, one of those pesky social-media posts or even a keep-‘em-the-pew sermon. The day’s catechism:

  • Six (or seven) commandments of the writing process: What you have to do to make a story work
  • Loaves and fishes of story ideas: How to find fresh angles and practical approaches to any event, idea or assignment
  • Saints and sinners: Reporting and writing compelling personality profiles
  • Structural rocks upon which stories are built: Fail-safe ways to organize your material
  • Disciples of discipline: Understanding and addressing your individual writing habits from the inside-out
  • No-penance confessional: Round-robin problem-solving of your own writing challenges

IMPORTANT: Please bring hard-copy printouts of three pieces of your original writing (not heavily edited by someone else), and three different colored highlighter pens. The pieces can be of any style or length, but should be substantive enough to demonstrate writing patterns, and represent the kind of work you typically do.

Jacqui Banaszynski worked in newspapers for 30 years, and now teaches students and professionals around the world. She is a Knight Chair Professorship at the Missouri School of Journalism and a faculty fellow at the Poynter Institute. While at the St. Paul (Minn.) Pioneer Press, her series “AIDS in the Heartland” won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in feature writing. In 1986, her eyewitness account of the African famine was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting.  Projects she has edited have won national awards for business, investigative, social issues, environmental, human interest and sports reporting.