By Domenico Nicosia
Edited by Steven Kapoloma
Go Play Outside, it was called. My high school junior year column was about enjoying the outdoors. It was also my first piece of writing I did for pleasure.
English was always a waste of a class to me in high school. It required an hour of sitting and going through simple writing exercises. It was neither challenging nor stimulating. I enrolled in a journalism course at the request of my English teacher, perhaps as a way to stimulate my writing muscles.
I went in with pretty low expectations. Thus when my journalism teacher suggested I start a column, I was quite uninterested. But as I began researching and writing my first article, I noticed a different side of writing that I had never considered.
In my column I had the power to choose my topic and write about it however I saw fit. The rigid structure that high school English classes demanded were no longer required and I was allowed room for my words to breathe.
The process was liberating and it opened new doors to me journalistically — not just in column writing, but also in storytelling. Writing does not have to be boring. In fact, in the case of journalism, our short attention spans demand that it is not.
That small monthly column provided me reprieve and allowed me to discover my voice.
Thanks for sharing Domenico! I do not write oftenly for pleasure, but when I have done it, it has been a great experience. It is nice to read that you had a great experience with your column as you felt really good about it. There is a downside thou in journalism, when your column has to be edited because, depending on certain factors, what you write may not be published as you intended therefore the message you are trying to convey is somehow not yours and even you have to sign your column. Those are some of the bad things that happen in journalism and those are some of the things that I do not like about this job. Nevertheless, there are always ways to express our ideas.
Writing frees us in so many ways, doesn’t it.