In this week’s session we received individual feedback for the features we had written.

Before I started to write my feature, there was a concern that it may not be relevant in terms of when the magazine would be published. However, after I had written the story it was decided that it was a nice person of interest story and the way that I had written it supported it’s relevance.

Furthermore, the introduction I had written was quite a powerful one which made it a strong opening which would immediately grab the attention of the reader. “When I was demobbed in York, I called in at the first church and took an oath that I would not handle another weapon, not even a child’s toy. I have kept to this oath. Using that Bren gun every night, you’re hearing the screams, the cries, you know that you are hitting people.”

From the feedback that I was given, it became apparent that the biggest improvement I could make would be to follow the style guide closer. The biggest correction I had to make was using correct punctuation that fit with our style guide. This included correcting my punctuation when using quotations, for example, making sure that my commas came outside of the quotation marks unless they were a part of the actual quote. In addition to this, the naming of the interviewees was something that needed to be decided as everybody, including myself were using different styles. We decided that we should use their last name when speaking about them. However, I had sources from both Ken and his wife Gloria so in my case it made sense to use their first names to avoid confusion.

The last few corrections I had to make were basic errors that needed altering such as changing “150 thousand” to all numbers (150,000). The us of capital letters on events such as D-Day was another simple error that needed changing along with spelling out PTSD which is post traumatic stress disorder, even though the audience may already know what PTSD stands for, it is always best to use the full phrase just in case. The final correction I made was making sure that I didn’t keep drifting from different tenses as the whole feature had to remain in present tense.