Personal opinion

I have really enjoyed writing English articles about certain topics. It was a very useful task because in the future, as a journalist, we will have to use our writing and language skills a lot. By doing this exercise, we have been able to train these skills and to explore the English media landscape.

In the future, as a journalist working for a newspaper or magazine, we will also be given topics to write about, just like now. In that way it maybe was a restrictive exercise, because we really had to write about a given topic, but we were free to chose the content of the article.
I think it was a challenging exercise, certainly when we had to write about sports. I have never been interested in sports at all, but I found something very interesting to write about, and I learned that writing about sports can also be fun and instructive.

On top of that, it was a good exercise because we had to combine a lot of skills. To write a good article it is necessary to do some research, to understand what you are writing about, to translate your Dutch ideas into English ones, to write in good English and to think like a journalist, which means to be critical.

In my opinion, it was a positive experience, but it was a pity we didn’t receive any feedback.
I think, as a (future) journalist it is very important to receive comments on what you have written.

By Ruth Knaepkens

Critical opinion

I truly enjoyed this assignment. English is my favourite foreign language. This in combination with this assignment’s journalistic touch made it a task that was nice to do.
The topics being fixed certainly was a good idea. As a journalist you also don’t have all the freedom you want. Your bosses will always tell you what to write about. We still had a lot of freedom in the topics, so we were able to go choose our own path.
The only topic that didn’t interest me at all was ‘sports’. Because of that, I started the quest for information rather demotivated. But all of a sudden I discovered that Tia Hellebaut became the new world champion pentathlon indoor. Even I found this interesting.
Now, the negative aspects of the assignment. The most important one is the fact that there barely were any guidelines. ‘Would it be a problem if two student wrote about the same subject?’ was a question we asked ourselves a few times. Kathleen and I came in touch with that problem. I wrote about Tia Hellebaut, and she wanted to do the same which resulted in some panic. In the end she posted the article anyway, which I think was a good decision.
I also think that feedback would have been a good idea. I understand that a teacher doesn’t have the time to give feedback to every single student, but we could have given feedback ourselves, to the students of the other groups, that is.
But seen as a whole, I really enjoyed this!

Jessica Van Sintruyen