Celebrating Failure

This past semester I took Multimedia Writing. In this class we had lab once a week where we would write some type of news story, feature story or press release. Time and time again I couldn't get much higher than somewhere in the 80s on each week's assignment. On the rare occasion, I did score a 90 or so, but this wasn't too common. I think my most common mistake was with my headlines, I never knew how hard coming up with those short headlines you see every day in magazines or newspapers really was! It's hard to capture a whole story that could catch the attention of your audience in only 8 to 10 words.
The biggest thing I learned in this class was the difference between essay-style writing and news writing. We're trained to be masters at the 5-paragraph essays with a thesis statement, introduction paragraph, three supporting paragraphs, and a conclusion. So much so, that it's almost impossible to not automatically write like this anymore. Always told to have at least 5 sentences in each paragraph really messes with your brain when all of a sudden a paragraph is usually only one sentence and no more than 35 words. Though this was difficult, I think I finally started to improve, at least with news releases, which is more important since this is more of what I'll be dealing with as a public relations major.
Failure is definitely scary. Even as we get older and learn of its importance, it's still our first, initial reaction as humans. Growing up, my mom always encouraged my failures, she never was hard on me or disappointed in me every time I made a mistake, I actually was my hardest critic. No, she always would cheer me up by telling me to look at what I learned from my failures and what I would do next time to make it better. Though I still shy away from failure, I think this type of parenting has allowed me to be more of a courageous and adventurous person than most. I don't know if this class has really changed my perspective on failure, being that this class was virtually all on a blog, it's wasn't as real as other failures I've experienced. I think the best failures that I've learned the most from are those that happen in person and have the largest loss or gain on my life. The things that hold the most value are always the scariest to loose and the most likely to learn from.