Reading Journal

This week I focused a lot on quotes while I was reading. Usually when I read an article, I pay little to no attention to the format or length of a quote. I realize now that the reason, is because New York Times writers know what they are doing. After writing this last new article, it was really clear to me that extra long quotes that are not necessary to the story, really distract the reader from what the news is, rather than forming a cohesive attitude for the reader to take away from it. As I was reading one story in particular, about scientists at Carnegie Mellon University teaching a computer to think more like a human, I noticed how important weeding out the fluff was to find the perfect quote. The article is referencing advanced technologies, yet there was nothing in the article I could not understand. The quotes were all quick snippets that allowed the reader to gain more insight into the actual process of what this group of scientists were trying to achieve. I walked away being able to recount the story to a friend with full understanding, which I think is something I have to work on in my own stories. The lede of this story was also really interesting, because it was different from the basic who, what, where, when, why style. The lede to this story, "Give a computer a task that can be crisply defined — win at chess, predict the weather — and the machine bests humans nearly every time. Yet when problems are nuanced or ambiguous, or require combining varied sources of information, computers are no match for human intelligence," gave a clear image to the reader, and really grabs your attention. Even though every crucial piece of news does not appear in the lede, it makes the reader want to continue on to find out the meat of the story.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/05/science/05compute.html?ref=science