Narrated Slideshow: A New Home Away from Home

While looking for a narrated slideshow through Google, I came across The Washington Post where I found a slideshow about kids at Washington's Children's National Medical Center which caught my attention. The slideshow is about a new $75 million inpatient wing designed to make kids' hospitalization feel more homelike and comfortable with the intention of encouraging healing, and how the family and patients feel about it.

The pictures were not place chronologically, but it still worked pretty well because it connected to the narration. There were different people narrating, and every time a different person spoke they changed the picture to the person who were speaking, which I thought was really helpful to understand the story. I think that the pictures were really powerful to the slideshow because it brought a greater understanding of what they were talking about. For instance, when they showed how important it is for the relationship between the patients and parents and the support they provide, they showed a picture of a mother lying in bed with her daughter, and I think that it helps the viewer to feel some compassion since some things you won't have the same reaction it you explain it versus showing it in pictures.

The audio, I am not sure I liked because there were background noises which helpt to get a feeling of what it was like to be at the hospital, but there was narration on to of the ambient sound which turned out to be distracting. At one point, they had ambient sound, music and narration all at once, and that was totally confusing. I think that if they would have kept the pictures, narration and maybe music every now and then, it could have worked out, but the way they did it I think they actually over did it.

Besides the issue with the sound, the slideshow was pretty interesting; the pictures and narration kept me interested, and it wasn't that long, so that was good too.

Here is the URL:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/health/interactives/childrens/index.html

What to do with a bad quote?

There are lots of tips to get a good interview; obviously taking good notes, and knowing what you after, but you shouldn’t talk for more than 10 minutes, right? However, what do you do, if you do every thing you are supposed to do, and you still couldn’t get a good quote because of the poor grammar of your interviewee? Should you clean up the source’s quote or only run quotes verbatim? As hard as it may sound, it is a possibility, and one should be prepared at all times, and have alternate ways to solve this problem because after all you need your work published, and quotes are indeed a great gift to your story. Hence the best option would be to just paraphrase because if the interviewee can’t give a clear quote, it is better to use your own words instead of trying to run quotes verbatim which sometimes may sound awkward and make no sense.

Response

After reading the profile written about me by my classmate, I realized that we have to be careful how we say things because some times we might be misinterpreted simply by how we say things. For instance, when I was interviewed by my classmate, he asked about dancing and music and I answered according to my likings. However, the way he word it, sounded like dancing was really important to me, which is not really the case, I mean I like it, but not as he described. Besides the misunderstanding, my classmate did a great job describing how I am even though we only had few minutes conversing, and it was interesting how he incorporated some inspiration based on my answers which felt really nice because that means I did my part of the work by being true with my answers.

Dominic Mitchell

Dominic was born and raised in San Francisco-CA. He graduated from Galileo High School, and is now a current student at Skyline College where he is working on his path to transfer to a four year university where he will study Journalism. He mentioned: “I have always liked to write, usually for fun, nothing serious, but once I started watching sports news, it changed my view about writing, and that was when I knew I wanted to pursue a career in Journalism”. In fact, he confessed that one of his goals is that in ten years he will have started his own magazine, “GQ like”, but for African Americans. He admitted that he is happy with how his life has been so far, and if he had the power to go back in time, there was nothing he would like to have changed in his life because according to him “what I have done in the past has shaped who I am today”. He believes that with enough ingenuity he could get in a position where he could make a difference in the world, and that if it wasn’t for life circumstances, ideally divide wealth amongst the classes would make the world a better place to live.

THIS IS MY BLOG FOR JOUR 120

My name is Marcia Soares. I am a Brazilian who has been living in the US for the last eight and a half years. I am currently anxious as I am on my last semester at Skyline Community College in San Bruno while waiting for the decisions from the UCs I have applied. I also work full time. I have recently declared English as my major as a work my way up to Immigration Law. As a proud Latina that I am, I feel that our "raza" needs advocates, and that is what I am trying to focus on. Besides working and going to school I also try to enjoy some time with my family, friends and of course my boyfriend. I am a very friendly person who loves to make new friends and meet new people.