• First you must teach those things that make each form of the media distinct.
• Second, you must emphasize the commonalities that all media share.
  

Each medium presents distinct formats and forms that all professionals should appreciate. One goal of this book is to give our students that appreciation. That is tough to do if the students are allowed to feel that understanding each form as distinct means that one form has no relevance to the others.

Good writing in all forms is easily recognizable. Achieving mastery in writing depends upon the willingness of the student to learn. But student attitude alone is never sufficient. Just as the techniques of good writing can be learned through diligence and application, there is a corollary emphasis on the techniques of teaching those skills. Teaching writing takes skill, patience, intelligence, and hard work. Much of the material included in this manual is drawn from two decades of experience teaching writing courses and in conducting writing workshops for professional groups.

This manual is designed to give you a structure around which to tailor your particular style. Included is a general syllabus for three-credit semester length courses. Designed for a university setting with one lecture taught by the instructor and two laboratories taught by teaching assistants each week (which is how we do it at the University of Alabama), it is easily modified for a small class setting taught by the instructor with three sessions each week. There are sections on teaching objectives for individual classes are included with each chapter as lab instructions.

We have included answers to many of the exercises in the book. With the exercises in Chapters 2 and 3, that is a fairly straightforward matter. With the exercises in the other chapters, however, subjective approaches make many solutions possible. Included are samples of work that might be produced from the exercises in these chapters. These samples should be used as indicators, not as strict standards of what the exercises might elicit from your students.

The Instructor’s Manual to earlier editions of Writing for the Mass Media contained a number of mistakes in the answer keys. Some of the people who used it cared enough to contact us or the publisher about those mistakes. Despite the best efforts, this is not an error free manual. If you find any mistakes – or you believe that some of the answers are questionable — please let us hear from you. Contact me directly by writing to Department of Journalism, Box 870172, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-0172 or through my email address, stovall@jn.ua.edu. I am always interested in your comments about this manual, the text itself, and the way you tackle the difficult business of teaching writing.

• Sample syllabus
  
  
• Notes on grading writing assignments
  
  
• Notes on grading advertising copywriting assignments
  
  
• Handling graduate teaching assistants