Fleming County High School in Flemingsburg, Kentucky, from which I graduated in 1969, has announced on Facebook that it is looking for guest speakers "passionate about their careers" who would be willing to "invest in students' futures for the 2025-2026 school year during school hours." One of the categories for speakers is journalism.
Well, I am elderly, in Baltimore, and disinclined to drive there to talk for twenty minutes or so, but Fleming County did prepare me for a career of more than forty-five years in journalism, and I know a few things from which those students might benefit.
I am writing this for the chance that a high school student might look at it. If you are a jaded sophisticate, you might want to read somewhere else.
The first thing to be passionate about is reading. I was starved for books in the 1950s and early 1960s, before the library was established and when the school libraries were skimpy. I read comic books. I read history, biography, science fiction, everything I could get my hands on. And I kept on reading. Wide reading is the foundation of work in writing, how you know what works and what doesn't; and for an editor it is not possible to know too much about many subjects.
Even before that wide reading, I picked up standard English grammar quickly in class. Yes, I was a teacher's pet and obnoxiously officious, but if you want a career that involves writing, you have to know and use the standard English dialect. Savor and speak in all the Englishes you encounter and like--there is nothing wrong with that. But mastering standard English grammar and usage is your entry point to the profession.
When I was a junior in high school, Lowell Denton, the publisher of the Flemingsburg Gazette, invited me to work there in the summers. His wife, Jean, liked to take the summer off, and so I worked as reporter, columnist, and copy editor for six summers in high school and college. This was invaluable experience. Writing and editing are a craft; you learn them by doing them. If someone gives you a chance to learn it as you go along and make your mistakes early, do not pass it up.
In college and graduate school I majored in English. Once again, the reading: different authors at different times in different genres, seeing how they stretched the language, seeing how they put things together in different structures, talking about books and authors with knowledgeable friends.
Abandoning a misguided plan to become a Ph.D. in English literature, I by chance landed a job on the copy desk at The Cincinnati Enquirer and there through working with helpful and knowledgeable colleagues, I learned to be a copy editor. It's a craft that you learn by doing, remember? That in turn led to a thirty-four-year career at The Baltimore Sun during which I oversaw the copy desk and a retirement gig as an editor for The Baltimore Banner.
So thanks to Frances Dorsey in the fourth grade and Lynda McKee in high school, to Lowell and Jean Denton, and to colleagues in Cincinnati and Baltimore and nationally who saw some prospect of ability in me, I have had the satisfaction of doing the work I was meant to do. I hope that you will discover as fortunate an outcome.
