What follows is a newswriting exercise. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
You're on the day shift at the Centerville Gazette. The city editor gives you some information on a teacher who has died and tells you to bang out an obit. Here's the information:
Evelyn Jackson, a retired teacher, died yesterday at the Good Samaritan Nursing Home, where she'd lived the past five years. She was 79 and died of natural causes. Jackson had worked for 43 years as an English teacher at Centerville High School before retiring in her late 60s. She taught classes in composition and American literature and poetry. Her husband, Ralph, formerly a minister at a local Baptist church, died seven years ago. She is survived by a daughter, Anita, and three grandchildren.
You call the high school for some quotes and get the principal, Albert Munson, on the phone. He tells you Jackson received the school's teacher of the year award five times over her career. "I'm 42 now and I was a student here years before I became principal, and I had Mrs. Jackson as a teacher," he tells you. "She was inspiring. She brought the books we read to life. She made these writers relevant to our own lives, whether it was Hawthorne or Hemingway."
"But she was tough," he adds. "I once turned in a sloppily done paper, and boy, she chewed me out. She was a tiny little thing and I was 6-feet plus by the time I was in high school, but she wasn't afraid to let you know when you'd done poor work."
You also speak to Alice Farmington, head of the school's English department. She, too, was a student of Jackson's. "Mrs. Jackson inspired me to become an English teacher," Farmington tells you. "She gave me a love of literature in a way that no other teacher ever did, even in college. And she did this for several generations of students here."
Farmington also tells you that Jackson was one of the first African-American instructors in the school district when she first started teaching in the 1950s. "I've heard she was often ostracized by her colleagues in the early years," Farmington says. "And apparently there were some incidents, including one where her car was spray-painted with racial epithets. But I've heard she never let it get to her. She just kept doing her job, kept inspiring her students, year after year."
Write this obituary in an hour or less.
Learn how to write obituaries here.
Find more great newswriting exercises here.
