Journal Entry#6

This week in class I learned a lot about McPhee himself. I was very intrigued and surprised to learn how he goes about writing his articles. I had no idea he hated writing so much! When I read his work, it is so well written that I could only assume he is very passionate about it and puts a lot of work into it. He does indeed work very hard on his articles; he goes out and does everything he can in order to get the true, full story. But when it comes to piecing everything together, he apparently hates it. He takes an excruciating amount of time to type anything up, and once he does he rearranges it countless times.

A lot has been said about the writing style McPhee has as well. He has the ability to subtly show his opinion through his work; someone in class read a quote they found in an article that describes McPhee and his "ability to juxtapose difficult questions in a way that insures that the reader will become his partner in the making of meaning". By the way he writes, he has the ability to have his readers side with his point of view. He never shoves his opinions in your face, but still gets his point across. Another point that was made in McPhee's writing is that his work always has a lot of facts with narrative sentencing. So the reader is reading this very informative article, but they are reading it with the idea that is more like a fictional book, because of the way he writes.

He is a very active journalist as well. A lot of people who write, usually just like to be the invisible person in the room, the fly on the wall. However, McPhee gets involved with his subjects. Like playing basketball with the player's he is interviewing. By doing this McPhee takes his research a step further, by establishing more intimate relationships with his interviewers, he is more susceptible to getting information that is true and close to home, creating a very impressive article.

Katelyn Mokler