ENGL 830 Teaching Writing
Nugrahenny Zacharias
Zhiling Wu
Ani Pujiastuti
Anwer Al-Zahrani
Reflections on Our Interview
We are very pleased to interview Tom Stewart, a journalist, who has dedicated
almost 30 years of his professional life to Greensburg Tribune-Review – a newspaper
now claims a Sunday circulation of 221,000 readers, together with Pittsburg Tribune
Review and affiliated dailies. Tom, started as a part-time reporter, full-time reporter and
then part-time editor, was promoted as a full-time editor in 1997 due to his rich writing
experience and long-time quality service. During the interview, we mainly asked him
about his pre-writing, writing and revising strategies. Because none of us in this project
has had any experience in journalist writing, we all think this is a worthwhile interview.
Associating with our different writing background, particularly we find the following
issues are thought-provoking to each of us:
Interviewing Tom Stewart has reminded me (Henny) how writing a situated act is.
I learned that writing skills has much to do with the kinds of genres one engages in. Take
the pre-writing strategies as an example: When I taught writing in Indonesia, teachers
most often asked students to do brainstorming or outlining as pre-writing strategies.
Sometimes we gave students a week for this. The idea was that the more time the
students had, the better their writing would be. What’s more, as a teacher, I often tended
to treat pre-writing activities such as outlining as a plan that students should follow.
Additionally, in whatever genre students wrote, I tended to ask them to write outlines or
brainstorming ideas. However, listening to Tom’s interview, I learned that pre-writing
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