Advice for TESC's TECEPs: Public Relations, Intro to News Reporting or Marketing Com?

[scribbler]

We passed Intro to News Reporting - yay!!!

This one felt like a leap in the dark. The feedback on this thread was really all we had to go on, and we used only one of the three textbooks recommended on the Fact Sheet (we just picked one). That was a little disconcerting.

We really wish we could have found out what we scored on the exam, but all we know is we got the 3 credits each. Is there a way to get more details than that?

We thoroughly studied Writing & Reporting News by Carole Riche. This seemed like our lifeline for the course... there was precious little else that we could study that we knew would help. So we studied it intensively.

As far as the textbook is concerned, it seemed to be relatively straightforward... we will mention that there are huge boatloads of news stories (partial or whole) scattered throughout the textbook. These were somewhat helpful, particularly if you didn't understand the way the textbook told you to do something - analyzing the stories was helpful. However, they can also be extremely distracting - after all, they are interjecting news stories into the middle of your studying!

Our study method:

1. Devour the textbook
2. Memorize terms (we used Quizlet - primarily studied the sets "News Reporting TECEP A-N" and "New Reporting TECEP O-Z" - just search and include keyword TECEP - they'll come up.)
3. Practice writing news stories!! We can't emphasize this enough. It's a very large percentage of your TECEP score... you NEED to practice. Especially writing leads and summaries.

For writing practice news stories, we used any prompts we could find in the textbook (a grand total of about 3), used online scenarios, and also had someone else deconstruct online news stories - take it to the bare facts - so we could reconstruct them. We used online scenarios from About.com - Newswriting Exercises - VERY helpful.

We studied the AP Stylebook some, looking for things we thought would most likely apply to us. Pay attention to which cities you don't need to write out the state for, which cities you don't abbreviate, etc. The posts above about AP Style were helpful.


All in all, we were very relieved to pass this exam!! You can do it!!

[scribbler]

Lady Grace's feedback was very valuable, so we thought we'd go ahead and post it here. Thanks Lady Grace!