Hey, everybody, and welcome to a Tuesday in the life of senior reporter Mary Kate Brogan. My main focus for this blog post is TMI. TMI stands for too much information, often used when someone says something too personal or awkward.
In my case, it's not necessarily that I say things that are too personal or awkward, I just tend to give everyone too much information in my stories, both verbal and journalistic. I’m really awful at being concise. It’s a serious challenge for any journalist because being concise is pretty much in the job description. There’s just so much information I want to tell the whole world…and I typically forget that there’s only so much attention span for any given reader. I also often forget that sometimes people just don’t care. I just care too much. That’s my own problem.
On more than one occasion, I’ve been told by sources that they’ve probably given me far more information than I’d ever want to know about a topic. This is almost never true. In fact, I want to know basically everything I can find out about a subject before I write the story because it helps me write the most comprehensive story that will get the point across. So sources, if you think you’re giving TMI, you’re not. The more information, the merrier, I always say! In fact, I want to thank you for your TMI. Without TMI, stories would be cut and dry and probably not very interesting. What you may think is babbling is actually music to my ears. So thank you.
Anyway, my main thing with TMI this week is that some information had to be taken out of a story I wrote this week because, like I said, it was just too much for the story to fit. So I wanted to thank Sandy Weiss, Junior Honors Fellow, for her contribution to “Faculty revisits concerns about grade distribution." Here is what she had to say about the recently released grade distribution reports:
“(The increasing number of As and Bs) is too drastic to be without an explanation,” Weiss said. “There must be something behind that. I don’t know what, but maybe comparing average SAT scores or high school GPAs of students would help shed some light on that.”
So that was my journalistic TMI moment for the week. Readers, thanks for reading, sources, thanks for rambling, and, keyboard, thanks for standing up to the extreme amount of typing I’ve put you through in TMI mode.