The Weather

I am always excited at the beginning of Winter because it means the holiday season is coming. I get even more excited for the first snow fall, I just love the way campus looks dusted with pretty, fresh, white snow. After that first snow fall however, I say bring on Spring and Summer! I especially hate when the snow gets old and all muddy from melting and people walking on it. I hate walking to class in the freezing cold, slipping every 5 seconds. I think that there is a general consensus among students all over the country, from graduate students to kindergartners that we only truly enjoy the snow if there is a potential snow day involved.  I mean we don't really want to deal with the snow unless school is canceled. So it is pretty much guaranteed that at the first word of a snow storm, every student is silently hoping and crossing their fingers that they will get the coveted cancellation. Unfortunately here at Penn State you have a better chance of running into Joe Paterno walking to class than you do of getting a snow day. I understand why the campus rarely closes but in the wake of yesterdays ice storm, for the safety of everyone there should have at least been a delay.

Transitions

I seem to be struggling the most with my transitions so far. I understand that they are an integral part of the inverted pyramid, and I understand that transitions are necessary to move readers smoothly from one paragraph to another but so far my writing has been lacking clear, strong transitions. News writing is so different from the kind of writing I have been asked to do throughout my whole education and that is why I think it is a weak point for me. News writing is very short, quick and too the point, and I am having trouble connecting such fragmented thought in a smooth way. In the article on Inverted Pyramid Style it says that, "Transition alerts an audience that a shift or change is coming up". I thought that a transition was supposed to be so smooth that the reader wouldn't even have noticed that a change had happened? Now I understand that it's supposed to seem not only smooth but deliberate and obvious that the writer is changing something so that the different paragraphs don't just seem like random facts or thoughts dropped in to an article. The transitions carry the reader through the article.