Applicants for the Walsh Award and the other ACES scholarships must be seeking degrees as enrolled college/university juniors, seniors, or graduate students during the summer and/or fall term in 2021. Scholarships are awarded without regard to the student’s nationality, major or field of academic concentration. Previous scholarship winners are not eligible. Applications are made by email, with a deadline of Nov. 15. All entry materials must be in English.
1. Provide your résumé.
2. Provide names, their titles or job descriptions, and contact information for three instructors and/or supervisors who are familiar with your accomplishments that relate to editing of news.
3. Write a summary (headline), using no more than nine words, for each of these three pieces of news.
(a) LAS VEGAS — A desert city built on a reputation for excess and indulgence wants to become a model for restraint and conservation with a first-in-the-nation policy banning grass that nobody walks on. Local water officials are asking the Nevada Legislature to outlaw “nonfunctional turf” in the metro area — for example, grass that covers street medians and grows in office parks.
(b) Counterintuitive as it may seem, white voices carry a weight on matters of race that a Black person’s does not, experts in the field say. They say this is because the white voices can’t be dismissed as self-interest. They will be heard in ways and places Black people never will.
(c) At rocky sites across America, including the Grand Canyon, 550-million-year-old rock sits on top of rock that has existed as long as 3 billion years. But there's no other rock in between. It's as though a time period between 550 million years ago and 3 billion years ago has literally been wiped from Earth. It's called the Great Unconformity, and some researchers believe it's the result of one massive cataclysmic event in Earth's history.
4. What is the worst thing an editor can do or allow regarding the editing of a news story? And why do you think it is the worst?
5. Assume you are editing the following first paragraph of a news article. Identify things in this paragraph that you would question or correct.
WASHINGTON – In the most important Supreme Court verdict of the year, justices ruled 9-1 that Congress cheated health insurance companies by reneging on a $12-million promise made under the Affordable Care Act, which later came to be known by its nickname of Obamacare and was heavily criticized by GOP congressmen. The April 20 decision was announced by the lone dissenter, Justice John Robert.
6. What are the joys of editing news? Please describe your views, in 500 or fewer words. Provide examples, if you wish, from your own experience or others’.
Now, using one or more Word or PDF attachments, email your complete application – with “Walsh scholarship” in the message field – to crudenalex@gmail.com. Begin the file name of each attachment with your last name.
1. Provide your résumé.
2. Provide names, their titles or job descriptions, and contact information for three instructors and/or supervisors who are familiar with your accomplishments that relate to analyzing and clarifying written materials.
3. Please respond in 500 words or fewer to this: If you could pose one question to a group of 700 editors – such critical thinkers as might be found at an ACES national conference – what would it be, and why would you choose that question?
4. Address the following three scenarios:
Scenario A: You work in a university research office and want to share this article with your audience of academics across disciplines: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2020.2581
Write a tweet that encompasses the main takeaway of the article for your followers. Limit the tweet to 250 characters so you have room for the link.
Scenario B: You work in the communication department of a hospital and are putting together a booklet about nutrition for patients. Write a title (or summary) of no more than 10 words for the following short article:
Epidemiologists from the School of Medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center San Antonio looked at the relationship between diet soft drink consumption and long-term change in waist circumference. They assessed data from 474 participants in the San Antonio Longitudinal Study of Aging, or SALSA, over the course of a decade.
The researchers compared long-term change in waist circumference for diet soda users versus non-users, and found that people who drank diet soft drinks, as a group, experienced 70 percent greater increases in waist circumference compared with people who did not. Frequent users, who said they consumed two or more diet sodas a day, experienced waist circumference increases that were 500 percent greater than those of non-users. Waist size is important because abdominal fat is a major risk factor for diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer and other chronic conditions.
“These results suggest that, amidst the national drive to reduce consumption of sugar-sweetened drinks, policies that would promote the consumption of diet soft drinks may have unintended deleterious effects,” the authors wrote.
Scenario C: You are editing a news story for a campus publication. Based on this excerpt, what questions do you have for the reporter?
Blue emergency phone systems on college campuses across the nation are starting to be removed as some universities are rendering them obsolete in the age of mobile phones. However, the University of Kansas plans to continue maintaining the phones for the foreseeable future.
James Druen, deputy chief of the KU Public Safety Office, acknowledged a decrease in blue phone usage but said they have advantages that mobile phones do not. If someone’s cellphone is dead, he said, the blue phones are readily available.
Also, when someone is in an emergency and needs to keep moving, Druen said, the blue phones can allow them to keep pressing the help button at consecutive phones, allowing KU Public Safety to track their movement.
“If something happens and you need to call the police, those phones are still there,” Druen said. “They still serve a purpose.”
Despite blue phones being available throughout much of campus, students have mixed opinions regarding their effectiveness.
Angela Davis, a sophomore from Emporia, said the blue phone system makes her feel safer on campus, especially in the event of her phone dying.
However, Shelbi Taussig, a sophomore from Highland Park, Illinois, said she’s never needed to use one and doesn’t look around for them since she has her own phone with her all the time.
Now, using one or more Word or PDF attachments, email your complete application – with “ACES scholarship” in the message field – to lisa.mclendon@gmail.com. Begin the file name of each attachment with your last name.