A life...continued

Now for the rest of my internship. My first assignment was writing "advances," which are basically playfully worded summaries of events featured in the events/calendar section of the magazine. I wrote one for a dog walk fundraiser sponsored by the Delaware Humane Association and another for a new germ exhibit at the Delaware Natural History Museum. This was really fun to do because I was able to be creative and practice my writing. Writing up events are challenging because you have to take out the important information from the press release and internet site, which usually consists of plenty of ultimately superfluous and distracting background, and make it into a humorous, light-hearted 15o word summary. Once you've selected the highlights, wording the advances so that they're not pushy but positive and entertaining was a challenge. My first advances were slightly too on the advertising/urging-people-to-come-to-the-event side. I was able to come up with puns and funny ways of wording things, however, especially with the germ exhibit, since an exhibit featuring germs would make me phobic. Anyway, the advances were educational and fun, and I was able to practice condensing events, which is invaluable when you work for a publication.