{"id":425,"date":"2025-11-01T20:42:55","date_gmt":"2025-11-02T00:42:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/migration-reporting2025\/?p=425"},"modified":"2025-11-07T15:43:21","modified_gmt":"2025-11-07T20:43:21","slug":"week-9-blog-post","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/migration-reporting2025\/week-9-blog-post\/","title":{"rendered":"Week 9 Blog Post"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Jennifer Senior\u2019s piece about the McIlvane family, I felt like she had taken me by the hand and was gently forcing me to walk through the lives of these grieving people, to unpack their grief alongside them, to watch as they descended from or clung to their mountains of grief, so that I would come away knowing the story of this one individual \u2013 Bobby \u2013 of so many individual 9\/11 stories which have not been told. Throughout the beginning of the piece, Senior frequently signposted to remind the reader why the piece was important, providing us with a \u201cwhy now\u201d: \u201cA lot of the theories you read about grief are great, beautiful even, but they have a way of erasing individual experiences,\u201d she writes. \u201cEvery mourner has a very different story to tell.\u201d A few pages later, she reminds us again of the significance of recording individual experiences: \u201cIn talking with Bob Sr., something heartbreaking and rudely basic dawned on me: September 11 may be one of the most-documented calamities in history, but for all the spools of disaster footage we\u2019ve watched, we still know practically nothing about the last movements of the individual dead. It\u2019s strange, when you think about it, that an event so public could still be such a punishing mystery.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

These asides did the trick for me \u2013 I had been loath to read another 9\/11 story as just one among so many which, especially we New Yorkers, have to record and understand that day and its aftermath. Senior must have predicted this, and she promises us that this piece is worth our time, that it is precisely that we have the story of the many, that the story of the one is significant, that there are still mysteries to be unravelled. And she was right. She won my trust in that moment and had it the whole way through, and it ended up being my favorite of this week\u2019s stories, the one I could not put down.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It was not until I read the structure pieces, particularly Stewart\u2019s \u201cFollow the Story\u201d that I realized what kept me reading Senior\u2019s piece was less the riveting content and more the highly effective structure, which was so good from the start that I completely trusted Jennifer to continue effectively telling this story. It struck me how, in both the piece about the McIlvay\u2019s as well as the expose of Paul Skalnik and the corruption in prisoner testimony, the authors must have known every single piece of information in their stories before they started telling it. The beauty of their writing, particularly Senior\u2019s, is her intentionality in deciding when we as readers discover each piece of information. She withholds that she knows and loves the McIlvays until a couple of pages in, but doesn\u2019t wait so long to tell us that it feels untruthful. She introduces us to Bob McIlvane as a sympathetic person before telling us about the conspiracy theories in which he has come to believe. I want to try this more in my own writing. Often I\u2019m so concerned with communicating the information I have that I forget to be intentional about the order in which I present it, leaning on chronology. McPhee recommends a chronological approach married with the tucking-in of themes for a stuck writer, which I agree with; a proficient reader can draw out themes on their own, but they cannot generate chronology, that\u2019s why they need to. But I find I rely less on the chronology of events and more on the chronology in which I found things out. And when I find things out should have no bearing on when my reader finds things out.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

One thing that frustrates me a bit about McPhee\u2019s \u201cOn Structure\u201d is his reliance on instinct. I currently feel like I\u2019m \u201con the table,\u201d to use his metaphor, when it comes to my journalism capstone piece for the colloquium. I just have no clue where to start, and each first sentence is worse than the last. In the McPhee piece, he suddenly remembers Fred Brown and figures everything out. There he is, off the table, ready to write. My question is: what happens if you don\u2019t have a \u201cFred Brown\u201d? Or if you do, but you can\u2019t figure out who that person is? It\u2019s nice that McPhee got off the table, but why doesn\u2019t he teach us how?<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Jennifer Senior\u2019s piece about the McIlvane family, I felt like she had taken me by the hand and was gently forcing me to walk through the lives of these grieving people, to unpack their grief alongside them, to watch as they descended from or clung to their mountains of grief, so that I would<\/p>\n

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