So when I joined VOA and on my third day, the edoitor gave me a practice piece to do, I thought ' Piece of Cake' - writing is what I do and of course I pooh pah-ed it. I sat at teh computer, my fingers flew across the keyboard and I typed out my first practice piece, proudly printed it off and handed it in to my editor. She- did not seem as impressed with me as I had been with myself. She basically thought my piece was fairly boring, bland, complicated and full off technical nitty gritty wrongs- only she was too kind to sya it in these many woprds. POint of teh matter I sucked! But wait a minute I thougt, I've had all this expereince interning and stuff at Mint newspaper and all, then what the...!

What I clearly missed out was that VOA is broadcast. Newspaper writing doesnt work here. To top all that my really nice professors had further corrupted my writing. Handing in all those academic essays at uni and having teh profs tell me taht I need to write in a more formal, academic way, basically kicked bits of teh little miserable half baked journalist within me. what I ended up with was a blah style of writing a news story taht nobody in tehir right minds would want to listen to. Broadcast is sooo different from anything Ive ever done. Of course now I totally kick ass at it ( or so Id like to beleive), but it took me a month and several frusterating practice pieces where I jsut didnt get it right, to finally get there.