AP English Language — Rhetorical Situation — Drill 1

The following text is adapted from a speech delivered by journalist and author Katherine Boo at a journalism school commencement ceremony in 2014. I want to tell you something that your professors probably haven't, because it doesn't fit neatly into a curriculum: the most important skill you will develop as a journalist is not writing. It is not research, though research matters enormously. It is not even the ability to ask good questions, though you should practice that every day for the rest of your lives. The most important skill is the capacity to be wrong in public — and to keep going. Every story I have ever reported began with a theory I was certain about. And every story, without exception, eventually required me to revise that theory — sometimes slightly, sometimes so thoroughly that I had to begin again. The journalists who frightened me most when I was starting out were not the ones who made errors. They were the ones who never seemed to make any. Because what that told me was not that they were extraordinarily careful. It told me they were not looking hard enough. The world you are entering is one in which the pressure to be right the first time has never been greater. Social media rewards speed and punishes correction. An editor who publishes a retraction is seen as having failed rather than having done exactly what a serious journalist should do. I understand these pressures. I have felt them. But I want to suggest to you that the culture which treats correction as failure is not a culture of accuracy. It is a culture of performance. And performance, in the long run, is the enemy of truth. What does it mean to report well under these conditions? It means building into your practice the assumption that you are, right now, missing something. It means cultivating sources who will tell you what you don't want to hear. It means sitting with a community long enough that people stop performing for you — stop giving you the story they think you came for — and start giving you the story that is actually there. That takes time. It takes discomfort. It requires you to be genuinely uncertain in a media environment that rewards the performance of certainty. I spent four years reporting in a single slum in Mumbai. People asked me constantly whether that was efficient use of my time. My answer was always the same: I didn't know what efficiency meant in the context of trying to understand a human life. What I knew was that the longer I stayed, the more wrong I discovered I had been, and the closer I got to something I would not be ashamed to call the truth. You will be told, in the years ahead, that the audience doesn't have the patience for complexity. That they want short. That they want fast. That they want to confirm what they already believe. Some of that is true some of the time. But I have spent my career betting against the assumption that people are only capable of the worst version of their curiosity. I have not always won that bet. I have won it often enough to keep making it. Go find the story that no one else is sitting with long enough to understand. Be wrong about it. Be wrong about it again. And then, when you have earned the right to be right, write it.