Much of our communication takes place online. Whether it be an email, social media post or news article it is important to communicate effectively. The ability to craft stories, explain complex ideas and present information confidently can give you an edge.
The San Diego Press Club’s Write Better Write Now series is an opportunity for professional writers to share techniques to help you refine your writing. These tools can help you avoid pitfalls, tighten your storytelling and meet deadlines.
Dana Littlefield, an editor at The San Diego Union-Tribune shared tips and advice to help you find your unique voice and improve your writing.
Audience members will learn:
- How to find your own voice as a writer, how to make the writing sound like YOU.
- How to get unstuck when you feel like you don’t know where to begin a story.
- To write to serve the story and inform the reader.
- How to write with emotion – without being too heavy, melodramatic or maudlin.
There will also be an opportunity to get your specific questions answered as well.
This event is free to attend for San Diego Press Club members. Guests and non-members are $10. An optional donation of $15 is suggested to cover the nonprofit’s future programming and operational costs. Register on the San Diego Press Club website: sdpressclub.org.
About Dana Littlefield:
Dana Littlefield is public safety editor at The San Diego Union-Tribune. After joining the U-T in 2000, she covered coastal cities in San Diego County before moving to the courts/legal beat. Littlefield has written about numerous high-profile civil and criminal cases and appeared on local and national television to discuss the cases she covered. She currently leads a team of reporters who cover breaking news – including stories about crime, fire and other emergency situations. They also write about policing and social justice, including the protests last summer when thousands took to the streets locally in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
In addition to her duties as editor, Littlefield writes on occasion, including a profile last year of Tameka Jones, mother of 2-year-old Jahi Turner who went missing in San Diego in 2002 while she was deployed on a Navy ship. The story, which described the ongoing mystery of what happened to Jahi and the toll it has taken on his mother, won a 5th place award from the California Newspaper Publishers Association in the profile writing category.
A San Diego native, Littlefield earned her bachelor’s degree in American literature from the University of California Los Angeles and a master’s degree in mass communications from the University of Florida. She has taught journalism classes at Southwestern College and currently holds a lecturer position at San Diego State University. She is a longtime member of the National Association of Black Journalists and is a past president of the local chapter. For more than a decade, Littlefield has been a mentor/instructor in the JSHOP, an annual journalism workshop for high school students hosted by NABJ.
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