Making a feature article was fun, but a lot harder than expected. We had to get topics, know what we would write about them, and a lot more. Sounds easy, right? Wrong. Making a feature article included knowing enough about your topic to fill three slides. The only bonus you had was that text features took up a good amount of space. The feature article was very enjoyable though. Whether it was formatting, or finding pictures, I enjoyed everything about it. If you want to know how this process started and how it ended up, keep reading.
Coming up with a topic and message was as easy as expected. Off the bat, I knew I wanted to do two topics. Soccer, or UChicago. The hard part was finding my third as I did not know what to do. But after some thinking I knew that I wanted to do JWST. It was a fun process and the next part was to choose which topic I wanted to do. In the end I chose to do UChicago which was a fun topic to do.
The part I am most proud of is my formatting. In the end, it looked very good and without borders I think it looked more professional. For my first slide I thought I needed to make it look the best as it had to catch the attention of everyone who saw it. I decided to have one photo, a fun fact box, and a good amount of text. In the end I made the photo and the facts box very close to each other to make sure I could fit as much text as possible. In the end I think all the pages except for the second came out perfectly. I don’t prefer the second because it is a bit too text feature heavy. Also, the most enjoyable part of writing the feature article was by far formatting it. Formatting was deciding where you wanted everything to go and that’s important because if you had a bad format your slide would look to text feature heavy, or just off. I feel the slide I formatted best was my first slide as it was very text feature and text balanced. One part I found challenging was the writing part. It was not challenging, but the part that I feel might have discouraged people was the fact that it looked a lot smaller than your actual slide. For example, the requirement was to have an article with three pages or more. While I first started writing with no text features, my writing was around 2 slides. That got me very nervous as I did not know if I was going to have enough writing to meet the requirements. In the end it was not a problem and I was able to get five slides, two more than the requirement.
I would say that the main difference between a personal narrative and a feature article is that for a feature article you have to be a lot more broad. For example, let’s say that somebody wrote about their favorite sports team. They would have needed to remove that that was their favorite team. For me that came when I needed to remove a part of the Rockefeller Chapel section. In my first rough draft, I had a few sentences about how I felt about the chapel when I went to chicago. I had to remove that and a lot more as I talked about my time at the university. In the end it did not affect me and I do feel like my teacher was correct in telling me to change a few words but still roughly have the same sentences.
I used certain strategies to help me make my article sound better. One strategy that I used was to use deliberate word choices. For example, I had a sentence that used the word ex-student. While it does make sense, I thought alumni would work better as it is a quicker, and easier way to get my point across. Also, since I used a word readers did not know I could have put a vocabulary box that explained that word and many more. In the end, I did actually end up putting the vocabulary box in the second page, where I had a blank spot I needed to fill.
Making my feature article was a very fun experience. There are many things I learned from this process. Firstly, making a simple article can be a lot harder than you think. And second, articles like the NYT take a lot of effort to actually make. While there were some challenging parts, the article was still fun to make. I would like to do this again, as I am very proud about the article I ended up with.

If you will like to see the article here it is.