Has The Times Changed My Style?

  Thus far, my readings of the New York Times (which I access via the Times website) have been surprisingly pleasant. I never noticed how easily I enjoy reading the news until I had to read interesting news articles for an assignment and experienced how painless the process is.
  The stories that capture my attention are invariably the ones that appear on the top of the main page. Because the structure of a newspaper normally maintains an order arranged by importance, the case is usually true that the big stories — and often the most entertaining and well-written — are the ones that require little searching.
  Consequently, chances are good that I’ve completely overlooked stories that may be popularly seen as less relevant, but that I might happen to appreciate even more than the stories featured on the front page.
  Reading the Times probably hasn’t affected my habits very much. I have already been reading Yahoo! articles for quite some time. For a person like myself who may not be quite as refined in the art of analyzing sources, the Times doesn’t seem so very different from Yahoo!.
  However, having immediately read the Times before writing this blog post, I suspect that the short-paragraph format of that newspaper may have influenced the frequent paragraph breaks in this post, thereby influencing my writing habits on some small level, even if only temporarily.
  The first article I read today was Part 5 in an ongoing story about a journalist captured by the Taliban and the narrative of his escape. Being a part of “Generation Y,” naturally I’ve heard about journalists being kidnapped in the Middle East on more than one occasion throughout the past two decades. But until today, I had yet to read a detailed, first-person account.
  I could easily see how reading such articles could give people a better sense of what it might be like to experience what the authors experienced. Articles like what I read are effective because storytelling is, by nature, one of the most easily-retained ways of absorbing information. Through reading this particular article today and writing about what I’ve learned in doing so, I have come to better-understand the value of injecting feeling into the learning process.