An Englishman comes to UCO

Alan Smith is many things. He is an Englishman, he is a husband and a father. He is a teacher at South Western University in England. However, Alan is also a storyteller. He is a journalist. 

Alan started his journalism career late in life. It all began when someone else had written a feature article about him. He saw his name printed in the paper and said, “I can do this.” He realized that he too wanted to be writing others’ stories.

A unique part of this man is the fact that he spends time at the prison cells in England listening to the inmates and writing their stories. Initially, pitched the idea to a newspaper but got very little for his prison stories. Alan then landed with the Guardian newspaper who promised four times the pay than the previous newspaper. Alan is now a freelance writer at the Guardian with over seventy prison stories.

Alan says that the prison is full of interesting stories, with rapists, murderers, bank robbers, and criminals. However, Alan takes a different approach as people might think.

“The country is lining up to bad mouth prisoners. They don’t need my help.  My job is to show how intelligent and witty and how they were good men at one time”, Smith said.

Alan relates a prisoner who shares his first name, where the prisoner had done horrendous misdeeds but is still very sensitive and charming and human. Alan also talks about another who played the violin beautifully. For his story, Alan chose to focus on the violin and the music in the prisoner, instead of what brought him in.

“Don’t write for nothing. If you don’t write for anything, aim to write to be published. If they don’t pay you to write, they don’t value you. Any fool can say you write wonderfully”.

This quote really struck me.  Everything has a price. And that includes writing. I never minded not getting paid for writing before, just because the thrill of seeing my name printed far outweighs the money I might be getting. However, what Alan says does make sense. Any fool can say you write wonderfully.

Also, Alan stressed the importance of having good grammar.

“If you’re too stupid to use an apostrophe, you’re too stupid to earn a degree from this university”.

Alan says that bad grammar ruins an article. If we cannot put a correct sentence together, it does not really matter how good the content is. People will be turned off.

I will say that this has been a long pet peeve of mine, and I am very happy to have “professional support”.