The University Star Review

Ethan Miller

The effectiveness of the writing:
From the passages that I looked through (which were randomly chosen from the opening page, closing page, and Trends page) the writing seems consistent, proper grammar is used, things are spelled correctly, and the articles focus on the subject they are supposed to cover. Overall the writing does seem effective. There were two things that I noticed from these passages: some did not have much of a flare to them, the stories generally had an interesting subject, and covered the subject well, but there was no ‘pizzaz’ in most opening lines, or paragraphs to come. Also, and this happens in everyone’s writing, there were some repetitions (and they may have been related to quote transition style), but I think the writing (in one case) depended too heavily on journalistic structure.
Score: 9

The quality of the photographs:
The paper starts out with a pleasant eye catcher: a picture of a sculpted gray cat on a subtly different but contrasting background. Through the paper I noticed good use of photography: pages that stayed traditional with opening photos were displayed well, and pages that used more untraditional setup of photography arranged the photos in non-intrusive way. The only mistake in photography that I noticed were a couple of things on the front page, a head was cut off in a photo below the title, and their eye catcher bar cut off the head of a sports player at the bottom of the front page. The paper had good photography and choice of placement.
Score: 9

Impact of the Layout and design:
The front page starts out well: I feel like fonts were carefully selected, border colors were considered and made to match each other and school colors, and that the pictures compliment the writing and visa versa, they don’t compete for attention. The back page has a story on top of a photograph, it works well, the text is placed over the sky so it is easily read and leads into the rest of the photo. They mixed up the display of writing, some stories are in columns, others in the normal chunk of text, and again they compliment each other. I think this is probably the strongest part of the paper.
Score: 10

The strength of the non-photo graphics and info graphics:
This paper is a shorter one, and a good portion of it is advertisements; It doesn’t seem like they had much space for non-photo graphics and they had basically no info graphics. The only pages to judge this portion on are the opinions page and the comics’ page. The comic book illustrations are good enough, simple like a comic should be, but the opinions page uses too much space for a lower-detailed drawing (it’s drawn well, it just seems like it could have been condensed). This would probably be the weakest portion of the paper, but it’s still pretty good.
Score: 7

The continuity of the theme/design elements visible throughout the entire work:
I don’t think there was a particular theme for this work; I guess it could be called school themed (and it does focus of the school activities, which is nice), but that would hopefully be all school newspapers. The design elements are particularly strong, pictures are displayed in interesting ways, and the stories are built around the pictures in carefully balanced ways (although there were a few mistakes). The paper is all around strong, does not make any obnoxious use of display, and, like I said before, does focus on the school.
Score: 8

Final Score: 43