JAROD DAILY
Writing Samples
I have been writing for as long as I can remember, and have written in a variety of forms and on a variety of topics. As a journalism major in college, I covered the administration at Texas Christian University. Years of working at newspapers have given me a taste for writing about politics, and one of my favorite hobbies, watching college football, is always fair game to me. Since starting my graduate studies, I have found more academic topics to write about, like linguistics. The writing samples below represent a small sample of the work I have produced in either a professional or student capacity since the start of my postsecondary education. They also represent some of the topics that most interest me as a writer.
Photograph © 2012 Stephen Spillman
More sports writing (external links):
Expansion Creating Very Bad Blood: Published at
The Upset in 2010
Raising the level of second-tier bowl games:
Originally published at College Football News as
part of Matt Zemek's Weekly Affirmation column;
now archived on Mr. Zemek's own site
No Bowl Tie-Ins? No problem: Published at The Upset
in 2011
NCAA Football Neutral Site Kickoff Games a Boon:
Published at The Sports Column in 2014
College football has been a major interest of mine since my freshman year at Texas Christian University, and became more important to me as I got older and moved away from where I grew up. While I follow and occasionally write about the entire college football landscape, my primary team will always be TCU, which in 2012 joined the Big 12 Conference, an event that felt like coming home to Horned Frog fans, given that the school would be rejoining old rivals Texas, Texas Tech, and Baylor.
That fall, in addition to seeing my team compete in a new league, I began full-time study in the University of Arkansas at Little Rock's master's program in Professional and Technical Writing. One of the classes I took that semester was Advanced Persuasive Writing. For one of our assignments, we had to write a negotiatory piece, urging for a middle ground in an argument in which we had a stake. For my topic, I chose Big 12 expansion. Realignment in college football has been a hot-button topic since 2010, and in November 2012, Maryland and Rutgers reignited the conversation by accepting invitations to join the Big Ten Conference. The Big 12 schools, meanwhile, had reportedly been considering whether to add Florida State and Clemson for quite some time. In this piece, I used the rhetorical skills I had learned in my classes to urge both sides in the debate over whether the Big 12 should expand to wait until the realignment dust settled before making a decision on whether to expand, while still making it clear that I was in favor of expansion.
Photograph by Gage Skidmore
The Rhetoric of Campaign Coverage
In the spring of 2012, I took a Rhetorical Theory class while still working as a copy editor at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette during presidential primary season. For a major project, I had to write a research paper exploring an aspect of rhetorical theory or examining a topic through that lens. Using the easy access to wire coverage that I had as a copy editor, I decided to examine how news services covered the Republican primary elections that were going on during that semester. This piece, which has been published on RhetWiki, a project of the UALR Department of Rhetoric and Writing, shows my ability to analyze and synthesize different types of sources, including newspaper articles, contemporary books on journalism, and established sources from classical and modern rhetorical theory. It also represents my first attempt to build a bridge between the two disciplines of my background.
2012 election-related persuasive writing:
Photograph by Ty Halasz, TCU Daily Skiff
Pop Culture and Language
(PDF)
In Spring 2013, I took a Language Theory class that expanded my existing interest in linguistics. For this class, I had to write two research papers with the option of combining them into one longer project. As I began considering topics for my first paper, I kept thinking about how much of my own daily speech uses a variety of references from pop culture. I focused my paper on this topic, incorporating elements ranging from memetics to speech communities, and quickly found that I would need to expand into a longer paper. This research paper shows my ability to synthesize new ideas about modern language formation and change using a variety of sources. It is also a medium-length piece of research writing that I am proud of and that I had a lot of fun writing.
Donovan hired as TCU provost
(external link)
As an undergraduate journalism student at Texas Christian University, I spent most of my time working at the TCU Daily Skiff and its sister publication, Image magazine, in various capacities, including as a staff reporter and a contributing writer. The semester that I was a staff reporter, I was assigned to the administration beat during a semester that saw a search for a new provost for the university. TCU ended up hiring the only internal candidate among the finalists for the job, beloved Scottish geologist Nowell Donovan. When the news of his hiring broke, I was pulled off of my shift on the copy desk and had to cover the story on a tight deadline. This story is one of the best pieces of spot news I wrote in my time as a reporter.
More of my articles from the TCU Daily Skiff (external link)