When I teach college and high school aged writers, they love to see stories about people who are their age.  So here is a really nice piece by CBS’ Steve Hartman and my buddy photojournalist Les Rose.  It is a simple no frills kind of piece that has some very nice teaching points that I will list at the bottom of the photo below:

Notice:

-Steve does not get hung up in the girl’s ethnicity. It is not about her “Chinese-ness” it is about her drive.

-The bookending of her lust for shoes makes her human and normal

-Steve is the ”everyday guy” in the story, not pretending to know more than any of the rest of us about medicine or science.  It makes the subject’s expertise even more impressive.

-The story does not overstate the probability that this will work a as a cure. These kinds of things are never as simple as that. So the piece is honest.