Winchester city centre will be experiencing a massive cake sale on Saturday, as its residents plan a cake sale to try and raise money for wounded soldiers coming back from overseas.
Winchester, which has a long military history, is holding a ‘colossal cake sale’ as part of the fundraising mania that is capturing the hearts of people around Great Britain. Belinda Mitchell, a fundraiser, is not only encouraging residents but is encouraging everyone to “make cakes for us, and [to] ask your friends to make cakes [too]”. The cake sale will take place on Saturday 1st March in the Brooks Centre, and all proceeds will be donated to the ‘Help for Heroes’ charity, in hope to raise enough money for a new gym and swimming pool at Headley Court in Surrey.
The charity, which was established on the 1st October 2007 has already raised £3 million, and is hoping to build a swimming pool and gym at Headley Court in Surrey, in effort to help wounded British soldiers returning from operational theatre. The charity raises money not only for those that are physically wounded, but for those that have been injured psychologically, through post traumatic stress syndrome, with those in the Navy, Army, and Royal Air force benefiting from this charity.
Private Matthew Woollen is one of the few soldiers who experienced the ‘good care’ of the uniformed doctors and nurses. Aged 19, Woollen was severely wounded during active service in Afghanistan and thanks to the help received he’s “feeling much better”. Wing Commander believes Headley Court (where some of the money will go to) will help patients to be “rehabilitated in a way that encourages team spirit and a military way of thinking”.
The fundraising event is not one of the first – in fact throughout the country ordinary people are planning ways to make money, from marathons in London, to comedy nights in the West Midlands. For more information, and to make a donation visit www.helpforheros.com, or turn up on Saturday around noon time for the cake sale.
winchestertutor said,
February 29, 2008 at 4:57 pm
What I can’t work out is why they are selling “massive cakes” (maybe just a few of them) – like the novelty cakes that girls jump out of in gangster films. That’s what it says here!
A city centre can’t really experience anything. Subject and verb must agree on case.
Winchester’s long military history – that’s a bit vague. Isn’t the headquaters of some military unit based here. I genuinely don’t know.
Who says it is fundsraising ‘mania’. Surely people are not very excited about this. That reads like hype (or is it sarcasm? – that never works in news).
Who is this Belinda Mitchell – how did we get to her. This is just advertising for her campaign isn’t it. We don’t do free advertising – even for good causes. If we give them free adverts they won’t buy adverts for their (it strikes me pretty futile) cake stall and we will all be in cardboard city. (or have to join the army and get shot!).
You’ve got quotes here but I am not sure what they mean, eg:
“rehabilitated in a way that encourages team spirit and a military way of thinking”. What does that mean? It sounds like doubletalk.
Good points are that you have instinctively chosen a very news worthy subject for this area, squadies and the war. But (and this is very common with starting out students) you are so grateful that they gave you help withthe stoythat you have basically given them advertising.
A lot of students have done this in this exercise to some degree or another, so don’t worry about it too much at this stage. It is perectly normal level for a student at this stage. But it is nevertheless ‘advertorial’ and we have to be careful about that (even in a ‘good casue’).
The basic standard of English is very good, though a bit ‘chatty’. It does not yet have that crisp, tight, machine gun feel that good news writing (partic, tabloid writing) has. That comes with reading the papers incessantly and following suit.
What puzzles me is what newspapers and books about news reporting style you are reading that say you should do your journalism like this. Surely not Evans?
News writing style is pretty easy to master. But it won’t come to you in a dream. You have to ead the textbooks and then read the papers and then you will do very well because clearly you are intelligent and well informed about things generally.