LAST week, the Herald welcomed Auchenharvie Academy student Gabrielle Boyd to the office for work experience.

Here, she reveals how she spent her week with our editorial team:

My work experience at Ardrossan Herald has been very interesting this week. There has been so much about writing that I never knew, and I’ve met so many people as well.

It has been a very educational week. This week I’ve done so many different tasks such as writing my own stories, editing pictures, looking over news articles and visiting St Anthony’s Academy.

Writing stories was hard at first but soon after I began to get the hang of it. Suddenly it became less complicated.

My first story I wrote was the Ed Vere article. It’s about a famous author and illustrator coming to Scotland to read to the primary schools.

The first story I wrote about him I got some help from Lisa Hodge, one of the journalists I sat across from. She explained on how to set it out and how to place my words correctly.

Soon after I went to St Anthony’s to go meet Ed Vere with photographer Charlie Gilmour and managed to get an interview with him and then wrote a story about it.

For little mini tasks, I was given sheets of paper with stories on them written by other journalists and had to correct the mistakes they had made, for example, missing words, misspelled words, unwanted words etc.

It was interesting to see how other journalists wrote stories and their writing technique.

I got help from Rebecca Garrett who looked over it first then gave it to me.

I was given papers from 10-20 years ago and had to look out for pictures for the ‘A Blast from the Past’ section of the paper.

I took some pictures I thought would be good on my phone, imported them onto the computer and started editing them for the paper. I had to look over the old paper again to see what the pictures were about and give them little headlines.

It was fun to do and interesting to see what the paper looked like 10 years ago.

Neil Smith and Paul Fisher explained to me how the paper is set out on the computer and how they have to put pictures in and how they need to add or take away text.

Overall my experience at Ardrossan Herald has been memorable and very welcoming.

Watching how journalists work and discuss stories inspires me even more to become a journalist when I leave school.

I hope to see everyone again and for a different reason other than work experience.