What is style, part 2

I still feel that style is the same thing I thought it was in the beginning of the term. Style is a regular or typical form that you or your work takes. Your style may change depending on the medium or the topic, but overall, it stays pretty much the same. Learning new tricks, and having new tools at your disposal may help your style to evolve into something more streamlined or pleasing to the senses, but at its root, it is still the same.
As for the class, I found the reading to be very interesting, as well as the movies we watched. I will forever think of youtube in a different manner, and I also have more experience with various mediums than I did before the class. However, the class as a whole seemed to concentrate more on writing theory than it did on actual writing style. Perhaps by concentrating on the theory, we as writers may change our style slightly, but I feel as though this class was more about philosphy. I liked it, and I wish that personal issues hadn't arisen midway through the term, which had caused me to spend a considerably smaller amount of time on class work.

Peer Review part 4

The process of peer reviewing can only be written about so many times. I feel that it is a process that I understand pretty well, and had a firm grasp on before this class. It is important for many reasons, such as editing, as well as getting ideas and such from others. However, I have always thought that the best peer reviewer is someone who is as interested in your work as you are. Someone who does it solely for the sake of an assignment will be less helpful (typically), than someone who would do it of their own free will.
Further, the editor needs to know what they are talking about. Everyone can give good ideas, but as far as the techniques involved in the writing go, sometimes you need to ignore advice that is just wrong. Again, the person you pick as your editor is probably the most important step in the peer review process.
When it comes to being an editor, it is best to try and find some reason to be interested in the work, and to set aside adequate time to be as helpful to them as you can be. Make as many suggestions as you can, both in regards to the form, as well as the function of the writing.

Looking back, Looking forward

There are many similarities between making a movie and making a comic. Both use pictures and dialouge to help express ideas. Movies have the extra helping hand of music and sound, while comics have the possibility of having narration bubbles. Both make use of symbols, and both have to deal with transitions. Ong and Baron both comment on the evolution of writing as a technology, and movies are basically the next evolutionary step of writing. Many people see a large gap between writing and making movies, but I have always felt that they are truely one and the same. Many of the same rules apply to both. You have to keep a pace that the audience can keep up with, while at the same time keeping them entertained enough to keep them reading/watching. To that end, Strunk and White, and also Williams, have many rules that help make writing clear, such as being concise, omitting needless words, etc. All of these can be applied to scenes in film as well.

Youtube/low-bridge videos: Are they bad?

There is a vast difference between writing for a video, and writing for a research paper. For a video, you have the elements of sound and sight to help you convey what the words are meant to represent. However, without resorting to simple writing, it can be hard to find the proper way to represent an idea. McCloud discusses this when talking about icons in comics. You cannot show infinity, happiness, or other intangible ideas.

However, both are just tools used to convey thoughts. Because they are both used for the same purpose, there are always going to be similarities in the processes that come before, during, and after creation of the content. Both benefit from pre-planning and foresight, lest they be sent off on wild tangents that the author had no intention of visiting. Both use symbolism to represent things that neither can "show" concreately. The same arguments for why comics are a form of writing apply. All three are mediums for the writers/author/creator to express their visions, their thoughts, their dreams, etc.

Most students write much more often than they make videos, and so the tool set that they develope as writers is often more full than that of a director. Some may find that this makes making a video more challenging, and because they have to use different tools, they may find to two completely different in form, function, and use. If we spent as much time making movies as we did writing, this would not be the case.

Also, as a sidenote, I found all of Wesch's videos to be pretty amazing, and am now sharing them with my friends.

Peer Recap part 3

Peer reviewing is a tricky process, because everyone involved needs to be equally prepared and invested in the project. For this third peer review group, out of the 5 people in it, only 1 had their rough draft when we first exchanged email addresses, and one never turned one in at all.

Having one isn't enough either though. When reviewing, the ones who are always well prepared give good advice, offering ideas of where the paper can go, more area for the writer to explore, and corrections to sentence structure and such. However, those same people who turned it in late gave a similar amount of effort to the actual reviewing. They read it until they reach something that seems wrong, make a note of it, make sure they made at least 2 or 3 notes, and then write something nice at the end. This is less than helpful, and typically those students who do go out of their way to add that extra advice are the same ones who turned in the paper early.

I think that this is mostly due to a lack of interest. How much I help someone else does not in any way reflect upon myself as far as grades go. When working on my Three Kingdoms wiki, I noticed a similar phenomena. Whenever someone's name would be added to an article (ie, they get credit for writing it), people were much less inclined to help them. Because they were getting nothing out of it (in terms of respect in this case) most people simply didn't extend that extra little effort.

As a general rule of thumb, I think that finding those people who care as much about your work (or can at least pretend to for long enough to help you) is critical to finding good editors and peer reviewers. Since we cannot pick our groups though, I am unable to put this information to use this time around.

Reading and Writing about Comics, ala McCloud, Part 1

I picked a comic from VGCats (which stands for video game cats).http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=269. Here, we see a living potato telling some animated peas that he will be back with a new toy for them. The potato is supposed to represent Shigeru Miyamoto, the man responsible for Super Mario, Zelda, Metorid, and many other hallmarks of video games. The peas, obviously, represent his loyal fans.
many of the aspects in this comic are discussed in Scott McCloud's book, "Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art". For example, the third to last panel has a pea standing, but with little ((( )))'s around his knee. McCloud discusses this style of imagray twice. Once, in the chatper about motion, he states that could be a cue taken from film. On page 113, he states that "when a camera's shutter speed is too slow to fuly freeze a moving object's image, an interesting blurring effect occurs." Due to the little pea's knees wobbeling so much, the "camera" is unable to fully capture the image frozen in time.
Also, earlier on, McCloud mentions that individual panels act as a sort of general indicator of time being devided (page 99). You can see this clearly in the comic, but that it also uses a form of sequencing called inter-dependant to convey just how much time is covered. The inter-dependant-ness of the scene can be seen by examining the panels where it says "much, much later". Without that bubble of narration, we would probably not understand just how much later it was. We may think that the new toy was responsible for the apperent death of the two peas in the background. Having that extra word helps the audience understand exactly what's going on.
A final thing I'd like to talk about, is the eyes of the last pea-man in the 9th panel, or the second panel after the potato-man has come back. His normally blakc eyes have little sparkles of white in them, and he looks oh-so hopeful and happy. This is because of something that McCloud explains on page 129, about symbols entering the language. If a real human ever had sparkles in their eyes, it would probably be a sign of something wrong with their vision. However, because enough artists use that symbol to represent a certain emotion, it has entered the language, and now is a symbol for something that is typically invisible- an emotion..

Picturing Texts on the Web

I sort of cheated for this assaignment. I choose http://www.threekingdoms.com/overture.htm as the page I would discuss, and the reason that seems a bit unfair, is that it is actually taken from a novel. It is the opening "song" for the book, Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
The page does contain balance, to an extent. The top and the bottom are both the same, and act as a boarder for the contents within it. However, inside those boarders, the left side of the page is filled with a beautiful painting, while the right side has a lot of white space, with sparsely-filling words written into it.
The painting is obviously a metaphor... that being a river being like time. However, the page as a whole could also be seen as a metaphor as well. The page is supposed to be a page in a page. I don't think that there is much of a comparasion or contrastion going on in the page.

Peer Review Recap part 2

Well... this time around I made one of the same mistakes I did the first time, which was not having enough written to get good, sound advice from my reviewers. I only had an outline because I had put it off until the day before it was due, but was called into work. There were other students who had the same issue, so I hope that they also learn from this mistake so that they can get more out of the next (if this is one) peer review.

I did provide more time to review others's papers, which not only allowed me to provide more feedback, but also allowed me to think more about the choices that others had made. Last time I had almost no time, so I noticed quite a difference when I reflected on my own work with their choices in mind.

Using Wetpaint made it easier to read more paper, but it also allowed for some students to not have anyone (or very few) people give them feedback. I only had one reader, which was less than ideal to say the least. Again, because I had so little to be given feedback on to begin with, I'm not sure it really matters.

First Impressions

I know that this blog is late... but to be honest, it would have been impossible for me to do it on time since I didn't buy the book until a few days ago. Now that I have actually sat down and read it, I am a bit surprised by how few people seemed to like it. It wasn't exactly enjoyable, but I didn't find it a particularly difficult read. Taking it in small chunks helped ease the monotiny of it, and also gave me the time to let it sink in.

The first thing that struck me about this book is the use of the word "Style" in the title. This book is geared towards a very specific style as it currently stands, as opposed to dicussing different styles, or even "stylist" writing. Instead, it is almost completely concerned with what I call "academic writing", or the writing of something where the point is to share an idea as concretely and obviously as possible. To me, writing stylistically involves some flowery language, some metaphors and apstract ideas, and other, more cereibal, devices. A book that claims to discuss and teach "style" should be more open-ended and encompassing than this. I recognize that the last chapter touches more on this particular aspect, but it seems almost as if it were added as an after thought.

However, this book is extremely useful for the "academic style" of writing. It gives advice on ways to make writing more clear, more direct, and more bold. This can be great for college papers, publications in academic journals, resumes and business related writing, etc. It teaches the "correct" way to write, which helps you appear more professional. In a similar vien, the chapter on commonly misused words was useful, and sometimes even interesting.

Finally, I think that the size of the book is both conveinent (who could stand to keep reading more material like this?), and a good illistration of the writers's point. Failing to follow a rule in the same paragraph that you are using to illustrate the rule is so distracting that the reader is more likely to remember that the writer was hypocritical than the actual rule itself. Had Strunk written too much, then he would be breaking his own rule of "Omit needless words," which is a commonly stressed thread throughout The Elements of Style. The rule is a good one when you do not have to meet a certain length quota, and because so many teachers do enforce a specifed length, it is a rule that almost all students not only break intentionally, but are almost forced to learn to NOT follow the rule.

I don't believe that I will consult this book nearly as often as I could, or probably should, but I feel that having read it once has given me a lot of things to think about and reflect on in regardes to my writing.

My writing technologies.

In my daily life, I use the computer for almost all of my writing needs. Good ol' pen and paper doesn't work as well for my needs, because my handwriting is so poor that I usually cannot read what I've written. This makes the computer a god-send, but also i can work while I surf the net or listen to music, so it isn't just about legibility. I actually do like writing using pen or pencil and paper, but it is less useful, and I am a much faster typist. Over the years, I have phased out blogs like Livejournal and myspace, and instead just concentrated my writing for more scholastic purposes.

What is style

Style.... Style is the overall way who you are or what you do comes across to others. In dress, your style is the appearance that you convey of who you are and what you like to wear. In video games, if you play according to a certain style, you are more likely to do certain things than others, which, again, means that your style is acting as an overall description of how you go about doing something. Just for reference, the dictionary defines it as "a particular kind, sort, or type, as with reference to form, appearance, or character".

Peer Review Recap

A few things that I know I need to do to make the next peer review work better are:

1) Have more for them to read.  This time around, I had very little already written, and so they were limited by what I had provided.  I only had 500 of the 1500 required words, and I had yet to make references to the writings.

2)  Set aside more time to read their work.  I was extremely busy, and because of that, I felt that my comments and advice wasn't nearly as useful as it could have been for my partners.

3) Familiarizing myself with the tools at my disposal would also aid me in helping my partners.  I was unaware that you had to save your comments, and because of that one of my partners didn't get anything from me until a little bit after midnight.  This was because I had to go back and redo the comments.

I think that this process is a great idea, because it gives people who know what they are doing feedback about how to improve their work.  Those of us who don't quite no exactly where we want to take our project are aided even more, because not only do we get pointers from the other partners, but we also can see how they went about doing their work, which can help inspire the people who are less creatively inclined.

writing techonolgy picture

First post

This is the first post for my English 328 blog.