Punctuation

 Punctuation has always given me troubles when writing for I haven't known the rules as well as I should. These issues have been a prominent problem in my writing for a long time. This mad the article Teaching Punctuation as a Rhetorical Tool a very interesting one. The fact that he says that what I used to know as rules or “laws” of punctuation are actually guidelines I was shocked. But it also follows the road that a lot of of articles have been saying in our assigned readings. The way punctuation changes for who you are writing for seems to be important but as you can tell punctuation itself can change its entire meaning such as this picture.

When “good writers” like Orwell write they punctuate for their intended meaning that they have in mind and while put emphasis on the punctuation. For me I have always had a very weak grasp on punctuation and I have felt less confident as a writer in result. When going into a paper I have always given it the impression that I wast trying and that if I was it would be better. This has halted my ability to increase my skill because I was incompetent in certain areas I wouldn't try to advance myself to where I should be.

Side Note: I just read the Cracked article 6Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person in 2014 and I have been able to relate a lot of it to my life and in this case my own writing. Some of the content is NSFW so im just giving you a heads up.

All in all the writing that I have been producing in my life has been something that is riddled with errors and punctuation has been a major flaw that I have been ignoring with pure ignorance and laziness because I know It all wont happen in just a day but I will start working on my punctuation until I have a true understanding of what I am doing. As this is my last thought piece for this blog I would like to give my readers a sign off by thanking all of you who were with me from the beginning and has seen my writing grow with each article read from the book Writing about Writing.

Thank You,

Blake Dufner        

Error

As a reader when I read an article or any sort of finished product, I put higher standards on the writing than I probably should. Like in "The Phenomenology of Error" I am the type of reader that results in getting kind of angers me. This I think is a problem because I as a reader am too harsh on other people's work even though my own work is riddled with errors. The game that he played with me was a game that I lost for I didn't catch the mass amount of errors he was speaking of. This brought up a question of whether I really care about errors or just obvious ones. Like when he spoke of the fat hostess who you make fun of just because they violate your own comfort zone. This is what happens when I read errors, I feel uncomfortable because I wish that it was perfect and the errors alone make me uncomfortable.The game that I unknowingly was playing is now letting me think of how oblivious In not only reading but in my life.

The way Joseph Williams was able to subtly play this game and in the end prove a point was very impressive. I throughout this course have been reminded of my own writing in eye opening ways such as this one. He put so much thought into an article. On the surface the article looks like a well thout out article on errors and you take it at that face value until you read the last paragrraph and realize that there was an underline message the entire time. The amount of time it must of took to purposely place your errors must have been more than most of my school papers have had in the revision state.

This article gave me a different effect on me than it probably should have. Instead of thinking about how errors are everywhere I thought about how much time must have went into planning. It is beyond me how someone could write with that muc planning and thought in every word, sentence, and paragraph.

Rough Drafts

 

When reading the incredibly short article Shitty First Drafts there were many things that I thought were interesting. First off when she said that she would write something just to get it done and not have it even resemble what it should is an interesting way to go about writing. When I write for my papers I usually put in a lot of thought into it as I am typing and than my second draft highly resembles my second, but for Anne Lamott she goes the route of writing her “shitty” first draft with intentions of it not being good at all.

I was able to relate a lot to her when saying that first drafts are supposed to be bad because by the title the are needing work. She puts a whole new meaning to the idea of a rough draft with statements like “just making my fingers move” When talking about writing for her first draft not caring about it because it isn't how you get to the finished product but just the quality of the final draft. Hopefully I learn a lesson from this whole experience and start doing this in my own first drafts because it would help with my problems I have with writers block. More than anything a rough draft gives you a blueprint for where your paper will go because once you have the groundwork made it will be incredibly easier to continue to work forward on what you have.

A problem I have had in papers is that I have made my “shitty rough draft” also my “shitty final draft” because I was to lazy to continue working on it, didn't think it was worth my time, and that I didn’t have the time in general. This problem may in fact be my biggest issue in my big bag of problems I have with writing. All in all shitty rough drafts make for smooth final drafts, and that if you want a quality paper maybe the best way to get to that point is to force out a shitty first draft that has little to no resemblance of your final draft because at least you got the ball rolling. 

Writers Block

As we continue to analyze writing we have also covered the things in writing that have caused me extreme amounts of pain and anguish. The subject of Mike Rose’s article A Cognitive Analysis of Writers Blog covers the thing that has caused the most of all other things that have plagued me. Whether I am fully prepared for writing or am just about to “wing it” i have always struggled with writing for my ideas never seem to be able to come out right once I am sitting at the computer. As Rose states plans are much different than executing because you can plan as much as you want but when it comes down to it you may realize that your idea wasn't as strong as it could have been or you may not be able to put your plan down on paper. These reasons make writing a pain because writers block for me is raised to a new level whenever I am stressed. 
There also times when writer's block doesn't hit me even a little and ideas come into fruition when i start to type and i never have problems. These moments are rare but they let me understand the difference between having and not having writers block. In life there are many things like writers block such as quick decisions and even dinner decisions but the key thing behind writers block and both of my examples is they have deadlines that need to be met which is what causes your mind to go blank and for nothing to get accomplished.

Planning and Stress

Planning before writing a paper is a completely necessary step and is essential for a paper to be optimized. In Carol Berkenkotter’s article “Decisions and Revisions: The Planning Strategies of a Publishing Writer” I had a sad realization that my own planning has lacked throughout my writing. I think that if you are planning a paper correctly you will come out much farther ahead than if not. In the article when she wrote about revisions i had a strong realization that my own papers need more revisions. But I also realized that I plan just like the college students in her paper saying that most of the time you are writing you aren't writing at all, in fact you are thinking about what you will write.

I have a serious problem with planning too much when writing a paper if the paper has a lot of worth behind it. A situation that I have in the forefront of my mind was my junior year at Sentinel High School in Missoula. We had to take a writing assessment for college, the test was called the MUSWA (I believe it stood for Montana university system writing assessment). A major requirement for this assignment was to reach a certain word count which was a problem because I put much more time into having a quality paper than have a paper which was basically all filler. I was like a deer in the headlights when my teacher announced that there was  fifteen minutes left for us to write because I had much less written than I should have at that point. By the time the time limit had been completely finished I had half as much written as many people in my class and i realized it was going to hurt me down the road.

Writing this thought piece shows me the parallels between then and now. This thought piece has much less riding on it than that time my junior year and i have been able to not get locked up because i don't feel as if it needs to be perfect. Planning should not cause anxiety in fact it should cause confidence because you should know that your paper is a higher quality than it would have been. But because of time frames and due dates it can cause a lot of anxiety in a student (or maybe its just me).

Judging a Book by its Cover

In Anne Frances Wysocki’s article titled “The Multiple Media of Text: How Onscreen and paper Texts Incorporate Word, Images, and Other Media” I have a pretty large understanding of how interpreting texts at face value is a trait that everyone already has. Just like almost everyone of my previous blog posts I am going to relate this to my film knowledge. Last semester in my class Film in America we went over genre and the professor spoke of how an audience can recognize a movies genre without actually seeing the whole. In example if you see an arid desert and a man riding a horse in the distance you can logically and make an educated prediction that the movie you are watching is a western movie. And on the other side of the spectrum if you see a spaceships and laser beams you would be able to say the movie Is a science fiction without much doubt in your mind. If continuing on this idea of film and being able to understand its genre it is something that we as the viewers have come to understand because there are certain themes to these films that separate it from others. In writing there are different types of writing and you can also tell by the way it appears. I think it is very interesting and it never stops amazing me that people the human brain is so smart that little things such as hearing the sound of a jazz band and seeing a man in a suit in a movie can let you think that the movie takes place in the twenties from nothing else but that.

I think that people need to understand how to guess what a certain media is without taking the time to fully watch or read it because it helps people have a much heavier grasp on other things that are used in life. Such as recognizing literary devices in your paper will help you understand writing better and can further your own writing as well. People always say that judging a book by its cover is bad but when it comes down to it recognizing similarities that things have can help you understand the world in new ways.

Changes

           Jody Shipka’s article doesn’t feel that new to me but however it goes more in depth on theories of how flawed the public school systems way of showing worth in the classroom. A big flaw I see with how people write papers in the classroom is that it doesn’t really show how knowledgeable you are on your said topic but in fact more on how you can regurgitate what you read without any form of comprehension. During my years in school I have found myself more a part of Jody Shipka’s problem than the average student. For I am the king of regurgitation I feel as though I am being spoken to in this article because I haven’t been actually engaged on subjects in the past and I just mindlessly go through web pages finding what I should pick up and plop into my own paper (in my own words and with citations of course).

            Within the paper Jody talks about a student writing a paper on the movie Mona Lisa’s Smile she first shows the “what” of the student’s paper then fires back with the “why”. Over the past few weeks in class I have found that the thinking of why when writing can change how your paper will be finally composed and structured. But the word “why” hasn't stopped there with its ability to take over my mind I have also been questioning previous papers I have written and why things happened the way they did just as Jody showed the whys of the paper of the student I have been thinking of the whys of my own work. The kid in the video here is like me asking why (Just put your fingers in your ears and pretend he is saying "why" not "what") 

When I really think about everything I think that everything is flawed and we can fix it but nobody wants to change a old system. Because who really likes change?  Doesn't it cause more heartache then its worth? I dont think so, I think we need to grab on tight to new ideas and propel our educational system out of the dark ages.

Technology of Words

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 The world is changing at every moment of time even though some may find a moment minuscule it is full of changes. In the article From Pencils to Pixels by Dennis Baron he speaks on how the changes of technology have changed the landscape of how the modern man becomes literate. For me It is much different from the author for I was born into this new world of technology and computers, so I didn’t see the rapid change that the world went through first hand but I do understand that these changes are happening. As I am typing this paper I am seeing the difference between the past and the present with how people are doing homework nowadays. I am currently writing this blog on a Toshiba laptop which comparing to twenty years ago it would most likely be written on a typewriter or written by hand. Even the way I am turning in this paper differs in a ridiculous way to thirty years ago where  no one would be able to imagine typing a paper on a “magical screen” then turning it in through a wireless transmitting method where anyone in the world can read what you wrote the moment you are finished writing it.

            The big advancement that this article was making was how big the advancement of the pencil was. It said how such a big advancement is cheap “pencil technology has advanced to the point where the ubiquitous no.2 wood-cased pencil can be manufactured for a unit cost of a few pennies”.This reminded me of a video i watched called I, Pencil. Pencils are pretty universal no matter what your economic standing is. But today you need to have money to use the technology that is popular today. I don’t know a single person who writes on a typewriter but there is no way that everyone I know can afford laptops or some sort of personal computer. Also for those people that do have computer but no internet the computer is about as useful as a typewriter except for the fact that you can delete and erase on a laptop and because of  that it has changed the way that people think when writing papers because making a decision isn't ever permanent.

Discourse and Interpretation

In the article Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: Introduction the author James Paul Gee discusses the way people speak to each other and how it varies. The way we speak to each other is a very intriguing thing, because it varies from person to person. The way you talk to your friends is usually extremely different from the way you talk to your family. But the way you talk to your family isn’t even the same all across the board, for if you are talking to your grandpa it will be very different then if you are talking to a cousin who is about the same age as yourself. It’s not just because of age it’s because of respect that you have in your elders and you know what would be inappropriate. Respect just like many other things play a role in the discourse of you r points you will make for there are so many variables that change how you convey your message.  Just as in the article the way you talk during a job interview is different from how you would usually speak to someone. The vocabulary you use and the way you speak changes with the audience you are talking too and it is important to understand that the words you use with one person may not work with someone else for they may not know the word in the first place or they may not get the same reaction from the said word.

The way you tell stories in film is just as big of a difference as how important the discourse is in speech and writing. Recognizing your audience in film is as easy as designing a trailer that will speak to certain people. If the movie in question is a romantic comedy you could take two approaches with your trailer. One showing the comedy aspects with funny parts of the film in the trailer this would attract more males to the movie then if you went with the other route. The other route to be taken is highlighting the romanticism behind the movie. This way you capture both sides of the audience getting them to go to the theater and seeing the film. The way you use scenes can be interpreted differently just like the words in a paper the video below shows this perfectly.

The Tale of Two Stories

After reading Margaret Kantz’s article entitled “Helping Students Use Textual Sources Persuasively” I made a few observations about the article. One point in the article is about imaginary characters that have different approaches when compiling information for research papers. The thing that I felt was incredibly relatable was the acknowledgment of sources. During my sophomore year in high school one of my teachers retired and he was replaced by this new teacher who forced everyone into citing their papers and would fail anyone who did not cite their sources. This was a very monumental moment for my career as a student and as a writer for I had never cited my sources before and I thought it was a total waste of my own time. If I didn’t understand the difference of accepting fact as I read it and seeing opinions for what they are, I would be just  like how Shirley does her research during the story, because she takes a piece of information at face value and doesn't think about who it is who is telling you the information. I feel this is completely like how the news is today, because if a story happens the slants that each news company will be completely different and sometimes even completely opposites. I have seen it hundreds of times, I will see some news story on MSNBC or Fox then I will change the channel so I can see what the other station is saying and nine times out of ten they will be completely different approaches on the subject (as you can see from the video above). To be better when taking information you must do as Alice does for she has a complete understanding on the biases of articles knowing that using more than one source will make your paper better and will give you a more rounded understanding on the subject. Understanding that when you see a piece of information that it is not always true and that you probably are seeing a biased version of the information given. Recently a group of friends of mine were talking and brought up to me  that they read an article that said the broncos had thrown the super bowl in order to make money. The conversation quickly turned to anger as they realized how unreliable the source they were reading was, because the same website had many other satirical articles presented as true.

Originality

Being original is a very hard trait to maintain. Weather in life or when it is in writing, It is hard in both because there are so many driving forces behind what happens. When in life, people and the media drive us to do certain things. But in writing we follow others writing in all stages for we learned to write from reading from others.

 As a group writers have worked together to make more exciting and quality pieces of writing. They do this by picking up from what other writers have written and the conventions that they use. This is called intertextuality and as James Porter argues is behind every piece of text. I believe it is possible to have some sort of originality when writing but it is never truly just your own.  For you learned from others writing to build your own. Also nearly every writing style has been done by someone because writing has been around a long time and hardly anyone gets published. So calling yourself original is basically being like Zoolander.

To me intertextuality reminds me a lot of one of my two majors, that major is film. Film and cinema has been around  over over 100 years. People like to think that certain directors are completely original and have these methods are super new. Just as in writing nearly everything isn't just your own. For the conventions of cinema much like writing have been honed over the years. But unlike writing new film techniques will arise more often then in writing. a technique in film that was pretty original at the time was bullet time the slow-motion technique used in the movie The Matrix. After this movie many movies copied this technique and perfected it. All in all artistic work in literature and all types of creative media is a group effort that has spanned through the medians existence which results in taking and reusing other peoples techniques and methods which will change through time.