Featured videos: language, literacy, writing

Reading Together

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Calendar: link here

Author: Heather Stogsdill

‘Place Eye-Catching Descriptive Here’

‘Place Eye-Catching Descriptive Here’

Leaving class on Wednesday, I shared one of my favorite quotes with Kim:

“Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with shades of deeper meaning.”  – Maya Angelou, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

I’ve probably shared this quote with you all before, I know I’ve said it a time or two in other courses when I could connect it to the discussion topic, but I find that Angelou’s point is dynamic in interpretation. Dynamic in the sense that its interpretation changes with context and perspective–as with all things. But also dynamic in the sense that, even within a focused context and perspective, the quote’s meaning is ever-changing. At least, that’s how it feels to me. Let me try and explain this to those not savvy to my ADD thought processes. Actually, my ADD might help me make my point here.

Meaning is my (the) cornerstone to interpreting Angelou’s quote. Meaning, meaning of what? Meaning of words, obviously, but what meaning? Shades is important here. Shades… variants… subs… divisions… sub-divisions… layers? Deeper layers. Layers are all connected, tied to the same root. The rainbow shows us prime colors, the basics, colors from which all other colors come. Rods and Cones—β, γ, ρ—and bipolar cells allow us shades, variants, levels, layers of those cornerstone five that are but are not the same color and that’s not even counting the variants seen by those few human tetrachromats out there. How did I get to talking about the anatomy of photreception… Words, back to words, back to meaningMeaning and layers. A word has many layers, many meanings, many connotations. Each connotation leads us to a synonym of the word with a similar connotation. That synonym has many connotations of its own, and so it goes until we lead ourselves away from the meaning we chose to focus on. Our original interpretation has changed. And so Angelou’s quote is dynamic because words themselves are dynamic and how can one interpret something exactly the same way in separate spaces of time and in separate circumstances unless they themselves have not changed at all. Improbable.

Now, since I know you all have had quite enough of reading the thought process of an ADD mind, I’ll get to my point. I like to use this quote by Angelou for the fact that it illustrates the ever-malleable nature of the meanings of words, and that there must be something else in affect to make sense of it. A word is only a word, until someone gives voice to its meaning.

This dynamism is, to me, a great way to exemplify our class’ current topic of study: multimodality. Why? Well, if my ramblings make any sense to you then you might already know. Because the way we understand things, anything, is dynamic. We don’t acquire information simply by seeing words on a page, we learn and understand through another’s ability to give those words voice, to give them meaning. And we understand that meaning better, it seems, when multiple methods are used to reinforce the intended meaning. So, no, words aren’t only what is on the page, they are what you make them to be.

Now that I’ve got that out of my system, here are a few examples of my own utilization of multimodality (at least, some of the more obviously multimodal).

Let me start with a blog. I had to create a Blogster account for a couple multicultural courses I took with Dr. Burton here at Chico State. These blogs were his way of keeping track of our writings for the course and were also a way for him to showcase the phenomena of Globalization and how that affects culture in different respects. Also, if you do follow the link above, notice how Burton leaves different smiley faces in the comments section for each blog. That was his grading method. Sunglasses was 4 out of 4.

Another example is this Wix site. I created it for Little League District 2 of California. I volunteer with them as both an umpire and as the District Information Officer. The website is still pretty amateur, but it works.

Then there’s my Prezi account. I’ve used it a bunch in the past for presentation in various courses, but I haven’t actually used it in a while. I haven’t had a presentation that needed such an animated platform. That and the group projects that I’ve done in recent years were all done through Google Slides, more for convenience’s sake than anything else.

There’s also my Author website. Though it is still in the works right now. I don’t really have anything to put up on it, and I haven’t really had the time to sit down and actually build it.

Must I go on? Well, maybe. Besides all of the above digital-heavy examples of my multimodal behavior, I feel I should mention some simpler things. Such as a visual index I included in an analysis paper involving mural paintings. Or a watermarked image embedded in a presentation handout. Or a digital Annotated Bibliography I made that doubled as a class handout with embedding links to different online videos and documentaries. Simple things, that serve to make the words more interactive, the meaning clearer.

Tell Me What I Don’t Know… It May Take a While

Tell Me What I Don’t Know… It May Take a While

Roxanne Gay once wrote an article titled “Too Many Of Us, Too Much Noise.” The piece itself is an expose (where is my grave accent key in this text program?!) on literary magazines, but there seems to be a broader message to Gay’s titular statement than just there being a confounding influx of lit mags. To me, she is touching on a more philosophical aspect of our modern society in which everyone has something to say and (now more than ever before in our history) everyone has an outlet by which to say it, “. Her’s is a message that I can empathize with, and one that I can transpose, if you will, to other subjects and/or areas of interest. This is where Gay’s old article becomes relevant for our coursework. “Too Many Of Us, Too Much Noise” is something of a perfectly apt description for how I now feel concerning the concept of “writing.” Notice how I said “now” there? Yup.

So, what does that have to do with anything? Well, the way I see it, everyone and their mommas has an opinion on what “writing” is and what it does and does not do, and many of those opinions are written and published as anything from academic papers to opinion blogs. It’s almost enough to make your head spin (at least mine, anyway).

But, the readings from this course were chosen well, I think, for their ability to drive home the consensus that Writing, as a concept, is pretty much a “by your leave” kind of theory. In which individual awareness and understanding dictates how one perceives it.

Now, what am I going to make of this idea in our upcoming paper assignment… Sure, there are many ways by which a written assignment can be completed and presented. But I am of the opinion that form and content should be much more cooperative than, say, writing a technical essay about stream-of-consciousness. So, I am going to convey what I know so far (or don’t know as the case may be) by presenting a creative nonfiction piece. Something where my own opinions and ideas as well as those presented to us in this course can flow together more harmoniously with my own writing style. Of course, this could be done almost as well in other genres of writing, but where’s the fun in that?

What I want to do with this paper is build a looking-glass through which the reader may get an idea of how I see the world of writing and literacy, but that also incorporates how the readings/theories from this course have influenced my understanding thus far. But I also want to give the reader a sense of how very convoluted the concept of writing and literacy truly is. Because of these “wants,” I’m thinking that a braided-essay-esque structure would be a good fit for my paper. Or, perhaps, a more stream-of-consciousness layout. Either one or some combination of both would help to further my purpose. I also, however, think that during drafting of the paper I may switch modes and include sections that will look more “academically traditional” than creative nonfiction. But that is what the braiding is for I guess.

So, give me a “by your leave” for my own conception of writing, and I shall endeavor to present a piece as entertaining as it should be enlightening. With as many of the following “no-nos” as is possible. :)

Formulaic Writing and What Creative Writers Do With It

Formulaic Writing and What Creative Writers Do With It

If anyone recalls, I mentioned a creative nonfiction piece that detailed writing a five paragraph essay in the form of a five paragraph essay. Well, I may have misremembered the aforementioned piece. But only slightly. After much searching through the internet universe, I finally found the essay that I had remembered reading for one of Dr. Eggers’ creative writing courses. The essay (posted below) was actually a pseudo-tutorial on writing a personal essay. But the premise is the same and it does utilize the old standard five paragraph format. It’s actually a pretty good read, so please do so!

Otherwise, my own personal opinion on formulaic writing is that it does have its place in academia, but that its place should be limited to that space of time in which students are beginning to learn how to write academic papers. Meaning that I think students should initially be taught formulaic writing as a jumping off point, a way to begin to think about academic writing, after which the student should be encouraged and pushed to explore their own modes of writing in order to find a “formula” that works for them.

Now, please read the following essay by Stanton Michaels, originally published in the Georgia Review in 1998.

 

 

How to Write a Personal Essay

Intro. Three main points. Summary. Sex. 

by Stanton Michaels, from Georgia Review

The easiest way to write a personal essay is to use the standard form taught in Composition 101: an introductory paragraph followed by three paragraphs outlining three main points and a final summary paragraph. But instead of just blathering about yourself, describe vivid scenes and what they mean to you, such as when your 2-year-old son, Jordan, solemnly declares from the bathtub “I can’t swim—my penis is hard” and you tell him it’s OK, it’s normal, knowing it’ll subside and he’ll be able to swim soon, but you don’t tell him that teeny little weenie he’s holding will be the source of the most intense worries, sorrows, and pleasures he’ll ever experience, and you wonder if you’ll ever be able to tell him the truth. You could follow this thought with the trials and tribulations of your own penis, unless you’re a woman—but of course females are involved with love, sex, and life built around their own body parts, which can provide many interesting topics. The key to maintaining reader interest is to be open and honest, displaying your concerns and fears through specific, true-life examples rather than abstract concepts about how you think sex education is important because you learned the hard way on your own and you doubt you’ll explain things any better than your own father did. Follow this format and, while you may not become a world-renowned author, you will be able to complete a personal essay.

Use five sentences in each paragraph. Some authors, like Faulkner, write immensely long sentences that drift into nooks and crannies of life, enlightening the reader about how, at age 16, you were tricked by a girl into trying on ring sets from her mom’s jewelry-making equipment to find your ring size and later presented with a black onyx and silver ring you were too scared to wear because it implied going steady, which leads to sex, and Dad had just given you and your brother a box of Trojans the week before when Mom and Brooke had gone shopping at Sears for dresses and you were as uncomfortable as Dad when he grunted out his heart-to-heart “Use these to be safe,” especially since you’d recently calculated and realized he’d knocked Mom up with you when she was 16 and he was out of the army after a four-year hitch and you figured it must have happened by accident since their meeting was accidental, him picking her and her sisters up at a railroad crossing in the rain on Halloween and giving them a ride home, coming later to visit, finally getting down in April without a condom or maybe with one that broke and there you are in December but at least they’d gotten married over the summer and you realize it’s April now and you stare at the ring and finally throw it away and tell her later you don’t wear jewelry. Tough guys like Hemingway write short, straightforward sentences, such as: “The author stopped typing. His thick fingers lay bare on the keyboard. Although he’s been married for eight years, his ring finger is naked. His wife knows he doesn’t wear jewelry. Ever.” Yet other writers like to mix up the lengths of their sentences, using long, compound run-ons that begin with one thought then drive on to others but eventually circle back for completion, then follow with a short, crisp, prissy sentence that would satisfy an eighth-grade grammar teacher. Not me.

Write about things you’ve done or people you know, introducing your first true love or your first sexual encounter at age 17 crammed in the back of a Volkswagen Beetle with Danielle who will do it for free ’cause she has a crush on you and you need the experience to be ready for your true first time with Julie whom you love and can’t get off your mind while you’re wedged against the cold side window, remembering Julie’s taste, the force of her tongue in your mouth, the way she holds your hard-on like she knows what she wants and you need to be sure how to do it exactly right so here you are pumping away feeling cheap and drunk and ashamed and excited and sore and thinking sex should be a lot more fun or magical than this floundering on the back seat. You can write in sober first person (“I found later with Julie I didn’t need the practice session with Danielle”), but some feel this is self-serving and others, such as myself, need the safe distance from slivers of memory provided by humor, misdirection, and second or even third person (“At least he wore a condom both times”). Don’t take examples from television or books or newspapers unless they have an effect on you. Don’t write about Kurt Cobain’s suicide after achieving fatherhood or Jimi and Janis overdosing when you were a teen unless you’re a musician—even a part-time folk-rock banjo-picker—wondering how you ever made it out of adolescence since you were so horny yet scared of sex you could only function by smoking a joint first thing in the morning to slow down your thoughts yet still dragged home at midnight after playing a party and jerked off into a dark toilet bowl before passing out in bed worried if you’d wake the next morning and mostly hoping you wouldn’t, having all these memories from those horrid nights years ago cascade through your mind when you returned home from a jam session last Wednesday night a little drunk and then—after checking on Jordan and his sister sleeping peacefully—crying for Kurt who’ll never know his own child and crying for Jim Morrison and Carla Hill and Randy Batson who died in a car accident in high school and all the others you remember, knowing it was just luck you made it and they didn’t, finally wiping away the tears as you piss tequila residue into a murky toilet before going to sleep knowing you’re gonna drag tomorrow at work but sure you’ll wake up in time as you always do. Write about universal themes you’ve experienced personally and others can relate to, like love, fear, and death—or sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll.

Use specific examples that stick to one theme. Don’t write generically about how condoms might break when you can write specifically about the first time with Melanie who’d just gotten over an abortion and her new IUD wasn’t ready yet so you ran back to your cabin at the summer camp where you were both counselors to get the jet-black, ribbed Love Machine you’d bought in a gas station in North Carolina and carried for two years for just such an occasion but after shredded pieces of black latex dripping with semen fell onto the rumpled sheets and Melanie stared like it was a loaded shotgun pointed right at her belly and all you could do was shrug “Sorry” and the only worry on your mind was when your next day off was so you could get to town and buy some that worked because this first time with her was what you’d always hoped sex would finally turn out to be—a fun, relaxed sharing of talk, laughter, and touch. Stick to one theme. Don’t write about Carla Hill in ninth grade when you were 14 if you’re writing about your sex life because she was murdered before anything happened, her throat cut in her own bed during an attempted rape the night before you’d finally mustered up enough courage to ask her to go steady and your buddies had helped you out by sitting in all the seats in the front, right-hand side of the bus where she always sat, leaving the only open space right next to you so she’d just have to sit there and you had your name bracelet all ready but she never got on and everyone else was sobbing, telling you about it. I feel that stories like that, despite being of possible interest, lack relevance to the major themes of “your sex life” in this essay and should be saved for some other piece of writing—unless, of course, you can tie the story in using a new focus, perhaps discovered while writing the essay, such as maybe realizing your refusal to wear jewelry has nothing to do with your dad, condoms, and pregnancy but is instead related somehow to your first attempt at commitment that went totally sour and you simply compensated in the best way your 14-year-old mind could think of.

Personal essays come in all kinds. Some are forms of reportage, such as those by John McPhee or Tracy Kidder, telling the truths about people they’ve interviewed yet injecting the honesty of the reporter’s perception rather than trying to pretend a writer has no slant that skews a story. Other essays deal with decisions made, such as when you finally decide to make a baby and Cheryl leaves her diaphragm out for the first time in 14 years and you laugh as you remember getting sick of her mom asking about grandkids and telling her you both wanted to get really good at sex before doing it for real and now here you are for real and scared if you’ll be good enough, and you’re not talking just about sex now. Essays can also be speculative: questions about found objects, thoughts about missed opportunities and things that never were, or memories that haunt you such as Lindsey in Washington, D.C., who lived in an all-women’s house that banned men and made you stand outside in the snow when you came over to get some banjo books abandoned by a former tenant but something happened and Lindsey moved into your room the weekend you hitched down to North Carolina as bodyguard and companion to her friend Rose and stayed when you got back to hump you two or three times a night until you got so raw you could hardly walk and with no talk or even real emotion of love or commitment to prevent you leaving a month later, but now you remember how there also wasn’t any talk of contraception because you’d assumed she took care of it since she was so much older, yet now you jerk awake in the middle of the night years later with the stark realization that a lesbian has no need of IUDs or diaphragms or the pill but she does need something to make a baby of her own and maybe there’s a little Stan Junior walking around someplace who is 6 years older now than you were then and you wonder if he’s as naive as you suddenly discover you were (probably still are) and the only minuscule iota of relief you can find is that at least you’ll never have to give him that man-to-man about the birds and bees. By baring your life, using concrete situations and honest thoughts, and following the basic rules of grammar and composition, you too can write a personal essay in 25 sentences.

From Georgia Review (Fall 1998). From the University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602-9009.

Week 2: Writing…. Hmmm….

Week 2: Writing…. Hmmm….

Again, sorry for the lateness. My internet is still on the fritz, but it should be fixed this week, I swear! At least my hotel in DC will have WiFi, so my blog will be on-time for the next post.

 

So, my “Theory of Writing”… It’s complicated. For a few reasons. To start, trying to pin down any specific way of thinking about writing is just so difficult that it kinda turns my brain to mush. Then, trying to pin down any specific way of thinking about writing within different contexts kinda makes the mush explode. (Which is a bit of a grotesque, or macabre, way of putting it.) The complexity is in trying to specify what writing is while taking into account the varying contexts in which writing occurs and for varying purposes and with varying intents. The possibilities are nearly endless.

Perhaps I can narrow down the complexity by saying that writing is centered on specificity and relativity. Let me explain. Every instance of writing, in every format, is influenced by its own specific circumstances (which are themselves relative). So, writing itself could be said to be relative. (Are you tired of me saying “relative” yet?)

I think that this coincides well with our reading, especially for the fact that every context that you think about writing in has its own definitions and concepts tied to it. In this way each section of our reading (1.0-1.10) was its own theory of writing (its own “threshold”), and yet all were connected to and influenced by the others. This has me quantifying writing in different ways depending on the context, but also in ways that often touch upon or overlap with other contexts. Which is why I would say that any theory (and thus my theory) about writing is relative.

This brings me to something else that I wanted to talk about for this blog post. Chris (Dr. Fosen) said something to me last Monday during our first intern session that I think ties into our discussion. While we mentors were being busy-bodies, walking around the room and looking over shoulders at what the English 30 guys were doing, I overheard a question, more like a flippant response, Chris gave one of the other mentors:

“Do you think there is more or less writing in college?”

It was said in a joking manner, in the breath between a laugh, and I found it so amusing that I inserted myself into the conversation with the dry remark:

That’s a question to ask.”

But then Chris took the question more seriously. Asking me, what if you did ask it though?

I had to stop and think the question to myself. It would certainly make for a good way to generate a discussion, especially among freshmen. But then the answer seemed so obvious. Is there more or less writing in college? Of course there’s more! I implied as much to Chris. He answered with this:

“Is there though?”

That statement not only gave me pause, but has got me thinking about it critically even days later. Does one write more in college? Why? Why not? Are there differences in the amount of writing done between different majors? Which majors write more? What do different majors write? Does the length of a written piece necessarily mean that it was more? How would we measure this? Does any of this matter? Why or why not?

Again, there are so many possibilities that can come from this seemingly simple question about the amount of writing done in only the pseudo-specific context of the college student. It has me going around in circles (like much of the concepts brought up in this class) simply because whenever I get to a point where I have a more narrow/focused understanding or definition, I end up tying it back into the original broader theory question. The concept itself seems circular to me. Which brings us back to my theory of writing: It’s all about relativity.