Blog Post 15

I have found myself disappointed throughout the peer review process. The theory of peer review is good, it never seems to work out. I found that I do not get enough feedback. I have no desire to hear that my work is good, if you don’t complain about it, I know it is fine. I have also noticed that people tend not to take the advice of others. I know not every comment given is correct, but every comment should be double checked, in case you are wrong.

Tensions seem to be running high right now. Which makes peer review comments even touchier than normal.

I learned that there is no good way to correct someone. Even at my politest, people do not like to be corrected. Because this is a online class, I found it was easier to be honest about people’s work, though they probably did not appreciate that!

I think that using tools like Google docs made peer reviewing a much easier task. It would have been nice if all my additions/changes to the actual documents was a separate color. To better track users.

With every comment I get, I try to look at the situation as if it was not my paper. There is no reason to not take the advice. I would not want my teacher to point out the same mistakes a fellow classmate did.

I hope that I have improved my writings through peer reviews. They are meant to be a learning tool and I hope that I have used it to my advantage this semester.

 

Blog post 13

I am struggling to actually say that making this movie is like the writing process. But, I think that doing things with a group (especially one you never see!), can make the easiest problems so much harder.

I have seen some similiarities between writing and making a movie. They both need to have an idea and some sort of theme. Characters need to be planned and explained. There should be some sort of plot.

We analyzed YouTube commercials earlier in the year. I feel that reviewing how I did that project and the Ancient style guide, would be important as I start to draft my paper. It has been quite a while since I looked at the other readings in this class, and I think reviewing them would be very helpful as well.

At the start of the semester, we made our own writing technologies. I feel that that project will shed some insight on to this one. Is YouTube a new from of writing? How do we know that it is? How is it evaluated? Determineded if it is good or bad? I plan to use the Ancient Style chapter to help evaluate the video and the writings we read about technology, such as Ong, to help connect writing and videos.

Blog Post 14

For me, the most complicate part of this project is trying to collaborate with everyone. It is hard to communicate, if the person isn’t online, what can you do? I found working in a group in person is significantly easier. But, if we all could be on one big video chat, I think things would be easier too.

Another difficulty I have found is that we haven’t elected a group leader or assigned roles. This makes me feel like we haven’t moved anywhere in the project. Then I get nervous.As of now, we have not done a lot with our video, so I am hesitant to compare the writing process as I know it, to an unknown video making process. Though, there are some very simple comparisons between the two.

Both the writing process and the video process starts with an idea. Then something is created, either a script or a rough draft, edited, then made into a finished project.

I believe that if you are writing a script for a video, even these “low bridge” ones, is a form of writing. But I don’t think that someone doing the numa numa song is a form of writing. I believe this because, when I talk to myself without a camera available, I am not writing anything–just being the werido talking to herself.

Having the ability to make our own videos adds the ability to connect, just like Anderson’s said. His movie about YouTube was very deep. I would have never thought that YouTube was that important to our world. Although, looking at the videos that Anderson choose to highlight, and comparing them to some of the videos I have seen, I feel that Anderson has idealized YouTube a little. But I might be judgmental of it. I have been out of the loop for most of the YouTube sensations and besides a few cat videos or songs, I don’t use YouTube. I always hated the homemade videos because most of the time they were awful, like out of tune singing. I am just one person, just because I have no desire to vblog, doesn’t mean that it isn’t a very useful tool for a lot of people.

Peer Review Recap 3

I found that as people have gotten use to each other in this class, they have become a bit more honest in reviews. For my last paper, I included words that can seem off to someone who isn’t into the genre I was writing in. This can add confusion to peer reviews as things can be marked wrong that aren’t, which can be frustrating to the writer.

The problem with peer reviews is that people hate to be corrected. It is hard to honestly consider the advice you are being given when you are defensive. I do fine that I have that problem and need to step back to consider the comments fairly.

I try to be picky in my reviews. I tried to remember the things that I had gotten marked down on in my papers and point those out. I hope that the pickier I am with reviews, the more the author will work on their paper so they can get a better grade.

I noticed that the majority of writers (myself included) have problems with clarity occasionally in a paper. The other common problem seems to be misspelled words. Sometimes, I really wonder how I missed so many after I ran spell check.

I have to say I wasn’t particularly fond of seeing everyone’s reviews in a spreadsheet after the last peer review. It felt awkward for the people I peer reviewed to see that I made the comments. Knowing that my review may not anonymous, makes me hesitant to be as honest as I would have been.

Comparing Strunk and White to Williams

Reading style guides feels remarkably similar to stuffing your brain with tofu. There is so much information that reads almost like a list (Strunk and White more so than Williams), that it can be overwhelming to read. After participating in the class discussions, I found that the majority of people like Williams better than Strunk and White. I do not agree. I prefer Strunk and White’s simplicity. They have everything mapped out in a way I can easily follow and find again. Williams was more in depth but, I found the way he explains things much more difficult to understand.

When I wrote my blog post on Strunk and White, I thought that Strunk and White’s view on the usage of the word “Hopefully” was outdated. I was surprised to see that Williams believes the same way Strunk and White do. He said “hopefully refers to the feelings of the speaker:” (Williams 191). What I also found interesting was the difference in tone when describing the usage of “hopefully”. Strunk and White come across quite vehemently, “Although the word in its new, free-floating capacity may be pleasurable and even useful to many, it offends the ear of many others, who do not like to see words dulled or eroded, particularly when the erosion leads to ambiguity, softness, or nonsense.” (48). Strunk and White feel that using “hopefully” as we tend to, ruins the meaning of the word and is to the point of an offense. Williams is more accepting of the usage “This rule has been so deeply entrenched in the minds of so many that it is impossible to convince them that it is entirely idiosyncratic.”(191). I feel that Strunk and White saw the start of the misuse of “hopefully”, declaring it “nonsense”. When Williams wrote his book, the use of “hopefully” is stuck in our minds as it is. The real usage of “hopefully” which is “I feel hopeful”, is unknown to a large majority of people. I like the way Strunk and White approached this issue, just coming out and saying that it is nonsense to misuse “hopefully”. Williams has understood how mainstream it is, saying that no one would condemn those who use it.

In my previous post on Strunk and White, I focused on the grammar points. Williams had less grammar points in the realm of punctuation. Maybe I am reading it wrong, but I could not find anything about comma usage or really anything about punctuation. Nor could I find anything in Williams about using and/or, the only thing that was mentioned when using conjunctions was the length of phrases surrounding them.

Strunk and White have a different view of what style is compared to Williams. The majority of their book was terms and definitions. Even when they are talking about technique, they still separated everything in to little sections with a header. I found that that layout was much more efficient than Williams. Strunk and White focus on grammar and punctuation significantly more than Williams, I feel that grammar and punctuation played a bigger part in the definition of style than it does today. It was quite interesting to see what the concept of style was almost 100 years ago compared to Williams’s concept that is only ten years old.

Revising with Williams

The example I found was located on the 2005 EMU catalog, in the “Undergraduate Catalog Degrees Offered” section, referring to the history of EMU’s general studies:

In February 1985, the provost commissioned a Basic Studies Review Committee and charged the members “with conducting a comprehensive reexamination of our present basic studies requirements and with determining what changes should be made to provide the most effective liberal/general education for today’s students.” The Basic Studies Review Committee met through April 1986 and recommended a series of revisions in the structure of the existing program. The recommended revisions were subjected to a thorough process of review by departmental, college and University bodies and were finally approved by the Board of Regents September 23, 1987 (“Undergraduate Catalog Degrees Offered” 22).

My revision:

The Basic Studies Review Committee was created in February of 1985 to evaluate the current studies program and to recommend changes to provide a more effective program. The committee worked through April 1986, before their revisions were ready for review.  The Board of Regents approved the revisions on September 23, 1987.

My first change was to decrease the wordiness of the first sentence, using Williams claim that  “…you have to go more than six or seven words into a sentence to get past the subject to the verb” (Williams 23), then you need to revise the sentence.

I found the need to use the word revisions twice, so I changed the pronoun I used in the first sentence “their” to “the” for the second (Williams 72).

I kept the date of the approval at the end of the sentence, because I felt that the date itself was the most important part of the sentence, (Williams 69).

I kept the actions that took place, the creating of the committee, the start off the review process, and when the changes were approved, to help the readers locate when the actions took place (Williams 49)

The two principles of “characters as subjects and their actions as verbs” (Williams 24) helped me shorten the sentences and to keep the sentences easily understood. An important part of keeping this understandable was to decrease the wordiness of the whole paragraph and opting for smaller words, such as replacing “commissioned” with “created”.

Williams has quite a few rules that help with revision. It was good practice for our papers to explore using them on a small paragraph. I hope that I grasped his concepts and applied them correctly.

Citing

“Undergraduate Catalog Degrees Offered.” EMU Undergraduate Catalog 2005: 22. Web. 13 Oct. 2011. <http://www.emich.edu/public/catalogs/2005-2007/undergrad/2005uundergraduateexperience.pdf>.

Williams, Joseph M. Style:Toward Clarity and Grace. N.p.: n.p., 1990. 1-95. Print.

 

Strunk and White, first impressions

One element in the book, Elements of Style by William Strunk jr. ad E.B. White, that I did like was the “serial” comma. I feel like it helps to define multiple terms very well. I found this rule especially helpful because it seems to be an issue for most writers. In the same section I found the serial comma, it talked about when not to use a comma after the word before the conjunction, which was when business are listed. Comma use can be very tricky and these two tips are something that will help my punctuation usage.

Another important tip that I have noticed I have a problem with is “Omit needless words”. As a student, I tend to add extra words to meet a word count. Now that I am writing other things, such as short stories, I have noticed how extra words clutter the page.

An element I didn’t quite agree with was “And/or”. I do not think that using and/or neccessarily makes a sentence confusing.It seems like a nice way to join words or phrases. Maybe it is just because I am so use to using and/or. It would be an interesting experiment to try not to use and/or in a short paper.

The use of the word “Hopefully” as desvibed by Strunk and White, seems outdated to me. They say the word means “with hope”, their example of why it is wrong is “Hopefully I’ll leave on the noon plane”. They say the sentence leads to confusion, are you leaving you hope to leave on the noon plane or are you leaving with hope. While this once might have been a factor,  I do not believe it is relevent any longer.

I think that Elements of Style, has quite a few useful tips. I felt that the first section, “Elementary Rules of Usage” is the section I will am planning to start with when I revise my essay. It seems like that chapter will be a good way to start a revision without feeling overloaded.