What is Style: Part II

At the beginning of the course I answered the question "What is style?" by saying that "Style refers to the choices a writer makes regarding word choice, phrasing, length of sentences, placement of punctuation, etc." I also added that a writer's style depends on the medium he or she uses.

While I would still agree with that, I think the definition needs to be expanded somewhat. The importance of medium is something we really stressed in this class. Through-out the course we have been looking at various mediums, such as comics and videos, and how they function compared to writing. In both cases the connections between writing and creating a comic or video were very strong; in fact, both seem to be an extension of writing.

But style is more than just enhancements or flourishes. Style is the procedure and guiding principles used to create a work; it is the foundation of any writing, video, art, music, etc. Style is what separates one piece of work from any other; what makes an individual's work his or her own and reflects their personality, culture, society, etc.

Style is the choices one makes when creating a work, whether it's a piece of writing, video, art, etc. Every single decision we make-from the words and images we include to the medium we use-is an element of style. Many of the same principles and concepts are used through-out various mediums and disciplines. For example, the process involved in creating a comic is similar to the process used to create a video.

This course changed the way I think about the choices I make in regards to my writing. My previous view of style was that in entirely depended on the type of work I was writing. This meant there was very little connection between writing I did for school, my journalism work, and my personal writing. I was trying to mimic the style I thought was acceptable for each medium, and thus lost my own sense of individual style. This class has helped me really develop my own sense of style and voice in everything I write.

Peer Review Recap 4

This time peer the peer review process went pretty well. I wrote two drafts of my essay and received helpful criticism for both. I think the quality of the suggestions have improved in general, and many were quite helpful. Personally, I've the comments I gave people were about what they could add as opposed to what they could change with regards to the writing they've already done. I added a few comments, but for the most part people simply had not expanded upon ideas enough.

I feel that the nature of our advice during peer reviews has become much more critical while at the same time has gotten more helpful. At first many people seemed unsure about what they should comment on and felt the need to make changes to other people's writing just to prove that they had done the assignment. After we talked about the peer reviewing process in class halfway through the semester people tended to improve the quality of their comments.

I found that through-out the semester one standard thing was that most of my comments were to encourage people who hadn't written enough to actually write more, or to do the assignment at all. I've tried to include as much constructive criticism as I could, but if people don't write enough to give us something to edit it kind of defeats the point. As I said, this time it went better, but I still felt like I was writing "expand on this" over and over.

In terms of the advice I received, most of it had to do with making statements more clear. This helped me pin-point some paragraphs that I felt weren't quite working or were more confusing than they should have been.

Looking back at past readings, looking forward to the essay about the movie-making process

As we've been making the videos for the final project in this course I've been trying to look for correlations between making a video, writing a paper, and drawing a comic. The truth is in preparing for all three I've found myself taking essentially the same steps: transforming a rough idea into a structured outline and eventually into a (more or less) polished final piece.

The big difference is that with essays I've gotten this down to an almost exact science. I've written so many essays in my life that I know exactly which steps to take and how to take them. With comics and videos the path is a bit less familiar. However, I've found the same approaches that I've used to prepare for an essay can be applied to videos and comics.

For instance, when preparing for the video we created an outline of the different scenes, characters, and props and a rough draft of a "script" that we built upon as we went.

As I was reading Alexandra Juhasz's piece "Why Not (to) Teach on Youtube" I was immediately reminded of Ong and Baron's description of the resistance people had to previous advances in technology with regards to writing. Just as with the written word and the computer, people are hesitant to incorporate Youtube videos into a wider application because it is unfamiliar and people generally have a hard time accepting things that they aren't entirely comfortable with into their lives.

As with Juhasz's students, my group often expressed feelings along the lines of, "I'd rather just write a paper" because the process of writing is much more familiar to us, even though it's no more demanding than writing a paper. It offers different obstacles which are unique to the medium, such as problems with cameras, scripting, acting, etc.

Though the same thing occured when we were analyzing pictures and comics. Things Scott McCloud talked about regarding comics were just as unfamiliar to me as many of the elements related to film, yet at the same time there was also a very strong connection in terms of processes that allowed me to use my foundation in writing principles to translate both image and video principles into a language I could understand and was familiar with.

YouTube/Low-bridge videos

The merit behind the use of what Daniel Anderson refers to as "low-bridge approaches to multimedia" is ultimately decided based not on the result of these projects but the intentions. It only makes sense for education and classrooms to change along with technology. Whenever a new technology comes along which is affordable and accessible there will be those who immediately want to integrate it into every facet of society and those who deny its benefits.

We've seen this already when we read Walter Ong and Plato's "Phaedrus." Utilizing Youtube and other similar things in the classroom falls into a long list of progress in technology that has offered a sort of cultural and social revolution, as Michael Wesch shows in his video "An Anthropological Introduction to Youtube." The effects this had on society is undeniable, but its application in the classroom is at best controversial.

In his article "The Low Bridge to High Benefits" Daniel Anderson investigates the potential for Youtube as a teaching aid. "Could it be that low-bridge new media technologies provide the right mix of challenge and ease of use for instructors and students to develop a sense of control, creativity, and flow? The entry-level nature of low-bridge technologies ameliorates difficulties that can shut down flow, but the challenge of composing with unfamiliar forms opens pathways
to creativity and motivation." (44)

The point he makes in this paragraph is an interesting one which seems to draw its evidence from the social effects of Youtube. It is something almost everyone of my generation knows about, many of whom already utilize it. It only makes sense to take something which is an active part of both the cultural and social lives of students and use it stimulate learning. If you think about the difference between student made films and student made Powerpoint presentations really isn't very much.

However, with videos there is a definite aspect of disorganization. With the film project for this class I found that the need for organization was incredibly important: if one element is out of place the rest comes crashing down very easily. Unlike with writing a paper or preparing a project where you have a limited number of easily anticipated obstacles (developing a thesis, finding sources, collecting research, etc) videos provide a myriad of obstacles, many of which are unpredictable and new.

In any situation where technology plays a pivotal role there is the potential for disaster, whether it be user-created or inherent to the technology. Video assignments tend to be viewed as fun and easy in comparison to essays, so the expectations are that it's something which can be improvised without much thought. What I found is that our group utilized a number of traditional approaches to make this system more familiar: outlines, scripts, etc.

In her article "Why Not (to) Teach on Youtube," Alexandra Juhasz describes her experience teaching a class through Youtube.

"Of the many surprises and challenges of this class, it was most dumbfounding for me to find
how resistant my students were to the loss of discipline, authority, and structure in the classroom. They hated the amount of process this course demanded; disliked that I wouldn’t just
tell them stuff; were reluctant to do course work in a new format in which they lacked training;
and generally wanted me to take control so that they could attend to other things and more
clearly understand what they needed to do to satisfy me."

Our group faced a similar situation, where the familiarity and predictability of writing papers was more appealing compared to the amount of effort and energy it takes to make a movie. In the end I think both Juhasz and Anderson make valid points, but the technology and its application are both still in their infancy. If video assignments begin to become a normal aspect of education and are used often enough for students and instructors to become familiar and comfortable with them, they could become helpful educations tools. If anthing, the failure of Juhasz's class is due to students simply not being used to the medium. As with any new technology, the more it is used the more people become familiar with it resulting in useful applications.

Peer Review Recap 3

This blog post is so late because I was waiting for the other members of my group to upload their essays to Google Docs. None of them ever did. This is nothing against them personally, but I really can't offer any advice if no one does the essay until the night before. I had mine done and both Hannah and Nick offered very helpful advice and suggestions which I used to improve my paper. I tried to help them as much as I could, including making comments on an outline Hannah had of her paper. I guess this is just one of the perils of the peer editing process. Cest la vie.

Reading and Writing about Comics ala McCloud, Part 2

For this post I chose to talk about Allison's blog. The comic she discussed was called "The Silencer," a comic about two boys who find a pistol while fishing.

One interesting thing I found about her post was that she discusses the inherent differences between internet and print comics. One point she touches on is how the internet offers more possibilities for comics than printed medium. She explains: "Instead, I would argue that the web allows for "infinite gutters", requiring more closure and direct participation from the reader, not eliminating the need for it."

Now, this is deviating from the purpose of the post a bit, but I found this to be very interesting. Obviously "Understanding Comics" was written before online comics were around (or were at least very popular, accessible, etc). Allison discusses briefly McCloud's idea that there is a big distinction between single panel cartoons and more elaborate comics. Though she later disagrees with her own assertion, she makes the claim that McCloud might argue that her comic "The Silencer" is closer to a cartoon than a comic.

What's interesting about this is the idea that the medium really has changed. McCloud seems to have an almost condescending attitude to cartoons while viewing comics as vastly superior. In the age of the internet web based comics really seem to be changing a lot. Today the medium really has abandoned a lot of the contraints it once had, and allows comics like "The Silencer" to exist. In truth each "panel" of the comic is roughly the same size as a standard three-panel comic you would find in print. This means that each panel is very fractured in terms of time, setting, plot, etc--but in the end each provides a lot more detail that, when taken in larger context, makes the comic as a whole much more enjoyable.

The very design of internet comics seems to go beyond McCloud's definition of "Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence..." By being able to play around with how readers see each panel, a single comic can really be just about anything.

Allison discusses how "The Silencer" seems to be a blend of realistic and cartoony images--another hallmark characteristic of internet comics. Far more options in terms of design are available to artists, meaning that the scope of comics--as well as the variation of panels within comics--can be extremely broad. This allows a comic like "The Silencer" to play around with how it delivers its storyline.

Reading and Writing about Comics ala McCloud, Part 1

The comic I chose is called "Slim" by Nicholas Gurewitch and is found on his website Perry Bible Fellowship. PBF is known for well drawn and often cynical comics which employ a variety of comic styles.

http://www.pbfcomics.com/?cid=PBF157-Slim.jpg

I chose this specific comic because it is fairly straightforward: a witness has come forward so a skinny mobster eats a whole bunch of cheeseburgers so that he's fat when called into the line-up. Both the style and content of the comic is very similar to 1920's comics like "Dick Tracy."

Another reason I chose this comic is because the artist's knowledge of comics is so wide that he is successfully able to parody a wide number of comic styles. The detail, artistic style, medium, and subject matter of every single one his comics is different.

Like any great satirist the Gurewitch has a firm understanding of the rules of comics, which is what allows him to break them so easily. As such a lot of what Scott McCloud discusses in his book Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art can be applied to Perry Bible Fellowship.

In "Slim" the level of detail is somewhere between realistic and cartoony, or what McCloud calls "iconic." (46) There's enough detail that the images are able to clearly convey what the artist wanted them to: anyone who is even remotely familiar with the detective comics of the 1930s will recognize this as a pretty faithful parody. The level of complexity for that era of comics is quite recognizable as it show fairly realistic looking figures with relatively simple facial expressions. This means that most people realize these men are mobsters: the way they are drawn allows the author to rely on the images to convey that fact, instead of supplying more background detail.

Keeping with the theme of simplicity, the comic's use of time is also fairly straightforward. Even if the comic had no words whatsoever most people would be able to figure out what was going on. Given the similarity between the first two frames and their difference from the third it's clear that we have jumped in time: obviously, a character referred to as Slim, in his distinctive green suit with purple accents, is no longer slim in the third frame.

McCloud refers to this movement in time as a scene-to-scene transition. "Deductive reasoning is often required in reading comics such as in these scene-to-scene transitions, which trasnport us across significan t distances of time and space." (71)

Between the first two panels and the third panel we understand that action has taken place, time has passed, and the setting has changed--despite not actually having seen these changes ourselves. The level of deductive reasoning which McCloud refers to is definitely visible in this comic, though it's not too hard to pick up on.

Our knowledge of the health benefits of eating a box of cheeseburgers is necessary for us to connect the skinny character of Slim from the first two panels to the fat character wearing the same clothes we see in the Police line-up in the third panel. Even though we don't see the mobster gorge himself in order to disguise himself, we can draw the conclusion based on the visual cues we are given.

McCloud often uses the term "closure" to refer to our ability to connect the dots between different ideas. For example, in "Slim" closure is achieved relatively easily as we are able to connect the skinny mobster in the green suit in the first panel to the fat mobster in the green suit in the third panel. There's essentially no ambiguity whatsoever to this comic, so the audience is quickly able to find closure.

Picturing Texts on the Web

Very few websites are as engaging and well designed at that of the hilarious fake-newspaper The Onion. As with actual newspapers and magazines, The Onion's website combines the use of images and headlines to pull readers in. Because The Onion's content follows journalistic rules so well (in order to break them), it makes sense that their website would be designed in a way that parodies standard news websites (such as CNN.com), while highlighting its content in a way that draws readers.

Most of The Onion's jokes are made in the text, but the use of pictures makes it seem familiar to anyone who has picked up a newspaper in their life. For example, the first story at the top of the page today has the headline: "Area Man Saddened To Realize Short Jewish Women With An Interest In Theater His Type." The text is similar (in style only) to what one might expect to find in an actual newspaper. The accompanying picture works in a similar way by showing a picture of an average man and a picture of three women which fit the description of "short Jewish women." The picture adds realism to a silly story.

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/area_man_saddened_to_realize_short

The website itself is extremely balanced, with an appropriate mix of text and pictures. The main website is split up into several sections containing headlines followed by small, thumbnail pictures. Also included are links to photo galleries and sections containing video.

While most of the pictures simply act as props for the jokes in the text, the website does include photo-shopped pictures which are pretty hilarious on their own. Without the pictures it would be incredibly difficult to read, even though anyone going to the website is expecting to digest large amounts of text. The pictures serve the purpose of engaging the readers visually in what would be an exclusively textual story. For example, in a story with the headline "Swaggering Down 87%" the accompanying picture shows a bunch of people walking around, heads down and arms hanging limply by their side. Though the emphasis is put on the headline, the picture really adds more to the story. This general principle exist through-out the website, with the pictures almost serving a role of necessity.

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/swaggering_down_87

Only occasionally are the pictures made the feature in the form of weekly galleries of photo-shopped images that are hilarious on their own. One of my favorites features a giant girl playing with a Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld doll. The picture alone is quite funny, but the importance of description comes out after reading the caption: "Giant Girl Forces Playthings Cheney And Rumsfeld To Wed."

http://www.theonion.com/content/files/images/onion_news1382.jpg

The point the author is trying to make in "Picturing Texts" is very much supported by what appears on The Onion: pictures really do add a whole lot to a story. If all the pictures were removed from The Onion's website the content would be unaffected but the presentation would be very underwhelming.

Peer Review Recap #2

For the most part this peer review was a success. I liked how easy it was to give direct feedback by starting a thread. In all honesty I found the suggestions made in this way far more helpful than reading through my paper looking for scattered comments. However, I didn't like the way that anyone could edit my piece and not necessarily leave their name. Sometimes people made changes which weren't helpful or didn't make sense, and I couldn't tell who made which changes.

Of the feedback I received, most were minor changes and criticism. Only one person really ripped my essay apart and I found this to be the most helpful. Merely suggesting organizational/grammatical changes is helpful, but the suggestions I received via threaded comments really helped me to understand how I could make my paper better.

I liked some parts of WetPaint better than Google Docs, and vice versa. As mentioned, I really liked the threaded comments. This helped me understand who was saying what and eliminated the general anonymity of the system. This was what I liked most about GoogleDocs: that only three people who were given permission could read/edit my paper.

What are others saying?

Because I tend to be a defender of Williams, I looked for a blog that disagreed with him. I found Allison’s blog very interesting because she prefers Strunk & White and gives good reason for why she dislikes Williams.

“I know, its true, 'write clearly' is not a clear rule. Williams, on the other hand, has an entire chapter devoted to how one can achieve clarity in writing. This is, clearly, more clear. But personally, Williams was just too prescriptive. He's overwhelming. There are too many too specific rules that in the end make me grind my teeth, tap my foot and grow a headache.”

I do agree that Williams is overwhelming, but I personally think it’s an entirely different book from Strunk & White. It’s meant to be more in depth and prescriptive because it’s essentially a direct guide to writing, a textbook that’s meant to be referred to when you are sitting down and writing.

Strunk & White on the other hand seemed far more introductory, and doesn’t seem so much as something you’d keep nearby when writing an essay. Everything that they discuss I essentially already knew—had I been given this earlier on in my writing career I think it would have been a lot more helpful.

I saw Susan’s blog and was surprised because I thought most people agreed that Williams was more interesting and more useful than Strunk & White. Her opinion that she felt she could use Strunk and White while writing was the opposite of how I felt. I thought that as a guidebook for writing Strunk and White really couldn’t help me as much as Williams could.

“The books are helpful in their own ways, where I will keep my Strunk and White book, and probably use it to help me write papers when I am unclear as to where to use a comma, or a semi-colon or something, I can go look it up, but Williams is more like, I read it, but I will not be able to go back and look up specific rules, it is meant to help your writing overall to make it better. Strunk and White is all about rules and that is not what Williams is exactly about at all.”

I figured most people would agree with me on Williams because his book is structured a lot more like a text book. Though I agree that Williams is a lot more longwinded and harder to read, I think that is par the course for textbooks.

Ashley agrees with me in terms of how useful S&W are compared with Williams. She goes a bit further and offers the following as an example of how Williams can help writers. “A spell checker will often pick up on simple grammatical errors or when you use the wrong punctuation. The Williams book allows you to be able to scan your work of writing and understand what needs improvement or rewording.”

I like that she mentions the use of spell check because I think it’s something a lot of people these days might take for granted and might not necessarily know the reason for many of William’s rules. I’ll admit, that’s how I am. Williams didn’t help me so much as give me an idea of the reasons behind what I already do.

Compraring Strunk and White with Williams

One of the elements of Strunk and White’s book “The Elements of Style” that I considered to be critical to writing was regarding the use of clear, uncomplicated language. Joseph Williams discusses this in his book “Style – Towards Clarity and Grace,” as well—but does so in a much more in-depth manner.
Both books use examples of how writers can make their writing clearer and stronger, but Williams tends to be far more specific and helpful than Strunk and White. The suggestions and examples they provide are helpful, but tend to be general guidelines instead of specific rules.
What they might address in a few pages, Williams devotes a whole chapter to. The key difference is that Williams’ advice is more critical and helpful, and far more specific. While Strunk and White might make a claim such as “Omit needless words,” they really don’t explain why this should be done. They might provide a few examples to illustrate their point, but never really explain the reasoning behind their ideas.
When discussing the use of specific and concrete language they provide the following example:

A period of unfavorable weather set in.
It rained every day for a week. (21)

This certainly illustrates the point they are trying to make, but go no further in explaining why this rule is important or how we should go about doing it.
Williams, on the other hand, is very specific. Instead of saying, “Omit needless words” and providing an example of a complicated sentence and one that is uncomplicated—he provides a few principles, a number of examples and a lot of additional ideas that add to his principles.
At the beginning of chapter seven he addresses his two principles in a clear and easy-to-find manner:
1. Usually, compress what you mean into the fewest words.
2. Don’t state what your reader can easily infer. (115)

He then backs these up with additional ideas and examples. The combination is far more successful in getting the same basic idea across to the reader than Strunk and White’s approach. He goes into a lot more detail, explaining related ideas such as eliminating redundancy, pompous diction and meaningless modifiers. (118)
This specificity does far more in helping a writer accomplish the goal of making their writing more concise than simply telling them to omit meaningless words.
Not only are his ideas more specific, but the layout of his book in general is more helpful. Strunk and White’s chapter on the principles of composition involves many ideas which Williams expands into specific chapters, where he addresses specific problems that come up.
In general, Williams seems to provide a handbook to improve your writing while Strunk and White offer a guide to understanding what you are doing wrong. By reading “The Elements of Style” you are likely to figure out what is wrong with your writing, but not how you can improve that—reading “Style” will help you address both.

Revising with Williams

"The President, as chief executive officer of the University, has overall responsibility for implementation of the Student Conduct Code and the student disciplinary process and has delegated its overall management to the Vice President for Student Affairs and the Director of Student Judicial Services."
-Original entry as taken from EMU Catalog, Policies: Student Conduct Code: Section II

"As chief executive officer of the University, (1) the president is responsible for (2) implementation of the Student Conduct Code and the student disciplinary process. (3) The president delegates (4) its overall management to the Vice President for Student Affairs and the Director of Student Judicial Services."
-Revision

(1): Changed the opening sentence so it was less choppy by putting important information on the right (68). This also eliminated the clutter of breaking the sentence up more than it needed to be.

(2): Changed "...has responsibility for..." to "...is responsible for..." Williams would call the original section of this sentence a "nominalization" because it is an abstraction of the original verb. (30) Changing "responsibility" to "responsible" makes the sentence much clearer.

(3): Changed two sentences into one by extracting and isolating the important idea of one long sentence into two smaller sentences (70). This makes the pacing of the paragraph a lot better and puts more emphasis on the idea.

(4): Changed "...and has delegated..." to "...delegates..." This original section is also a nominalization ( 30). Changing it also keeps the entire passage all in the same tense by eliminating the passive "delegated"(37).

These revisions really help a choppy paragraph flow a lot better by eliminating unnecessary elements that bog it down. The sentence is much easier to read and makes more sense with the revisions.

Strunk and White: First Impressions

Strunk and White’s “The Elements of Style” is interesting because, despite having been original written over 80 years ago, much of it is still relevant today. Many of Strunk’s central issues in the second chapter would still be items of concern to many teachers and students today.
For example, principle 16 explains the importance of using uncomplicated, clear language. “…the surest way to arouse and hold the reader’s attention is by being specific, definite, and concrete.” (21) For many new writers there is the urge to bump the word-count of a paper by using muddled and redundant language; this just as much of a problem today as it was when Strunk wrote this book in the early 1900s.
I find in my own writing, whether it be for fun or school, I tend to be rather wordy. For me it’s a subconscious thing that I can trace back to my junior year of High School when my composition teacher urged her students to pick up a thesaurus. Most likely if Strunk read some of my writing he would write, “Rule 17! Omit needless words,” all over it.
Another principle outlined by Strunk that is still a problem for many students today is principle 6, where Strunk cautions against using periods instead of commas. He provides the example of, “She was an interesting talker. A woman who had traveled all over the world and lived in half a dozen countries.” (7) Sentence fragments are a frequent nemesis of many an essay and term paper.
In fact, as I’m writing this the second part of that sentence is underlined by the squiggly green line in Microsoft Word. Strunk explains that sentence fragments can be used for emphasis, most commonly in fiction. I think this accounts for part of its prevalence, as many young writers might think they are using it to emphasize a point while the teachers simply sees it as being wrong.
Not everything in “The Elements of Style” is still relevant today, however. Many of Strunk’s points go completely against what I’ve been taught so far in writing classes. One of which is in the third chapter on form. Strunk writes, “Formal quotations cited as documentary evidence are introduced by a colon and enclosed in quotation marks.” (36)
In my writing classes both in High School and College I’ve never heard a professor say that quotes must be introduced by a colon. In most cases, at least as I’ve been taught, a quote is introduced with a comma. (Example: Strunk claims that, “…”)
Another difference is the very first principle Strunk introduces regarding the possessive singular of nouns. Strunk provides the example, “Charles’s friend.” In any writing class today this would come back surrounded in red ink. We’ve all been taught that proper way to form a sentence similar to the one above would be, “Charles’ friend.”
But for the most part I would say “The Elements of Style” is a straightforward and useful guide that many today, including myself, would find to be preferable to most modern writing textbooks.

Peer Review Recap, part one

For the most part I really liked using Google Docs to workshop this project. I thought it was a lot easier to work with than doing an in-class workshop and made it easier to give the paper's my full attention. The only problem was something which isn't inherent to Google Docs, but just to the group editing process in general. I was the first in our group to edit any of the papers, and the last to get any feedback on my own, so I had to wait until the last minute to do this assignment.


As for the advice both of my group members noticed that I focused on a few parts of how my project succeeded while almost entirely ignoring another aspect. This was something that I hadn't really thought of because I took the assignment in sort of a different direction than they did. I agree with what they said, though, and want to clean up certain parts of my essay to make them more clear.

In general the advice I gave was for them to include more information supporting their claims. I realized later that perhaps suggesting what information they should add may have been helpful.

The only suggestion I have is to set a deadline for when groups should have their edits made. This will eliminate the problem of being forced to wait until the last minute to do the blog post.

Blog Post #3: My Writing Technologies

As long as I've been old enough to be in some sort of school, including preschool, I've been exposed to computers. As such, like many in my generation, the piece of writing technology I use most would be the computer. Whether it's for personal writing, work, or school I turn to the computer first because I find it easiest to write for long periods of time.

I am 20 years old yet already I find myself unable to write by hand for more than 5 minutes or so at a time before getting serious pain in my hands. However, I cannot take notes using my computer. It's too much of a distraction for something that requires attention and simply does not allow me to make the necessary connections to the material.

But for hammering out a 12 page research paper or writing a newspaper story the computer is my first choice. I have a lot of experience using it, and find I can quickly and efficiently write with it. I also find it improves my editing techniques, as I am able to edit-on-the-fly with more ease than if I am writing by hand. It also gives me a better sense of structure and organization of my writing.

Right around the time that I was young enough to go with my parents to work when I was sick was also the time when type writers were beginning to be replaced by computers. My mom's job (at EMU) was slow on getting computers, so they always had type writers around. As such, I've used them before, but never to do any sort of actual writing--unless you count key mashing as writing.

I do occasionally use a notebook and a pen, but only if absolutely necessary. I always try to have a notebook on me in case an idea strikes me as something particularly interesting and I don't have a computer. Mostly, this is for personal writing, note taking, and other miscellaneous things. But, it's increasingly less likely for me to not have my laptop on me, as my job basically necessitates constant access to my e-mail.

What is style?

Style refers to the choices a writer makes regarding word choice, phrasing, length of sentences, placement of punctuation, etc. A writer's style usually depends on what they are writing about, and is more or less different for each individual. It has to do with the language a writer uses, but also how they arrange their words and sentences in their writing.

It also depends on the medium for which they are writing. The style of writing for a fictional novel differs greatly from that of a textbook or a blog post. Style is often contoured by the writer to match the expectations of his or her readership--that is to say, those reading a magazine about psychology expect a certain style that is very different than those reading a magazine about sports. Style also is part personal preference. Many writers try to develop this over time, to find a style that is unique to them, which sets them apart.

Blog Post Numero Uno

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