Choosing Your Battles

The book gives some bullet points concerning evalutation of the author of the piece that is under scrutiny. These usually had to do with the author's background or whether or not they give each side of an argument equal presentation. Sometimes I feel like the author may be giving equal respect to each side, but is fighting the wrong battle altogether. Why did Ed Tuft blame Microsoft for speaker's incompetence? Slideshow software is just that: software. It's how it's used that counts.

The Hard Part

The hard part of writing a rhetorical analysis is going to be the part about not taking sides. Reading It's the Same Old Song and A Spirit Reborn, I thougt I might be starting to understand it. The third section, Stay Sweet As You Are threw me off. It felt to me like it was an argument against the ads and not an objective analysis. Let me re-state that: I thought it was an objective analysis and argued against the advertisers. I couldn't tell if that was because of personal bias (who I agreed with) or because it was backed up (I mean, just look at the ads). Either way, it was breaking the rules as I understood them. I guess the author can disagree with the Listerine adverisers on issues of sexism, but can't say: "I don't agree that mouthwash stops bad breath."

Poor Fred

"Proofreading is like checking yourself in the mirror before going into a job interview." This is true, but proofreading isn't everything. I could write a story consisting of two lines:

I'm hungry and tired. I think I'll go home.

Ah! No spelling mistakes; it'll be a huge hit! A good story is better than good grammar. Grammar can be fixed later (well... I guess that is proofreading). Anyway, story can't be fixed later. It doesn't matter if your hair looks good if you wore pajamas to the interview.

Sacred

When I write a sentence or paragraph that I think is good, I do everything I can to keep it in my paper. Even if I've made changes to the format that makes the line confusing or awkward, I won't cut it. I know that it's a bad idea, but it was so good before the change and now it has nowhere to go. The Field Guide says, "As you revise, assume nothing is sacred." Sacred is the perfect word for it.

So Much For Gnat

Hoping to free up my Wednesday, I have been working all day on the latest science lab, German exercises, and now have just finished my English readings. Having been in my room for far too long now, I'm going to take the textbook's advice: "take a walk." Excuse me for a moment...
Ah. I'm back and (hopefully) refreshed. Not that the walk was very refreshing. On the way back to my dorm I was ambushed by a ferocious cloud of darting gnats that swarmed down on me like a squadron of kamikazes. Upon landing, they dug into my shirt as if I were an undiscovered continent and they the conquistadors searching for gold. I"m still picking them off of me.

*Note: The title was actually a typo, me thinking about gnats and all, but I liked it so much I couldn't change it.

Looking through the Field Guide’s idea-generating methods, I decided to give them a test run on a screenplay long abandoned by my high school friends and myself. The story features a long nosed detective named Sherman B. Shure who is tasked with tracking down his traitorous partner, Carl Berger. The story is meant to be rather tongue-in-cheek.
I had the most luck with the outline method. Though it didn’t actually generate many new ideas, it at least allowed me to get my old ideas in order. Free-writing and looping were useful, but often what I would think of were the ideas I wasn’t pleased with in the first place. I suppose that after enough loops something would have to crop up. I found the methods didn’t necessarily lend themselves well to purely fictional writing. For example, the cluster seems it would work best with a fact-based project or an argument.
I hope these methods lead me somewhere. Perhaps Sherman is not meant to be resurrected.

Know Your Enemy

Know your audience. Sounds a little bit like "Know your enemy" to me. The writer is the competitor, the audience is the judge. That's not to say the writer and the audience can't be friends... just a friend that the writer really wants to impress. Or maybe they don't want to be friends; maybe they want to hate each other (see comments on political Youtube videos).
Assuming they want to be friends, the writer and the audience need to get to know each other. The audience gets the easy half of this. They read what is written. The writer has to put a little more thought into it. Who is the audience? What do they care about? The broader the audience, the more difficult it becomes. The writer must respect the audience, but can't go overboard and turn the writing into an unintelligable cacophony of technobabble or newspeak. Often as not the writer also must justify the price of the magazine or the book in the reader's hand. "Do unto audiences as you would have them do unto you." A golden rule for writers or just friends.

Miracles of the Information Age