Blog Prompt

1 Before: Before I entered college, I thought there was a specific way to write. My high school didn’t focus on teaching writing that way we’re currently learning it in this major, but was more into teaching writing in the Literature and the Creative Writing styles (e.g literature analysis/persuasion and poetry/prose). I remember my high school English teachers would provide us with SPOOL work packets that specifically told us how to write essays, beginning with a hook, four-ish spots for paragraphs and then a place for a conclusion section. The conclusion section also provided options on the appropriate ways to end a conclusion (e.g full circle ending, summarizing what you already wrote, saying something that allows the reader to think more about your piece etc). During high school and my freshman year here (at MSU) (before I declared as a writing major), I did think that I had to learn the “rules” such as structure, formatting and grammar in order to be a good writer.

Before I entered college, I also didn’t associate rules with a specific style of writing. …. I honestly didn’t really know what the genres were besides essay writing and story/poem writing (I blame my high school for that). I just thought there were rules on how to make the right essay. Kind of like with math equations and formulas, I thought there was a right answer to writing too. I also thought that creative writing didn’t really follow a lot of rules but just depended mostly on talent.  

1 After: Now that I am on this Writing major path, my view has changed a lot. I now realize the “rules” are more flexible than what I previously thought and that certain ways of writing (and certain styles of writing) depend on the audience. I now realize that certain rules in formatting and perhaps the information said in the specific situations look good depending on the audience. In general I think more about the reader than I did before and I feel like there are certain styles, formatting, word choices (said in technical terms or general terms) etc used for a specific audience to help hold their attention and tickle their deep rooted values. For example, if we choose to mimic a sample’s structure on D2L for this class, we are sort of following a rule for what typically looks good for that specific audience. Lastly, I feel like concepts such as word choice (e.g beautiful vs. gorgeous), passion and sentence structure are not limited to rules because those are up to the writer to incorporate whenever they see fit.

As I think about the idea of rules across different styles of writing, I think of how every piece of writing has to follow rules to some degree for the purpose of appealing to the values of the reader. However, in all honesty, I haven’t given rules much thought at all until I read this question – I’m just sort of on this educational/learning ride.

2a Hmm… In high school when I had to write literary analysis/literature persuasive papers and papers for other classes, I thought that personal opinion was what we would use to either interpret/back up the quote in our own words or to back up our argument with our thoughts. Now I think that personal opinion in writing doesn’t have any one specific tangible role because it depends on the reasons/motivations for why we’re writing the piece to begin with. I suppose if I gave it more thought, I could say that opinion in writing could ultimately depend on the goals of the writer and the interpretation the reader. In other words, how does the reader know what opinion looks like in writing? What does the reader see as "opinion"?

2b I feel like all writing is personal and so I don’t understand the point to add more “opinion” or personal touches to it other than to perhaps add more details to a piece that weren’t already there to begin with.  

2c Okay, before I thought of/realized the answer to 2b, my gut instinct was “Yeah, instruction writing, research writing (excluding field research), manual-type writing, and description writing… Basically everything I did in WRIT 221 Technical Writing (sorry Dr. Verbanac). They have to abide by rules. We’re just regurgitating structure/other people’s knowledge and thus have no opinions/creative freedom to it.” However, now I’m remembering what I’ve recently learned/thought about. I think that opinion is allowed in all writing because if a piece is written by us, it’s our viewpoint and thus, our opinion.

2d Is this a trick question? ;). Honestly, I’m beginning to see that nothing we write is

“objective.” As I stated in one of my blog posts, if you’re passionate about what you write, then you’re not being objective. I also said that you sort of have to not be objective when you write because if you don’t like/love/have passion for what you’re writing about, then why are you writing it? For example, I enjoy answering these questions – they’ve been a lot of fun to think about. Certain papers in other classes that I had to write (e.g ANSC 100 I took when I was undeclared) were tortuous for me.

3 I feel conflicted because I want to say what I said in 2b, but at the same time I want to say that there is probably more opinion/personal writing in story/poetry/creative nonfiction writing like memoirs mainly because the writer is incorporating their feelings of daily desire into the pieces and possibly basing what they write off of their past experiences. Creative writing could have more personal meaning for the writer, especially if they consider what they write as an art form and a product of their personal being. I …. I don’t think there are any impersonal or objective writings because to instill objectivity would to remove passion and well, even instruction writing needs to hold someone’s attention. Plus, I would hope that people who write instruction writing would enjoy what they write otherwise their path as an instruction writer must be a hard/sad one…. =/. 

What is Accuracy?

Both pieces are like an ocean and a lake. They both thump into the shore line on occasion and are victims of the moon’s magnetic pull; however, one is inland with fresh water, and the other contains salt and sharks.

I wonder if perhaps our upcoming profiles pieces are supposed to look very similar to these articles in terms of format. The pieces we read seem to contain metaphors, character interaction (including dialogue), narrator’s feelings sprinkled throughout the piece and plot/structure from a narrative/fiction writing format (basically stuff from chapter 4 of the field guide).

Where does the salt & sharks and inland & fresh water come into play?…. Well, one  (Leakey/Lewin) exaggerated some parts, while the other (Sacks) was a little under structured for me as a reader.

Leakey/Lewin: “Kamoya’s skill at finding hominid fossils is legendary" (191). “Kamoya is a fossil hominid expert, and there is no one better at finding fossilized remains of our ancestors” (191).

Is his skill at finding the fossils truly legendary? I wiki’d him a little bit ago and he definitely seems famous, but I still can’t help but wonder if maybe the writers exaggerated a little bit. Maybe they didn’t exaggerate. Maybe Kamoya is really better than everyone else at finding fossils. … To be honest, I don’t really believe that because I feel that no matter how good a person is at something, there may be someone out there who may be better than them.  

I admit though: I feel like the exaggeration may be partly due to the writer’s adoration for the focal person in this piece and thus was formed their excitement. Maybe that excitement/exaggeration was done on purpose? Perhaps it was to help draw us in? Even still… if the exaggeration was done on purpose it makes me question the validity of this piece. The scientific information seems legit enough, but I’d rather also have the descriptions of Kamoya be accurate too or at least closer to accuracy. I think I would rather have a description of him painted for me with words so that way I can come to my own conclusions as to who Kamoya was. In other words, tell me how he picked out fossil remains, but don’t tell me that he was the best at it. I want to come to my own conclusions as to how great he was.

Sacks:
Even though I thought Leakey’s/Lewin’s piece was exaggerated in parts, it held my attention more than Sacks’ did. I wonder if that’s partly due to story construction, which didn’t really make sense to me (in Sacks’ piece) until I had a page or two left to go. By then, I understood (at least I think I did) what the piece was about.

Let me throw in a couple parts that I wanted to exaggerate on :) :

Earlier when I discussed exaggeration, I thought of the accuracy in writing across genres. In my Creative Writing class we recently discussed the potential differences in nonfiction and fiction writing and then the topic of accuracy came up. In a memoir we read for that class, the author’s editor asked her to remove an untrue scene from her piece, but then insert another untrue scene that the editor wanted instead. The author refused because she didn’t understand the reason why, especially given that both scenes were untrue and her part made more sense within her memoir.

Now, all of that made me wonder: How different (or similar) is falsifying information than exaggerating information? Is it okay to exaggerate on non-scientific information because the scientific information with it is (perhaps) accurate? One question that I want to specifically ask is: Shouldn’t even the exaggerated bits be more accurate to help the reader take the profile/scientific information more seriously overall?

Randomness (but interesting randomness):

On page 191, “I first met Kamoya in 1964, on my first serious foray into the hominid fossil business.”  Both pieces seemed to know their focal people very well. For our profiles, even if we don’t know our interviewees outside the interview, I wonder if we have to give the impression that we do. I wonder if we have to show that intimate relationship with our interviewees based on how well we describe them.
                                                       

Beauty of Language in the World of Science

“I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
~ Stephen King, On Writing, pg. 125

My plan going into this blog was to tell a story by using the tips I learned in Chapter 4 of the Field guide (which were all really interesting and helpful by the way), but now as I’ve dug into this post, I’m not really inspired to do that right now. However, I’ll try to at least insert my personality into it.

Beyond the field guide chapter, I noticed that the other three readings (Carl Sagan, Chandrasekhar & Wolpert) include a type of narrative voice that sort of go along with the tips that Field Guide provided for us. For example, I liked Carl Sagan’s metaphor usage “siren song of unreason” when he described the probable societal attraction to psuedoscience. It definitely spiced up the reading for me and it has helped me to see how I can add a little flavor to my News Brief. On a semi unrelated note, I really liked Wolpert’s piece about explaining the familiar in terms of the unfamiliar. It made me think of how in these News Briefs we could explain our topics in a similar fashion to help paint a picture for our readers.

Let me jump back to Carl Sagan:
When I read that “science is far from a perfect instrument of knowledge. It’s just the best we have (241),” it made me think of a concept that I just learned in my research methods class for psychology. We talked about the idea of “constructs.” In psychology, constructs are concepts that are not directly observable and thus cannot be measured without being precisely defined. For example love, motivation and creativity are examples of constructs. If we’re looking for a way to measure “aggression” (which is another construct) we could define it as an action that is intentionally harmful, but what exactly does “intentional” mean?

Does either character in the following video demonstrate aggression based on "intentionality"?

How do we know when someone intends to do something? In the video, it may look like Tom and Jerry were purposely trying to hurt each other, but we don't know the full context of the situation. Perhaps to make the definition of aggression clearer, we could measure “aggression” by asking a person how spiteful they feel toward another person/object based on a scale of 1 to 10.

To put this into context of this class, we don’t know exactly what we’re measuring, but in order to keep everyone on the same page, we have to define it somehow. Definitions are the key to happiness and understanding across different disciplines because we all see things according to the culture/group of people that we’re trained to think as. For example, how a psychologist views “research” is perhaps different than how a biologist or a high school student views research. If you throw a topic at each of them and ask them to “research” it, they may respond differently based on what they know within their discipline.

I also loved this quote on page 241, “The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.” This makes me think about faith.  I believe Sadie touched on this in a previous blog post. I feel like we put faith into everything we read, do and say. In my psychology class we’re learning to be skeptical (not cynical) of research and to question authority figures such as professors. In science we put faith that certain research methods will probably yield certain results (and is meaningful somehow) just as we put faith into quotes, God, the words of our parents/friends, the shows we watch, the books we read etc. without any promise for the personal meanings they give us. For example, I have faith that my future will be filled with happiness, but there are no guarantees that my future will be happy. Faith is all I can hold on to.

Chandrasekhar said that beauty is what our minds reach for. It’s beautiful to us if we try to discover it.

This makes me think about all the things I enjoy: language, rhetoric, kitties, psychology, 80s music ….

Before I declared as a Writing major, I wanted to learn more about writing and after I declared and took WRIT 205 last year, I wanted to learn more about rhetoric. Rhetoric was like this gigantic unknown topic that I didn’t understand but I wanted to understand. I still want to understand it, and I’m happy that I’m slowly putting the pieces together ( – I just wish I had more time to deeply think about it!). Language, culture and reader/writer relationship is so interesting to me, and so I think I’m willing to call this interest “beautiful.” :)

Now I feel like Chandrasekhar’s topic goes back to passion and objectivity that we had discussed earlier this semester. In science we’re not really objective if we love what we’re doing. Sure, we can perform certain experiments to keep out certain types of bias (e.g observer bias) from tainting the results of an experiment, but isn’t there some sort of passion that drives that research? If they’re genuinely curious about a scientific research study and have the patience to pursue it, don’t they have some degree of passion? On a related note, if we don’t have passion for what we’re doing (e.g writing these News briefs), then what’s the point of even doing it? If we’re not on this journey/quest to find the answers to scientific, rhetorical or whatever research because we want to, why are we doing it? If we didn’t want to do something, surely we’d be happier doing something we’d be interested in, right? In other words, I feel that if you love what you’re studying and have interest in it, that passion doesn’t really make you objective and to maintain all objectivity would be to take away what it means to be human.

Rhetorical Narration of Seven Wonders

Fisher:

I liked this part of the article: “Human beings as story tellers allow symbols to be created and then communicated as stories in order to give human experience and to induce others to live to establish ways of living in common in communities in which there is sanction for the story that constitutes one’s life.”

That quote made me think about how writers write using methods of relatability. Some of these methods could include a chore from their daily life to try to ensnare the readers who could use that to find meaning in what they read.

“Rationality = nature of human beings as storytellers.”

“Narratization = came from social conditioning and is a feature of human nature.”

There was one part in the reading where they discussed where people interacted (or argued) with one another in a social environment. Even though they did not hear the discussion from the very beginning, the people ended up forming their viewpoint and thus felt the need to include their own opinion. Some people aligned against the newcomers while others did not (it also showed how being rational can lead to differing of views/arguments).

On a related note, I wonder if perhaps our lives are like a type of narration. We go about our lives, some with a purpose and others without one, and then the book ends when we die. Like in the previous paragraph, the social interactions we’ve made along the way were what could have helped us form our own life’s narration.


H. Graves:

This reading discussed the roles of rhetoric in science and I found myself enjoying this reading as well.

I liked the discussion about how science is either concrete facts that exists prior to human contact or it was constructed by human beings, and the possibility of what we define as real in our universe are based on theories or models. This discussion made me wonder if we’re designed (or wired) to think a certain way. For example, what if, like the different types of colors we can’t see with our naked eye, there are different types of knowledge or perspectives we don’t know about?

I also thought this was cool to think about: “people are integral with what they create (machines) and thus their motives and intentions shape the design and purpose of an instrument which, in turn, shape the data generated by technology.” Would this point to data in a scientific collection as a construct? Personally, I think it does, which leads me to my next point:

Lastly, I began to wonder about how science could be rhetorical. The last quote alludes to my thinking on this, but this also further illustrates it: There was one part in this article where a man interacted with his colleague to see if his interpretation of his experiment was correct. That interaction was not only a potential elimination of objectivity, but could have also revealed how a person uses language (orally and/or written) to construct knowledge based on their findings.


Thomas:

This reading was a nice mental break compared to the other two readings. I loved his discussion of wonders! When he wondered about humans, I instantly thought of this: I wonder if human beings are capable of being peaceful with one another of if they have an instinct to fight/cause conflicts with out another (e.g wars) like the rest of the animal kingdom.

Lastly, I just wanted to say this: I love cats deeply (wild, domestic -- you name it) – Always have and always will. They’re such beautiful and amazing creatures.

One of my wonders with cats is if they truly have emotions or if they behave in certain ways because they associate a certain action with their own needs (e.g food). In other words, can cats feel love or affection for their owner? (I like to think they do! :) )I’m also fascinated with the similarities and differences between big cats (like tigers) and house cats. For example, how different are their stalking methods from each other?
                                                                                                         

Quick Connections:

* When I read Thomas’ article, I was instantly sucked into the narration technique he used. He discussed his personal wonders about different things in our world. Because I could relate with his curious mind, I immediately thought of my own wonders.

*  I also tried to think about how this (Thomas’) article related to H. Graves’ article. I thought of how those five pages were also a type of construct as the result of a man-made technology. Going even deeper than that, I also thought about objectivity and the information he presented within his seven wonders. Being objective would mean there were no emotions involved in what he wrote. However, because he was curious of his wonders, I’m assuming he was passionate as well. Because of his passion, I don’t think he was truly objective with how he presented the information.

Attitudes, Stories & Controversies

I took a lot of notes over my readings and I enjoyed the vast majority of it, but I think I’ll keep it simple and discuss some of my personal highlights under each heading so that way this doesn’t turn into a 1,000 + word post :).

Hancock Ch.1

On page two I really enjoyed the information over the magazine. The author mentioned how the magazine writers post essays and pictures at the end of the magazine to ensnare any of the readers who happen to flip the pages from back to front. It reminded me of how language and culture are (possibly) linked. For example if there is a group of people behaving/reading a certain way, a writer can modify how they grab their reader’s attention to make sure that the pictures and the articles keep the reader going through the magazine instead of putting it away.

I thought these bits of info were food for thought:

* “If you are bored, the reader will be bored”
* “If you are unsure of the information the reader will become uneasy.”
* “Readers can tell when you’re showing off and unconcerned with them… They turn the page.”

The three bullets make sense to me, but I’m not sure if I ever looked at my writing that way before. I’ll try to pay more attention to that as I write for not only this class but in general.

“Write like you talk!”

It’s funny… I didn’t think this way until about a couple years ago when corresponding with friends over Facebook and in handwritten letters. I used to be so caught up in grammar perfection and think that having grammatically correct sentences that flowed together and did not chop up the language was how all writing went. However, over the last year in this major I realized that there are so many different ways/styles to write and for different platforms. The science writing examples we read for last week, I now realize, have that conversation style instead of a formal one. It’ll be interesting to learn this way of writing.

Then later in the chapter, I liked when he mentioned that originality comes from a person. An article for my creative writing class discussed the possibility that originality comes from the structure/style of a writer even though the same ideas may be adapted by different writers.

Scientific truth = evidence & “Theory answers the most questions with the greatest precisions and the fewest lose ends.”

After reading those parts, I couldn’t help but think:
I find it interesting that even though we know nothing as “fact,” people do research to maintain things such as disease. Is it because they abide by the belief that even though they don’t know if it’s “true,” it works even though they don’t know why? Is this why scientific theory is alive and never absolute?

Hancock Ch. 2

I liked that this portion discussed how one cannot piece together textbooks and articles while at the same time making it seem conversational/effortless for the scientific reader. I suppose I can see that… I’m wondering if that means citation disruptions throughout the piece or if they mean piecing secondary research together without any inclusion of the writer’s input… (Or both..?)

Polayni

This was an interesting and yet hard article for me to read. I think what lost me was the definition of “frameworks.” After googling the term, I’m tentatively coming to a conclusion that this article was about the underlying/foundational perspectives that vary between writer and reader no matter what Discourses they’re apart of. I guess I’ll see in class how close or far apart this guess is :).

Lastly, in a general sense, I do think the discoveries we’ve made in math and science can be pretty cool and have been generally really beneficial for mankind. However, I wonder what makes us accept or gravitate toward one theory or the other based on logic, experimentation that can be replicated by others and reason. I’m taking a stab here and saying that maybe it’s because of culture.