Sketch 3

I’m moving my blogging habits to my Tumblr blog. Follow me there if you’d like to keep reading.

She liked to study atop the low prod of a straight beat—determined, laid back, but low. She thought it genius that, during the 90s, old music was made new; sampling records from earlier decades, musicians fashioned elderly hits into contemporary jams. These songs often had the characteristics she preferred to study with: that low beat, the skidding tempos, the jazzy chords, the sexy soft whispers...

And yet, her music was infused with a thin sense of nostalgia; the first time she’d heard these songs was when she was only eight, nine, ten, eleven—when life was simple. Tangy orange sodas. Free little legs kicked back in sprint. Smooth skin and scraped knees. The awe of summer fireflies.

Late afternoon. The big, west-facing glass door and the hanging pollen melted by thick, golden-red sun.

The more she worked, the more distracted she found herself. Tonight, the subtle tones of Slick Rick, Color Me Badd and Everclear were pulling her farther away from homework and into a different realm: she stood up, walked away from her carrel desk, and lost herself in an unpopulated aisle.

Her iPod turned up and eyes closed, she walked soft circles around a step stool.

Aww tick tock, you don’t stop—stop

Each step, each measure, each line... she felt warmer and warmer. Leaves were falling outside. The library never had adequate heating. Her boundless but sometimes jailed imagination was let free to stretch for a moment, and the bookshelves around her faded away.

Disconnect the phone so nobody knows

It’s a public library. What am I doing?

That booky smell wasn’t too far away from the round smell of freshly cut grass, or hot shingles and half-melted tar...

That gray sound of bicycle wheels skidding across rocky pavement. The quick flash of a white smile, a tiny line of freckles—and then the hair, pulled back by the wind but now hanging along his ears and electrified by sunlight...

Just lay back, enjoy the ride... yeah

In that moment, she experienced something she’d never felt before. All the worry of her world, all the stress of exams, grades, papers, work, and responsibility simply faded away. Almost instantly, and in the last fourteen seconds of “I Wanna Sex You Up,” she discovered her place in the universe, the meaning of life, what people want, the harmony of Earth, and everlasting love—all at once.

Her childhood rushed back. The power of her memory its aid, a smile of sizes never before discovered swam across her chin. She didn’t care if anyone was watching—if they were.

And when the song ended, it slipped away. She opens her eyes, adjusts her sweater, and stares down the aisle.

Her iPod starts playing “This Is How We Do It.” Her sense of belonging is on the other side of a foggy mirror. Now, she has the humbling understanding of individuality, soleness, Einzelgängerheit.

It’s the attitude she has to take to be an Adult. A real Citizen of the world. A working Man.

What’s so good about that again?

Sketch 2

The legislators in Harlem decided, speedily and with great self-inspired satisfaction, to immediately task city workers with replacing the red lights at every intersection along Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Boulevard with red lights three times their original size in hopes of deterring uptown-bound taxis from unceremoniously ignoring them when they saw no crossing traffic along the streets. After completing their work, the workers did not notice a decrease in such moving violations among taxicab drivers but instead observed a sudden increase in their illicit behavior.

One of the workers was asked to speak at a meeting of the policy makers, and when they asked her to testify, she merely imparted this: “By making the red lights larger, we’ve made them easier to see.” A particularly haughty politician responded with, “Well, that was the point! We called you here not to summarize our efforts but to provide insight into why these taxicab drivers continue to break the law.” 

She replied, “The laws no one wants to follow are best left un-enlarged.”

Sketch 1

When I was a child, I lived with my father on a farm 10 kilometers northeast of Praxis. There was a wheat field I watched grow tall each year from my window. Year after year, I anticipated their long stalks grow to heights seemingly shorter than years before, turning golden-brown and then being cut down with my father’s sharp blade.

On warm nights in the summer, I’d open my window and step out onto the straw roof of our barnhouse. If I looked over my shoulder, I could see the thick fog from Praxian reactors breathing light from the Zentrum. If I really squinted, I could see tiny points of moving light above the Earth’s surface, skittering along in skewed lines like marching ants.

The story I’m about to tell you began on the day the lights stopped glowing, and the ants scattered in all directions. The reactor fog stopped flowing in straight plumes toward the sky and started to be pulled in all directions like an angry spider’s web. That year, the wheat didn’t grow at all, but my father found another use for his blade.

I knew something had gone wrong when I approached the house one afternoon to see my father standing in the doorframe. With his cell in one hand and the TV remote in another, his eyebrows tilted up like the pitch of the barn’s shingles. That night, the absence of light from Praxis darkened the sky, sucking out its amber haze. The fog, too, was nearly gone, and the sky had reacquired some rightful dominance. My father peered out the window over the kitchen sink at the sky.

We had stayed up in the night to listen for news. The TV channels stopped broadcasting, so my father unearthed a radio from the attic. Sometimes we heard voices weaving in and out of the static.

What I couldn’t understand was the magnitude of the sky’s brightness. With the Praxis light extinguished, I could see more stars than I had ever imagined seeing with my own eyes. Images I’d only seen from orbital telescopes were passing through my eyes—images of a thousand, million, glowing points of light in all directions, a spinning shaft of bright clouds jutting out from the horizon. The sight was more amazing than any building in Praxis, any rocket launch or anything like that. I had seen the sky for the first time—the real sky.

A Partial Literacy Narrative

Why We Write

I write because I’m fancy.
No, really, I do—fanciness is something to be admired, exalted. Fancy writing is like yodeling in English, only everyone can identify the yodeler, and the yodeling is kept among three double-spaced pages. But don’t get me wrong: fanciness is not to be confused with gaudiness. Gaudiness is much more noticeable. Next time you take a flight longer than three hours, look over the seat in front of you. See that paperback your fellow traveler bought in the airport bookstore? That’s gaudy. Incidentally, it’s also a waste of six dollars.
It’s hard to describe the writing-feeling. For me, it’s kleptomaniacal: I write for fear that I’ll forget my ideas. For some, it’s compulsory: I know students who dread the act of writing, and who’ll only write what is absolutely necessary. For others, it’s reflective; author Joan Didion seems to fall into this category. In her short work titled Why I Write, she explains that she writes “to find out what [she’s] thinking, what [she’s] looking at, what [she sees] and what it means” (3).
But, if we write for different reasons, why are we all called writers? What makes us all part of this group? Didion claims that a writer is “a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper,” but this isn’t right—by Didion, some of my best writer-friends aren’t writers, but merely people who exploit the English language in an essay to get an easy A (2). Writers don’t have to be people who spend hours upon hours writing; writers aren’t nearly as special as Didion thinks so. We’re all writers, no matter what we do, and there’s no escaping it.

Flight of the Reader (and Writer)

There’s something happening to writing. In fact, it’s a change that’s rippling through the writing and reading communities simultaneously. The thing is, nobody realizes that it’s the same change, and it’s happening all at once.
The reader-writer relationship is changing, and Billy Collins offers a peek into how with his poem “Flight of the Reader.” In the poem, the speaker exposes something tender about the relationship between writers and readers: the relationship is not as unidirectional as Didion likes to think. The speaker in Collins’ poem frankly addresses his readers, playfully acknowledging them for their dedication and solemnly ruing the day “[he] wakes up to find [them] gone” (line 19). Sentimentally, Collins reveals a previously-ignored truism: without readers, there would be no writers. The relationship is not unidirectional. Perhaps without realizing it, readers support the livelihood of their beloved writers, and writers are only now beginning to understand that symbiosis.
Contemporary literature is to blame for making this relationship obvious. With the advent of publishing on the Internet, writers are not only reaching new readers, but they’re finding that new readers can reach them. In an evolution unparalleled in English literature history, writers are now closer to their readers—in the sense that they can respond to their readers’ comments, opinions, and misunderstandings. With this, a new perception of readership is emerging.
It’s becoming apparent that no two readers understand a text in the same way. I don’t mean in reference to their technical, grammatical understanding—I mean that readers bring their own habits, histories, emotions, and individual reading environments into their perception of a text. (Thanks to new technologies, the ability to read in a multitude of places is influencing this realization.) Readers, in a sense, are writers in their own minds; altering the text as they see it—a product of their own consciousness. As the boundary between writers and readers breaks down, writers are no longer bourgeois, and readers are no longer drones.

A Redefinition of Great Writing

Great writers are great readers. Proof that this exists lies in Ron Koertge’s poem titled “Do You Have Any Advice For Those of Us Just Starting Out?” In it, Koertge calls for writers to “go out into the world:” experience it as a reader does, and then write (line 2).
The best writers are great listeners. They set themselves on the pulse of a society’s population. To do that, they must read. But not just read in the typical sense, but read in the abstract: they must read expressions, read reactions, read responses. They must read history, news, and new technological developments. Because readers define a writer’s career, writers must write about what will be read, and to do that, writers must be readers.

Are You a Writer?

We’re all writers, and we have no choice but to be writers. Writers are creators; writers write on varied canvases. When we use our senses, we’re writing in the pages of our minds. When we read, we transcribe the thoughts of others into our own writings, adapting and refashioning them into new works. As the definition of writing and reading evolves, it reflects a new concept of writing and reading—as something more interrelated than ever before.

English in the Digital Age

Reflection on Bolter presentation

Chapter 5: The Electronic Book on Prezi

Overall, this presentation was a delight to research and produce. I found my fellow presenters to be motivated and intelligent, diligently absorbing their fraction of the chapter and crafting a suite of Bolter quotations that would best describe his intended meaning. I found myself at ease with the thought of presenting the work, not only because I had confidence in our group’s ability to accurately summarize the text, but because I felt I had a grasp of the entire chapter’s assertions that I could effectively speak and answer questions.

The most challenging (yet exciting and rewarding) task was the use of the Prezi software in crafting an accompanying visual. Before we created the presentation, we knew we’d have to establish a logical sequence of thought that complemented the chapter’s form. Due to Prezi’s nature, it was difficult to move the relative position of each textbox after it’s placement, but easy to establish a path through each point. We decided that we should arrange the points in a circle around the main title as a typographic reproduction of the world, in chorus with Dan’s concluding point.

Retrospectively, I would have preferred to break from our group’s sequential presentation and opt for a more impromptu, collaborative relay of the chapter’s content and implications. Yet, this would require a deep understanding of the entire chapter for each presenter and a comfort with improvisational methods—something we did not all possess. I would have also preferred to wean our presentation off of Bolter’s exact words and use short summaries instead.

Summaresponse to Chapter 6 presentation

Observe
This group adapted a turn-taking style that mimicked the form of the Bolter chapter, providing an effective representation of the writing. The approach was effective because it was straightforward, but suffered from a lack of connections between presenters. Even still, the chapter was effectively communicated and each presenter’s topics were excellently described.

Infer
The group took a distinct position on the new methods of communication and discourse in contemporary society. Using the Internet and new media as a frame, they compared old styles of “dialogues” from Plato and Socrates to scholars such as Wittgenstein. Their main points included: 1. Alternative forms of dialogue exist in Western musical notation, where tonal information is presented alternatively and effectively; 2. Writing and reading do not have to be sequential; 3. Oral storytellers have more control over their content as they tell the story, leading to unique performances and varying content subject to various factors; 4. The “anti-book” is a genre of writing in which traditional themes of narrative and typography are ignored; 5. The inclusion of images and illustrations in essays, although new, presents a transformation of the writing form.

Question
Why did Bolter choose to bring up oral philosophers in this chapter, and what do they have to do with digital media? How is oral storytelling related to hypertext? How can such things as the “exchange of ideas” be refashioned? While the Internet can facilitate the exchange of ideas, how will it transform that exchange? What does textual direction and sequence have to do with dialogue? What does it have to do with anti-books or new practices in essay-writing?

Summaresponse to Chapter 4 presentation

Observe
As an analysis of Bolter’s chapter, the group produced a well-organized and planned presentation. The thrust of the chapter was well communicated, but some details were lost. Definitions were occasionally underdeveloped, but their meanings could be deduced based on each presenter’s use of the terms in their analyses.

Infer
The presentation’s main points were: 1. In some ways, ancient illuminated manuscripts were more effective than early books (and recent revivals), due to their lack of imagery; 2. Today, control of readers is split between the verbal and the visual; 3. The concept of “ekphrasis” and “reverse ekphrasis” concerns the interoperability of print media and the image; 4. Designing text for the web has no longer been a “remediation” of graphic design for print—animation, streaming audio and video, and other multimedia present a “hyper-media” concept of their own.

Question
As the prevalence of digital media increases, will “old” writing practices be replaced by multimedia? How will (or won’t) the publishing industry respond to this change? How will “filmization” of novels contribute to the larger visual media market? If the “ideal image” is a graph, why is an artful for emotional image effective? Is it? Will verbal expression ever expire? How will the use of spoken language conform to Internet-based multimedia?

Summaresponse to Chapter 3 presentation

Observe
The presentation made use of good references from Bolter, citing useful snippets helping the audience wrap their head around questions like: What is hypertext? How is it different from books? What is hypertext’s function? Yet, the addition of futile demonstrations diluted the presentation’s effectiveness. Often, presenters would rephrase themselves to convey repeated topics while explaining differing concepts. As a metaphor for hypertext, this practice worked well. In terms of evoking a feeling of presentational progress, the technique fell short.

Infer
The presentation’s argument, and, in turn, Bolter’s argument, centers around the stark contrast between “text” and “hypertext,” claiming that the latter is an effective “remediation” of the former. The main points included: 1. Hypertext’s representation of “structures” can be more flexible on the computer screen, as opposed to speech or writing; 2. Despite hypertext’s reading difficulties, it presents itself as a formidable opponent to traditional print; 3. Hypertext can be placed in the space between written narrative and visual arguments: it may represent the human mind better than formal constructs; 4. Hypertext can inhibit or exhibit the “natural associations” that a traditional narrative almost always induces, for better rather than worse.

Question
What is so important about the concept: “hypertext is a process as much as a product”—i.e., what’s the big deal about “operating” the text as opposed to just reading it? Keeping the age of Bolter’s writing in mind, how has the difficulty in regards to reading electronic text declined, and what impact does the shrinking of that issue have on the “remediation” process? If hypertext is more akin to human thought, how might that change the linguistic habits of future cultures? How does it change current-day culture? Hyperlinks among hypertext: do they “[give] the illusion of control” (as Bolter says) or doe they actually hand over the control of the narrative to the reader (or “operator”)? Is there something “natural” about the traditional narrative process, or can any reader learn how to read hypertext? What difficulties does the “remediation” of traditional print into hypertext present to the English language and readers? How can this concept of hypertext ripple into young authors who choose to publish in physical format (read: antibooks)?

Where does the alphabet come from?

An amazing article from one of my favorite blogs:

http://ilovetypography.com/2010/08/07/where-does-the-alphabet-come-from/

Check it out—especially the last part, which speaks to the materiality of writing.

Freewrite in the dark

When I was a kid, my family and I would drive to the Adirondack Mountains, to a property remotely squished bin between Lake Placid and a small pond called Boy Pond. TThere, I experienced life at a slower pace, experiencing life at in a test tube, and allowing for my childhood experiences to be bottled up and kept forever.

One

There was a river than ran from pond to pond, running downhill for three miles, pulling and shaking over cliffs and hills, and, at the end of its journey, emptying out into a bucket—Cranberry Rapids,. We;d take Jeeps from place to place before sunset, enjoying the nature sounds and sights.

One night, around a campfire at Crandberry Rapids, I opened my notebook, grabbed a tiny bit of charcoal, and, in trying to keep as natural as possible, wrote a poem in the light of the fire and in the sound of the rapids around me. I still have that poem. My dad remembers the night. That was my earliest and proudest memory of writing—a blip of expression, embracing nature that surrounded me.

Chapter 2 response

In Chapter 2 of Writing Space, Bolter references “students of culture” such as Walter Ong and Jacques Derrida who assert that literate people “structure their speech as they do their writing,” claiming that literacy changes thought and speaking patterns in ways not usually explored. After reading this, I realized how true it is—I, without thinking, will structure my speech as I do my writing, “talking in sentences and even paragraphs.” I’ve never given this any thought, but these habits do seem to be directly influenced by my experience of literature (along with some cultural influences: it is considered correct and mature to speak in sentences).

With this in mind, how would people living before movable type speak? Would they have partitioned their spoken thoughts into sentences? How would writings of that time be different?

Can rigid routines sprout creativity?

Check out an interesting article on the daily routines of creative, productive people:

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/The99Percent/~3/5xrB9WzaSnc/How-Mundane-Routines-Produce-Creative-Magic

I’m immediately reminded of the sort of argument against cubicle officework. People say it’s terribly restricting and monotonous. Yet, it seems that there’s something behind the routine of daily life that makes way for deeper, creative thoughts—not to mention the fact that most of the people explored above incorporate some type of physical activity and steady sleep patterns. Perhaps this creative freedom comes from the reduced need to constantly be focused on new challenges: it seems that these people aren’t challenged or surprised on a daily basis... I’d imagine this to be the life of a philosopher, as well.

Response to Bolter

Bolter, across various sections in the first chapter of Writing Spaces, establishes the context in which literature finds itself across human history. Starting with the Bible, and ending in the contemporary age of information, Bolter defines “the late age of print”—the last hurrah of print’s existence in the literary world. Threatened by new technology, the physicality of print isn’t the only thing that could rapidly decline; as Bolter investigates, the literary novel style that accompanied the book will also decline, making way for more interactive forms of literature. He introduces the views of critics, old and new, who each predict the efficacy or weakness of the print medium. Lastly, he addresses the ever-growing prospect of graphics and film as something more suited for the computer screen. With those media, different rules apply for conveying information. All of these media seem to be growing with the rise of the computer, and the book seems to be losing relevance.

As a young kid, I begged my dad for a computer. At the time, even the slowest (by today’s standards) of computers were expensive, and my father felt he needed to delay the purchase until I was older. When that day came, I was enthralled. Ever since then, I’ve been a geek—fascinated with new technologies. Yet, I still feel attached to both the physicality and literary structure of a real novel... Unlike my children, who will probably never touch a physical book (or, perhaps on a less drastic level, think that books are archaic), I know I won’t be able to part with a hard, non-electronic copy of my favored literature.

Taylor Mali’s “Like you know”

Taylor Mali’s performance video





Typographic adaptation




I appreciate Mali’s performance of his poem much more than the typographic adaption video because this type of poem is best seen while it’s delivered. Mali’s physical movement and appearance contribute to the poem’s meaning: his facial expressions contribute to the overall feeling of satire, as does his hand movements and body postures. It is true, as well, that Mali’s criticism of contemporary thought expression concerns the physical postures as well as grammatical structures. As such, I felt that the performance video was more compelling.

Response to Shelley Jackson’s “Stitch Bitch”

Body Not Whole

In this section, it is Jackson’s objective to continue the thought she introduced in her preface, when she claims she’s (not) the author of a text about “the patchwork girl.” In a way that seems to introduce the fragmented form of the complete text, Body Not Whole aims to describe the oddity of the body, separate from the mind, as a “patchwork” (adapting the word from her preface and self-proclaimed title). Later in the section, she discovers that the “project of writing” lies in “unhinging” the mind as it tries to solidify its own hold on reality by “[substituting] an effigy for that complicated machine for inclusion and effusion that is the self.”

Gaps, Leaps

This section, which occurs later in the sequence, is a comparison between modern literature (the novel) and “hypertext.” As Jackson begins: “a conventional novel is a safe ride,” implying that the literary structure of novels, entangled with their existence in a physical form, has dictated their linear form. But as Jackson continues, it is seen that the physical form of a novel affects readers in more ways than one. Describing the novel as ”the mechanism of the chute,” Jackson criticizes it by asserting that its too quick, equating it to a ”slalom.” Hypertext, on the other hand, is random, formless, and dependent on the reader’s moods, attitudes, or other constraints. It’s existence without physical form and traditional scaffolding, Jackson implies, makes it attractive to “piratical readers, plagiarists and opportunists.”

Response to sample essay

In response to Sample R.

In this analysis of Kress, you claim that a “proper” sequence of writing entails ideas that are “sequenced,” implying that verbal arguments progress in a linear fashion. In describing proper form, you claim that “everything must occur subsequently” and that “one word comes after another, followed by a punctuation mark and the start of a new sentence.” What, then, do you make of poetry and non-linear writing? I’d assert that they are makers of meaning just as versatile as visual arguments. Verbal arguments need not take such rigid forms. Similarly, your assertion that visual arguments, “no matter how they are presented, still drive the same point across.” Visual arguments are not as clear, nor are as direct as you maintain. Your characterizations of verbal and visual arguments are too extreme; visual arguments are flexible, but are prone to misinterpretation. Further, visual arguments need structure in the same way verbal arguments may not need them. You claim that “one cannot take a paragraph and mix and match sentences,” yet this mixing and matching is seen frequently in poetry and can serve argumentative purpose—and perhaps provide that meaning more efficiently than prose.

Response to Rodney Jones’ “Hubris at Zunzal”

hu•bris. n. exaggerated pride or self-confidence

Jones’ speaker, at the end of the third stanza, describes a change of heart, and with it, the poem’s tone changes. After dumping his rum and coconut juice-filled coconut into the water, the speaker momentarily laments the act, saying “then the idea I was not finished, / then the act of reaching down / with the idea I would get it back.” Here, the speaker stops describing the gorgeous Zunzal beach and refutes the purpose of his own poem-writing: reflecting on a moment that makes the speaker stop to imagine his feelings after wasting his drink.

The poem’s title is significant as well, as it addresses the speaker’s haste in dropping his drink into the water.

“Stitch Bitch” Inkshedding

It is Shelley Jackson’s view that books are not a “natural evolutionary end,” but that books (in terms of both their physical makeup and linear construction style) are merely “formal devices,” or man-made constructions of literature that have defended from early humanity’s first interactions with literature. Yet, the formal structure of the book is still changing—especially exhibited by the contemporary author-publisher relationship. This business model contributes to the constraints placed on publishing, determining what content reaches readers.

Publishers maintain a hold on a book’s final version, working with editors to augment an author’s manuscript. Why? To make it appropriate for audiences to read. In this lies a constraint often overlooked: our favorite versions of popular novels probably do not resemble their original drafts. If they did, would they be less “linear” or more like Jackson’s “favorite texts,” defying “the linear”?

Reflection on Paper 2

Heated blogging

http://thewhitestgirluknow.tumblr.com/post/3753724987/how-to-handle-a-break-up

Visual argument project

Made with iMovie. Featuring music by Massive Attack and Kelly Bailey.

”Word” is an observation of antique and contemporary literature and journalism, highlighting the decline and perversion of English “words” as literature becomes subject to current-day injustices and corrupt world powers. It is a call to action for viewers to explore older texts as a way to discover purity in literature.

Freewrite: Response to Chel White’s video

The title card

The film’s title card shows the film’s title undergoing edits in real time: implying a motif that White’s work is constantly undergoing edits—a process affecting even this film. I think that the title card is an effective representation of the writing process because it shows how many mistakes a writer can intially make and how many edits are required to make that work ideal.

In the mirror with clown faces

At this moment, Chel White is describing how, after throwing away much of the work he tried to start, he looks at himself in the mirror, and, delving into depression, tells himself how terrible of a writer he is. This is an effective way to represent his feelings because it communicates how childish and useless he feels. The clown faces communicate something trivial, weak, or meaningless. The image in the mirror is strong because it plainly transforms his face into a clown’s.


“I have to write it on my leg”

The image of the bare leg hanging in space with pens around it communicates the absurdity of the whole narrative, leaving White to eventually claim that the film isn’t entirely an accurate representation of how he writes, but something similar to his struggle. It’s also a campy irony, revealing the absurdity of his own film.

Freewrite: A sentence starts out like...

A sentence starts out like a dark cloud of wispy smoke: it’s an idea in my head—an unformed, unbirthed idea, expressing only some type of meaning. Words pop in my head, but they’re often fragments of a sentence: phrases like “compared to” and “just like a” and sometimes “nothing like”... sometimes cool adjectives, sometimes odd verbs.

The subjects come in first, as the body of the sentence takes shape. As a virtue of the linear nature of writing, the subject appears, then the object, then the verb—and some other complexities fall in after that.

Certain sentences are fickle: they need to be written down immediately, otherwise I won‘t remember them. They‘re giggling trick-or-treaters, clutching their candy loot and sprinting from house to house in the darkness. If I can‘t pinpoint them, the meaning is lost.

Once I‘ve got the sentence, I‘ll write it once, and then choose to keep writing it or start all over again. Constructing the sentence is assembling a train, with the locomotive (the period) at the end. If I don‘t get a great start, I usually start over again: consulting the smoke in my head for the few minutes it‘s there, trying to grasp it and force it onto paper.

Freewrite: On texting

I don’t think that the dominant texting function of cell “phones” is odd, it is merely now a new technology more widely adapted. In the beginning of the cellular phone’s existence, it really was a phone—now, it has taken on a multitude of features unique to mobile communication devices. It shouldn’t still be called a cell phone: the newest smart-“phones” that are emerging do more than just allow for telephone calls, and do those other functions more efficiently and reliably than its actual voice call features. The telephone line hasn’t changed from it’s original 56.6 kilobit per second initiation: even now, smart-“phones” take on different wireless antennas to communicate using the Internet at speeds faster than telephone lines... so why do we still have those antennas and networks?

Six answers for Billy Collins

Do you truly believe you were doing the original author a favor in this rewrite? (from Alison’s blog)

Billy Collins is doing someone a favor, but it isn’t the original author—well, not directly, anyway. By rewriting the poem, he’s showing the poet how futile their strategy is, and, in turn, teaching the readers of his poem an important lesson on word choice and meaning. He’s also expressing his disinterest for poems of that style.

By making this poem are you trying to criticize the original poem or is it for a different reason? (from Amanda’s blog)

Billy Collins’ strategy here is to highlight an important concept in writing: that meaning is better attained through precise and concise wording. That’s not to say that he’s rejecting artful construction—he embraces it in his parody. He’s merely rejecting the habits of lovestruck poets, and consequently implying that writers shouldn’t fall into the trap of using grandiose metaphors.

Why did you incorporate metaphors about yourself in the poem? (from Jill’s blog)

It is a function of Collins’ humor to alter the speaker’s attention from his/her lover to himself/herself. Not only is it funny, but it summarizes Collins’ feelings toward poets embracing this style: that they may be self-indulgent or self-centered by using words in such a show-off manner.

The World... as New York sees it

Discuss.

Response to sample essays

“It Gives You Wings”
Sample G


The pros

1. Well-integrated sources lead to a varied reading experience
2. Claims are well-supported
3. Implications of fast-paced lifestyles are satisfactorily explored
4. Word choice is varied

The cons

1. Sentence structure is choppy, hard to follow
2. Lots of cop-out or general claims like “We are among the top producers as well as top consumers of a multitude of products” in the introduction paragraph
3. Repetitive conclusions, lack of depth in analyzation
4. A paragraph wholly dedicated to “Holy Shit”
5. Overuse of third-person plural in reference to “American society”
6. Some citations, like the one on page 5, contribute little to the discourse

Apple’s iPod: I’ve Got the World on a String (Shaped Earphone Chord [sic])

Sample H

The pros

1. Varied word choice
2. Interesting background information on Apple products

The cons

1. Use of “etc.”
2. Little to no analyzation; paper is merely a summary of Apple product offerings
3. The claim at the end of page 4 is both poorly constructed and not supported with proper evidence
4. Page 4 is a sea of quotation marks that make me think the writer likes to use “air quotes” in real life
5. On page 3, content about podcasting is plagiarized from the Wikipedia article on the topic
6. Copious amounts of speculation and irrelevant personal addenda

Why conform? A response to Will M.’s point of view

In a previous post, titled “Why conform? A not-so-short discourse on ‘proper’ manuscript-writing,” I examined the advantages and disadvantages of enforcing compositional rules in academic writing. This post is a follow-up.


The question is: are academic writers “prevented from making certain choices about the medium for their expression for good reasons”? What constitutes a good reason?

In terms of the technical justifications for style rules, the reasons are very good—in the academic world, keeping formatting rigidly uniform is the key to determining content length (as I’ve said). Past that, there’s really only one other good reason for rules like MLA and APA, and it lies in the prevention of plagiarism. When citing sources becomes a “big deal” (i.e., college), having the skill to properly reference external information saves you (and your instructor) lots of academic trouble.

But what if a certain assignment doesn’t have a set content length? And what if that assignment doesn’t include outside sources?

Will M., in the short video above, claims that society is to blame (or credit) for academic uniformity. How, though, is beyond the scope of the video.

“Paper specificities are based off societal norms.”

I disagree, and think it’s the inverse: society is more likely to follow from the restrictive efforts of language associations when it concerns controlling the form of academic content. Students, if more heavily restricted in their ways of expressing ideas, are more likely to keep up habits they developed in school around these rules, and begin to apply them to daily life as adults.

“When writing a serious paper, a writer should not see what the writer is feeling by visuals; instead, the writer should paint a picture with words.”

As a creative writer, I agree, but disagree while taking the position of a more visually-inclined student. Sometimes students can more effectively use visuals to do what natural-born writers and speakers do. By discouraging alternative methods of expression, the restriction can hurt these students’ academic performances.

“Society has set these rules. By not following them, one can become outcast and less accepted.”

Definitely—and it happens. I’m more inclined to believe that this is a problem in contemporary society. American culture is rapidly changing, moving to accept more liberal ideals—but still, the classroom is where social rejection most frequently occurs, and more often than not toward students who can’t express themselves in the ways they feel are most natural.

Have you heard of Readability?

I find this really useful—maybe you do, too.



Readability is an add-on for your browser that can make reading any cluttered news article or blog post on the Internet much easier. If you encounter a news article with ads, banners, navigation, links to social media, and other junk cluttering up your view of the article, you can click on Readability’s icon and it uses fancy algorithms to take out the stuff and leave only the article—and you can customize the colors, typefaces, and font size.

You can find Readability (for free) at their website.

They also have a monthly subscription service that will help you keep your articles organized (you can quickly press a button labeled “Read later” and it will keep all the articles you want to read together. What’s cool about the subscription is that 70% of the money goes to supporting good writing on the Internet. But who am I kidding? We’re broke college students).

Freewrite

Today it is forty-eight degrees and I’m about to miss my train.

Slipping through crowds with less than optimal speed, I’m clutching my baggage to my chest, knowing that if I stop for even a moment, I’d be on the platform seconds after the train chugs away. This could have been easier if the wheels on my suitcase weren’t broken—somewhere between 36th and 38th they broke—and I’ve been lifting it with my right arm just enough to let the broken axels spin as they skim the concrete. My backpack is open, but I don’t realize that, and my red notebook is about to slip out of the small pocket, open like a bird in flight, and release more than fifty loose pages of character outlines into the depths of Pennsylvania Station.

I’m not thinking about that, no—in fact, I’m choosing to think about how I’ll know if I miss the train: if, by some

Six questions for Billy Collins

1. Do you think badly of this literary strategy of comparing a belovéd to a multitude of objects?
2. How many common metaphors do you address in this poem, or do you stick to purely random creations?
3. In the last three stanzas, what motivated you to turn the speaker’s attention to him/herself?
4. At the end, you interject “somehow” into a line with which you began. Is this meant to trivialize the entire poem’s concept?
5. Is the poem’s title, “Litany,” a reference to the poem itself, or a style which you are imitating?
6. At times, the speaker seems to reference his or her own literary strategies. Is this meant to further depict the poem as overtly contrived?

Why conform? A not-so-short discourse on “proper” manuscript-writing

When writing academic papers, why conform? Why restrict yourself to a certain paper size, orientation, typeface, or color? These questions usually don’t enter the minds of university students, as they have been told to follow formats like MLA or APA, so maybe this question is more relevant: why do our professors ask us of this injustice? And why have we been taught, since high school, to strictly obey these “standards”?

I was interviewed on this topic, by the lovely Annik Spencer, who prodded me on the meaning of these choices. Many others, too, were asked of their opinions—but some, as I later heard, felt unprepared to answer: why should they have to answer for something they were instructed to do by some auspicious association of modern writing? I don’t blame them for feeling uneasy, but perhaps this is a way to widen their understanding of what these standards are and why they exist.

Take MLA guidelines, for example. The MLA guidelines at Purdue University’s famed website bullets these general rules to follow:

• Type your paper on a computer and print it out on standard, white 8.5 x 11-inch paper.

Devil’s advocate     Standard paper sizes should be used because, if paper size wasn’t regulated, writing professionals wouldn’t be able to consistently determine the length of manuscripts. Of course, this depends on whether you follow the rest of the guidelines, as full compliance makes it easier for instructors to easily specify content length in pages instead of specifying in terms of word count or character count (length in pages is much friendlier; it prevents students from trying to inflate the word count by writing simpler sentences). Also: if instructors need to photocopy a document, standard Letter size paper is the most widely used paper format in the United States. Additionally, white paper & black ink is both practical and easy to read. Anything else would be hard on the eyes.

To hell with standards!     Standard paper sizes shouldn’t be used because it corners students into monotonous, claustrophobic spaces that seriously limit creativity. Imagine the variety and expressiveness of essays on paper formats anywhere between 8x10 and poster paper: sure, they wouldn’t all be uniform, but students could be able to explore creative options that many would take advantage of to create true visual and lingual arguments. And for those who choose to take a more formal route: standard Letter size would still be available. As for the introduced difficulty of photocopying and printing—worthy tradeoffs, I say.

• Double-space the text of your paper, and use a legible font (e.g. Times New Roman). Whatever font you choose, MLA recommends that the regular and italics type styles contrast enough that they are recognizable one from another. The font size should be 12 pt.

Devil’s advocate     Double spacing the text makes it much easier for instructors to mark up the content, providing the student with valuable feedback. A legible serif typeface like Times New Roman is very readable at comfortable reading range, and Times New Roman at 12 points is widely regarded as “standard” (not to mention being the default character style for Microsoft Word documents before Office 2007). 11 points would be too small and 13 too large. These guidelines also make specifying content length easy, as long as each student follows the same formatting rules.

This ain’t your father’s essay!     Double space, double schmase. If we wanted your feedback, we would have come to you before we passed the paper in. As for your Times New Roman at 12 points—let me tell you how much I loathe Times New Roman at 12 points. Seeing the same face set in the same point size on the same paper size since the sixth grade is tiring. Yes—it’s really, actually visually tiring—and I’d like to think that I’ve amassed enough graphic design and typography knowledge to understand that setting my paper in 16 point Comic Sans MS is a bad idea (actually, Comic Sans MS is a bad idea at any point size—I’m not the only designer who thinks so). Besides, how can you instructors stand it? You’ve been reading text set in 12 point serif type much longer than we have... how are you not complaining? What about—just for once—allowing us to set our paper in 12 point Helvetica, double spaced? I guarantee that everyone would love it. A breath of fresh, sans-serif air. Quote me.

• Leave only one space after periods or other punctuation marks (unless otherwise instructed by your instructor). Set the margins of your document to 1 inch on all sides.

Devil’s advocate     Spacing should be specified uniformly to maintain accurate estimation of content length. The habit you have for putting two spaces after a full stop comes from the days of typewriters with monospaced type: with a monospaced typeface, every character has the same width, even the period. Adding two spaces after each period made it easier to distinguish among sentences. You don’t need to do this with Times New Roman, or any other proportional typeface. 1-inch margins exist, again, to maintain uniformity that allows instructors to determine content length. That guideline also exists to make sure photocopies are not cut off.

Na, na-na boo-boo.     Who are you to tell me what not to do after periods or other punctuation marks? And as for margins: I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen my friends change the page margins from 1.0 inches to 1.01 inches or 1.03 inches—that stuff works miracles.

• Create a header that numbers all pages consecutively in the upper right-hand corner, one-half inch from the top and flush with the right margin. (Note: Your instructor may ask that you omit the number on your first page. Always follow your instructor's guidelines.)

Devil’s advocate     A header with consistent placement ensures that instructors will always know where to look when sorting pages. If you type your last name into the header, it will help keep your pages together in the event of a de-stapling or an instructor spilling coffee all over your papers (it happened to me in Intro to Ethics last semester).

*blows raspberry*     I realize that I’m getting increasingly belligerent, but these rules really deserve this treatment. Excuse my elementary conduct.

As you may be able to tell, I am of two minds here. Two... really diverging minds. I think we, as students, understand the nature of these requirements, but following them takes perseverance (and, in my case, suppression of intrinsic potty language).

3.37 Inches by 2.125 Inches of Impersonality

Hofstra freshman Krista Camacho’s bright, kiddish smile shrinks when asked about her personal gift-giving traditions, especially about her habit of buying gift cards. When asked how frequently she buys the plastic cards of convenience, she answers sheepishly: “I try not to.”

Krista isn’t alone—she is one of many Americans who buy into the gift-carding tradition, forgoing personalized gifts for the go-to standard in quick gifting. For her, buying these cards unwraps the struggle of purchasing that perfect present. “They can choose what they want. It’s like giving them money, only with more of a purpose.”

While the benefits of choosing gift cards over more personalized gifts are compelling, they may be encouraging people to do the very opposite of what is beneficial about acts of charity: denying them the emotional and social growth that gifting can provide. At the same time, the overuse of this apparently insignificant solution represents something about the whole of American culture and consumerism: something to which not many readily admit.

That denial cannot come easily: on a walk through any popular American supermarket or convenience store, one will see them—usually placed strategically near the check-out counter—and one cannot help but marvel in their consumer appeal. Gift cards of the Visa variety, the ones boasting compatibility wherever Visa is accepted, seem to be the most aggressive. “Visa gift cards are perfect for any occasion: smart, thoughtful, and always well received” (Visa). Confidently self-referential, the cards themselves already know how great they are and how they will be received: they take away that worry on the purchaser’s part, ensuring that the only tough decision concerns the denomination. And how curious that decision is—the fact that each card has a definite value asserts that the purchaser subconsciously evaluates how monumental or generous he or she wants to be at the till. That concept of value confounds its actual value, Krista speculates. “It looks like you put more effort into it than just giving them money.”

But why not give money? Visa’s website advertises its gift cards as “welcome at any of the millions of locations where Visa debit cards are accepted,” but there is something even more universally accepted than Visa cards: cold, hard cash. After all, these cards would be useless without the attachment of monetary value, and, if their advertising claims are to be believed, it is their function to replace cash with retail applications. With further research, however, it is clear that they do not resemble money in any clear way. All one must do is read the “cardholder agreement,” the lengthy legalese printed on minuscule scraps of paper that come with these cards, and special terms and fees are revealed. For a $25 Vanilla brand Visa gift card, a compulsory $4.95 “activation fee” must be paid in order to use the card—after purchase. These fees can rise as the denomination rises, reaching up to $7.95 for a $200 gift card. Even more inconvenient are their terms of use: these gift cards are non-reloadable, non-refundable, non-returnable bits of plastic with value that depreciates over time (Bancorp).

If these gifts are such impersonal impostors, misleading products, and unlikely to be the subject of someone’s pride, how could they become so wrapped up in American society? Perhaps the answer lies in the theories of Thorstein Veblen, American economist and sociologist from the early 20th century. Veblen introduced several groundbreaking social concepts in his life’s work, combining “survival of the richest” Darwinistic perspectives with then-new capitalist institutions. His most important contribution, however, was the concept of “conspicuous consumption” that dictated the socioeconomic actions of Americans on a grand scale, depicting them as beings who acquire social identity through the preference to purchase products that make themselves appear more attractive than they might really be (Elwell). In essence, his theories regarding economic activity boiled down to one vice: vanity. Such a vice contributes to the desire to buy these gift cards instead of gifting money; slipping cash into a greeting card is unsentimental, whereas gift cards can be more attractive and represent more conscious thought on the gifter’s part. If this is true, the stereotypes that fuel the international perception of American consumerism—excessive consumption; high-powered advertisements; cheap, fast, and unhealthy food choices—don’t only exist in criticisms of America, but are the very truths that define it. Something as insignificant as gift carding can have enormous cultural implications.

But not all of gift card buyers do so because of a suppressed desire to be attractive, nor due to a drastic change in social norms. As difficult as it is to swallow, gift cards can serve some rational purpose in the lives of Americans. As Krista puts it, “[gift cards are] safer during the holiday time, because you don’t know what other people are getting them. If you give them a gift card, they won’t buy the same sweatshirt their grandmother gave them.” This concept of gift collision is a commonly experienced dilemma during holidays and special occasions. Before the existence of gift cards, gift receivers would deal with duplicate gifts by either “regifting” or caching the gift. Later, with the advent of gift cards, the reception of gift cards themselves would perpetuate regifting: in a habit I can attest to observing, my brother would often send gift cards he found useless to other unknowing recipients. The futility of this was ironic: the person receiving his former gift would often find it just as useless. This phenomena contributes to the observation that gift recipients value personalized gifts more than their plastic, rectangular counterparts. Hofstra University student and blogger Jill Saba writes about her own personal observations concerning gift cards, especially her mother’s decision to buy them. After explaining her mother’s rationale for purchasing the cards, she writes: “she likes to feel that she put at least a smidgen of thought into the gift,” implying that which her mother does not seem to understand: gift card recipients feel that, when given the cards, they are not the object of the gift-giving thought they deserve.

Even the subtle act of receiving such a gift bereft of intention can be detrimental to a relationship’s basic moorings. In a New York Times article examining the effects of gift-giving on human relationships, consumer psychologist Margaret Rucker cites research that underlines the important of gift-giving on “strengthening” relationship bonds, and, conversely, “[signalling] that a relationship should end” (Parker-Pope). Jill Saba’s mother may be unknowingly “signalling” her gift card recipients that she doesn’t value their relationship because she gives gifts that they consider disappointing or not personal enough. Considering this research, the cliché flower-giving phenomena that is made use of in so many serious relationships may hold water as a real way to illicit psychological responses inherently in the act of gift-giving. With this, the American gift-giving tradition is tarnished by the overuse of gift cards because they send the wrong message to the recipients, potentially causing unintended repercussions that put relationships in danger.

Despite this, gift cards were ranked as the second most given gift by Americans in 2006 (Consumers), and the gift card-buying habit doesn’t seem to be stopping. A substantiation for the product’s momentum might be the economic environment Americans find themselves in. With the American economy in slow recovery, consumers now find themselves with tighter budgets—and gifting is the first cost to take reductions. Rather than devote extra time and money into personalized gifting, Americans can turn to gift cards as a manageable, universally-applicable, and time-saving present. Speaking from personal experience, Krista Camacho sees the retail gift card market benefiting from the recession. “You’ll decide to buy gift cards because you set the cost. Gifts will vary in price, but not gift cards. The time spent buying personalized gifts is spent working instead.”

With this in mind, it seems that traditional gift-giving is on a downward trend. The reasoning behind this conclusion is clear, but the implications of its meaning is disquieting. How does this change how Americans convey their gratitude and appreciation of friendship? If this is to reflect how cost-conscious and cash-dependent Americans are, then the stereotypes are true. As an educated nation, we make the choice to buy plastic loaded with fees and hidden terms, with associated social stigmas and cultural admonishment, only to serve ourselves in acts of selfish frugality. The very existence of gift cards, in terms of their consumer appeal and market significance, reveals something about the American public’s attraction to quick solutions to difficult questions. Still, it is clear that the gift-giving tradition is an important one due to its relevancy in crafting and strengthening relationships and establishing good social grammar—so gift-giving is something we cannot overlook as a nation. Even in economic hardship, there are personalized solutions to the gift-giving problem that can better communicate the feelings that a gift should—and steer people clear from the tantalizing guise of an easy out.


The Bancorp Bank, ITC Financial Licenses, Inc. and IH Financial Licenses, Inc. Vanilla Visa® Gift Card Cardholder Agreement. 15 Sept. 2010. Legal contract.

Camacho, Krista R. Personal interview. 12 Feb. 2011.

Consumers Union of U.S., Inc. “Avoid Gift Card Pitfalls.” ConsumerReports.org. Dec. 2007. Web. 15 Feb. 2011.

Elwell, Frank. Veblen’s Sociology. Rogers State University, 2003. Web. 15 Feb. 2011.

Parker-Pope, Tara. “A Gift That Gives Right Back? The Giving Itself.” The New York Times 11 Dec. 2007. nytimes.com, 11 Dec. 2007. Web. 13 Feb. 2011.

Saba, Jill. “Gift Cards.” Web log post. Here and Now. 3 Feb. 2011. Web. 14 Feb. 2011.

Visa Inc. “Prepaid & Gift Cards.” Visa.com. Web. 15 Feb. 2011.

The spiral game: the miracle of human efficiency

What immediately fascinated me about the “shell game” was how well it worked: one shell from a box of nearly identical other shells could be quickly identified and distinguished from the others. One of the impossibilities of this feat stems from the fact that the distinctions were made using questions, not characteristics.

One might argue that a question like “why is the shell so blue” isn’t a question at all, but a statement implying: “the shell is blue.” Still, reliable identifications were made from questions much more confusing, like “does someone miss you?” This yes/no question could have implied that no one missed the shell, or that someone did. The efficacy behind this question is that the answer actually doesn’t matter—either way, there was a sea creature involved, and that creature may or may not have missed its shell, so the observational implications were that the shell could have been home to a sea creature.

As I later discussed with the Doc, what’s even cooler is the lightning-quick judgement that the human brain exercises while narrowing down the selections after hearing questions. I immediately imagined a computer trying to do this selection: with such confusing questions, and a computer’s inability to find distinctions in the shells, it would be impossible. It reveals a fundamental aspect of what separates us from computers.

A question like “why does the shell look so spiral-y,” to a computer, wouldn’t be very helpful. How does a computer know what “spiral-y” means? The spiral on a shell’s surface isn’t actually a spiral (despite how geometrically precise nature can be), and a computer wouldn’t have enough prior reasoning experience to determine that a shell would generally resemble a spiral. The technical limitations would begin at imaging and end in the computer’s logic—how, even, would a programmer begin to teach a computer how to continually learn, amass useful knowledge, and be able to apply conceptual understanding of a spiral to an identification game? If it’s hard enough for humans to do it, it would have to be near impossible for a computer to (considering we program them).

“All About Birds,” but you’d never know it

Don Stap writes an incredible article about the migratory patterns of the Numeniini shorebird Bar-tailed Godwit and its yearly 7,000-mile trek to wintering sites from Alaska to New Zealand—but you’d never know it. Stap’s rhetorical writing strategy encompasses a number of strategies that he shares with Jonah Lehrer, a highly-talented neuroscientist and author. These strategies include the ability to write effective hooks lacking in scientific jargon, painting accurate portraits of his interviewees, and maintaining a reader’s dwindling attention.

Perhaps the most surprising tool that Stap utilizes (and something Lehrer doesn’t possess, or, maybe chooses not to) is his talent for imagery. Take, for example, Stap’s first paragraph of Flight of the Kuaka, All About Birds:

In February, at 37 degrees 12 minutes south latitude, the sun sets late, but night has fallen and the darkness is thick and close. In the hills to the west I see a few dull globes of light from distant houses. Above, the stars glimmer like chipped ice, but they cast little light, and I would like very much to see where I’m stepping. I am in a shallow pond about 100 yards west of the Firth of Thames on New Zealand’s North Island. And I am up to my shins in mud as slick as lard. Having given up all pretense of grace, I wave my arms about with each step, as if I’m on a tightrope. I hope not to fall into this black goop—the manure-enriched runoff from a cow pasture—as two people near me did moments ago.

There’s no understating Stap’s penchant for using descriptive words to capture an audience, but what’s interesting here is his ability to weave factual information into his descriptions: in the first paragraph, we discover time of year, physical location, and the fact that he’s accompanied by others. All this with a dazzling description of the starlight and New Zealand countryside.

Like Lehrer, Stap includes a short portraiture of the article’s main figure:

In his early 60s, with close-cropped white hair, Gill is the senior member of an international team of scientists analyzing the migration of godwits and curlews as part of a four-year project funded largely by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. Gill’s voice rises with enthusiasm when he speaks of the bar-tails, and here in New Zealand his spirit is all the more buoyant because he’s wearing shorts and sandals; when he left Alaska two days ago, it was 10 below.

In a way nearly identical to Lehrer, Stap crafts an image of a sweet Bob Gill. But, in a way that is uniquely Stap, including factual information about his research project, and the source of it’s funding.

Lehrer article response

Mark each time Lehrer offers a definition. How elaborate is each definition? What does the sequence of these mean in aggregate?

“There is something deeply contradictory about Walter Mischel—a psychologist who spent decades critiquing the validity of personality tests—inventing the marshmallow task, a simple test with impressive predictive power.” (paragraph 18)

““Young kids are pure id,’ Mischel says. ‘They start off unable to wait for anything—whatever they want they need. But then, as I watched my own kids, I marveled at how they gradually learned how to delay and how that made so many other things possible.’” (paragraph 19)

“What, then, determined self-control? Mischel’s conclusion, based on hundreds of hours of observation, was that the crucial skill was the ‘strategic allocation of attention.’ Instead of getting obsessed with the marshmallow—the ‘hot stimulus’—the patient children distracted themselves by covering their eyes, pretending to play hide-and-seek underneath the desk, or singing songs from ‘Sesame Street.’” (paragraph 22)

This is the first occurrence of a scientific definition—and it’s relatively far into the text (22 paragraphs in), so it’s likely that the readers who have read this much are willing to trust Lehrer as he delves into the scientific underpinnings of the article.

“‘If you’re thinking about the marshmallow and how delicious it is, then you’re going to eat it,’ Mischel says. ‘The key is to avoid thinking about it in the first place.’ \ In adults, this skill is often referred to as metacognition, or thinking about thinking, and it’s what allows people to outsmart their shortcomings.” (paragraph 23)

Again, a technical definition, but Lehrer doesn’t allow the definition to break up the text’s flow, he quickly and simply defines the term, allowing it to contribute to the meaning of the text, and continues to analyze.

“The early appearance of the ability to delay suggest that is has a genetic origin, an example of personality at its most predetermined.” (paragraph 26)

“Two of the experiments were of particular interest. The first is a straightforward exercise known as the ‘suppression task.’ Subjects are given four random words, two printed in blue and two in red. After reading the words, they’re told to forget the blue words and remember the red words. Then the scientists provide a stream of ‘probe words’ and ask the subjects whether the probes are the words they were asked to remember.” (paragraph 30)

“In the second, known as the Go/No Go task, subjects are flashed a set of faces with various expressions. At first, they are told to press the space bar whenever they see a smile. This tasks little effort, since smiling faces automatically trigger what’s known as ‘approach behavior.’” (paragraph 31)

“Approach behavior” is the most interesting term here, letting its connotative meaning shine.

“For the most part, the regions are in the frontal cortex—the overhang of brain behind the eyes—and include the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the anterior prefrontal cortex, the anterior cingulate, and the right and left inferior frontal gyri. While these cortical folds have long been associated with self-control, they’re also essential for working memory and directed attention. According to the scientists, that’s not an accident. ‘These are powerful instincts telling us to reach for the marshmallow or press the space bar,’ Jonides says. ‘The only way to defeat them is to avoid them, and that means paying attention to something else. We call that will power, but it’s got nothing to do with the will.’’” (paragraph 33)

A very complex set of definitions, this paragraph has the heaviest scientific content; this is because Lehrer is listing brain regions, and systematically revealing their function. But he doesn’t let these definitions scare readers off because he introduces a quotation directly after. It’s almost as if he anticipates that readers will skip past the scientific jargon and go straight to the interview research, but those who are straining clinical content out of the article can still benefit.

Have you found any metaphors in this text?  Did you expect to find metaphors or metaphoric language in a scientific text?


“Others start kicking the desk, or tug on their pigtails, or stroke the marshmallow as if it were a tiny stuffed animal.” (paragraph 3)

As early as the third paragraph, metaphors are used. This is curious to find in an article written by a researcher, but not so hard to understand after much more of Lehrer’s writing is read.

“One of Mischel’s favorite metaphors for this model of personality, known as interactionism, concerns a car making a screeching noise. How does a mechanic solve the problem? He begins by trying to identify the specific conditions that trigger the noise. Is there a screech when the car is accelerating, or when it’s shifting gears, or turning at slow speeds? Unless the mechanic can give the screech a context, he’ll never find the broken part.” (paragraph 19)

Bad news for idea conveyance

In thinking about a certain idea, many sentences and ideas can be drawn by using detailed words within this idea.

This sentence, although it’s intentions are good, has no kinetic motion—it doesn’t drive the reader any closer to understanding the whole point. It’s general because of it’s futile use of the word “many,” but that’s not it’s major failing: the second clause details a condition that “can” occur if the writer himself uses “detailed words.” Don’t narrate that good things can come from descriptive writing, show readers that they can.

And what is this “certain idea?” Chances are, if you’re writing this, you know what this idea is, and you shouldn’t cop out by not choosing one. Try this:

In thinking about the significance of reading to your children, there are a multitude of exciting benefits that come to mind.

There. Hapless generality (if that’s your thing) doesn’t do squat...!

Inkshedding experiment

“One of Mischel’s favorite metaphors for this model of personality, known as interactionism, concerns a car making a screeching noise.”

The car making a screeching noise represents the child masking its eyes to hide from the marshmallow. (a) Screeching noises can distract from other immediacies, as can noise from a child who wants to delay their gratification. (b) This is particularly relevant in Lehrer’s discussion of delayed gratification, because the child-subject can learn or be taught strategies to forestall gratification. These skills can be mastered, resulting in all kinds of future benefits for the tested. (c) These benefits stem from the possible metaphor of the screeching car, or the young child covering his or her eyes. (d)


A psychologist, in this example, represents a mechanic whose job it is to determine the source of the noise. Depending his observations (such as the origin of the sound, intensity, and other observational patterns)

Four Loko is the opposite of this study of self-control. Mischel wants his subjects to be able to fight their need of instant gratification, and be able to resist. Four Loko is completely and totally a sinful immediate form of gratification. (e) People need to “screech the car” by keeping their mind from Four Loko. (f)

Don’t! The secret of self-control: First thoughts

The concept of the marshmallow experiment, as a hook, is very effective. Thought-provoking and interesting, the article mirrors the experiment in a way that makes me want to skip to the end and see the conclusion, much like Caroyln Wiesz’s desire to eat the marshmallow.

But whatever happened to this rule?

He said that if she rang a bell on the desk while he was away he would come running back, and she could eat one marshmallow but would forfeit the second. Then he left the room.

It’s curious that there is no mention of test subjects using this button. It seems like they feel ashamed about their impulsive desire to eat the marshmallow, and would rather eat it in privacy. If this is true, it would also be also curious that they don’t think ahead to when the researcher enters the room again and finds the marshmallow gone. Marshmallows don’t disappear into thin air...

The scientists are hoping to identify the particular brain regions that allow some people to delay gratification and control their temper. They’re also conducting a variety of genetic tests, as they search for the hereditary characteristics that influence the ability to wait for a second marshmallow.

How hereditary is the impulse to eat the marshmallow? The fact that it affects them in later life is implied, but how important is “nature” when it comes to delayed gratification? I’m more inclined to believe that it’s a product of upbringing and family culture. In my experience, teens in the information age have all adapted to new technology, becoming addicted to cellphones, television, and social media. Are we following an evolutionary path toward becoming symbiotic with technology? Or are our children merely benefiting from a more tech-infused adolescence?

“The kids who couldn’t delay would often have the rules backwards. They would think that the best way to resist the marshmallow is to stare right at it, to keep a close eye on the goal. But that’s a terrible idea. If you do that, you’re going to ring the bell before I leave the room.”

For a child, perhaps. As children, I feel that we’re more closely in touch with our senses—i.e.,  noises quickly grow annoying, physical touch (like poking) soon becomes bothersome—so the sight of the marshmallow could cause it to take a hold on the child’s mind. Now, in adulthood, I find that ignoring what’s tempting to me will only make me want it more.

“We should give marshmallows to every kindergartner,” he says. “We should say, ‘You see this marshmallow? You don’t have to eat it. You can wait. Here’s how.’”

I’m not alone when I say I wish I could have been told such a thing in kindergarten...

Small object, large subject

Gift cards. Such slogans like “simplify gifting,” “ease of use,” “versatile,” and “just what they wanted.” These are the claims of the makers of American gift cards—that they are a one-time solution to a tough-to-please giftee... or an inexperienced or lazy gifter. Marketing professionals assert that gift cards fill a void in the American gift-giving tradition: by enabling people to let the giftees choose what to buy, they shift the responsibility of the gifter away from designing the ultimately crafted gift and toward gifting the plastic equivalent of cold, hard cash.

Visa gift cards are an example of this phenomenon. The fact that Visa is accepted “everywhere” suggests that the giftee would be able to redeem his or her gift at any time, in any store.

From personal experience, being the recipient of a gift card is something mildly disappointing, but at the same time, acceptable. Giving gift cards project that the gifter would rather not risk picking the wrong gift, and instead, choose the universally-applicable gift card.

The popularity of gift cards suggest the notion that American consumers choose a quick, easy solution to their gifting problems.

Response to Pantene commercial

The Pantene commercial’s ending slogan reads “you can shine,” a blissful idealism stemming from one of two factors: either the near-miraculous deaf violinist’s shining performance, or the fact that she used Pantene shampoo and conditioner hours before, that which launched her into stardom because of the incredible shine of her hair. Regardless, the advertising professionals responsible for the ad seem to know that both of these meanings are likely to get the viewers of the commercial to buy Pantene products: not only did Pantene have a great ad, but it was inspiring, too.

Or, perhaps the ad’s air of self-referential inspiration and its fairy-tale ending were not intended for welcome acceptance; maybe the ad’s over-the-top sense of miracle was intentionally campy, and the ending slogan merely confirmed the suspicions of its eye-rolling viewers. The slogan and meaning would then be interpreted differently, maybe as a playful joke to assert the idea: “you may not be a deaf violinist performing the piece of a lifetime, but you can have her shiny hair.” This idea is partly evidenced by the cinematography during her performance: spotlights shine on her beautiful, pin-straight hair and wind blows up from nowhere, letting the violinist’s hair shine more than a brand new million-dollar diamond ring.

Materialities of Writing: Response to Question 4

In my free time, I enjoy photography, film, and graphic design—especially when it concerns typography. I’ve always been fascinated with typography in fine printed work.

I think this interest could be translated into handwriting and penmanship when it concerns the materiality of writing. An investigation of early written language, its impact on modern languages, and the morphology of their form in pertinence to penmanship and handwriting would be exciting to explore. Perhaps an analysis of early symbols, numbers, and pictographs and their impact on contemporary written languages and visual communication in signage could be viable.

I recently returned from a trip to Germany, and the signs on the Autobahn were particularly interesting because they were designed to be language-independent. I would be interested in examining the similarities between these signs and early pictographs. I hypothesize that their respective visual grammars would be similar, despite the fact that early illustration and visual communication was done in the absence of standard written language, and the modern signs on the Autobahn were designed in order to transcend a multitude of languages.

Materialities of Writing: Response to Question 3

If a culture existed that used only crayons as a method of writing, it would be a curious one. Nevertheless, writing with crayons has its advantages, and this culture would embrace those advantages, turning what we (as part of our culture) view as shortcomings into norms.

Because writing with crayons is more physically challenging than writing with a pen or pencil (or, perhaps, typing on a keyboard), the most renowned writers would be those with enough physical prowess to stay resilient when drafting works. This physical prowess may become tangled with the culture’s perception of their intellectual abilities, forming a more concretely related complex of both physical and mental ability. It also may negatively impact those who possess superior intellectual ability but lack the physical strength to express their extraordinary ideas.

The culture, as a whole, may accept different styles of writing or drawing as essential to their cultural identity because of the likelihood that those who create them were accepting the difficulties of crayon-writing as normal. This could either contribute to an ignorance of legibility in favor of content, or it could foster an obsession with legibility over content, implying that the observing public would be more impressed with a writer’s visual comprehensibility.

If that is the case, the culture may view those that can produce perfectly legible and precise writing (not unlike ours) as the crème de la crème.

Materialities of Writing: Response to Question 1

My approach to answering the question about Emily Dickinson’s poem changed in various ways because of the writing instrument with which I was required to write. Firstly, I realized that I could not conceptualize the response entirely in crayon, so I started a draft that I wrote with pen. After writing three page-length paragraphs, I started to copy my pen-and-paper text to the poster paper.

As I copied to the larger paper, I decided to represent the response in a way different from the way that I wrote my draft. Dividing the paper into three parts, I tried to place each of the three paragraphs in each third, placing them on a slant (representative of Emily Dickinson’s word choice in the poem). After completing the first section, I realized that I couldn’t fit each paragraph into their respective sections, and I would have to separate each paragraph visually by writing them with a differently-colored crayon.

As I moved to the second section, I realized that I could rotate the paper on its center axis, thereby making readers turn their heads—another representation of the poem’s meaning. Perhaps by requiring the reader to move their head (or to rotate the paper), the writing exerted some type of physical control on the reader, changing their perception of the text.

I found that using the crayon was difficult because it rarely maintained a sharp point, and that forced me to constantly adjust the crayon’s writing angle. It also impacted my ability to write legibly. Due to this inconvenience, coupled with the small amount of remaining space I had after the second paragraph, I found myself forgoing words or phrases for more concise ones.