What is Style? Part 2

Honestly, my perception of what style is has not really changed. I still think that someone's style is a term that shoudl eb used to describe the way that that person writes. However, a few more kinds of styles have been brought to my attention aside from informative or narrative.

I never really viewed comic writing as being a writing style. When we did the project about Scott McCloud's book "Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art", it made me see comics in a new light. I am not saying that I completely enjoyed reading his book, but it definitely gave me a new respect for the people who read and write comics. I also never looked at YouTube videos as a form of writing. I never really thought about what was being said could have been derived from a script.

I also learned that there are many easy ways to make your writing better. If you use examples of the rules that we covered in Williams and/or Strunk and White, you can clean up your writing with ease. There were definitely some things that I found myself to be guilty of, like being too wordy at times, which I plan to remedy in my future works of writing. Even though the books were a little dry and boring, there was a lot of valuable information inside their covers.

I had never considered writing to be a technology, either. It never really had occur ed to me that writing was something that had to be developed over time since it something that I have always done. In Baron's "From Pencils to Pixels" he chronicles the journey of the written word. It is really amazing how far everything has come from the origins of writing. I guess I kind of developed a new respect for writing as well. I never realized that there used to be people who feared it or even hated it like Socrates. It is hard to imagine what the world would be like without having all of the knowledge that we have at out fingertips being so easily accessible. Thankfully, we will never have to find out.

Peer Review Recap Part 4

Peer review was more useful to me in the beginning of the course. I would present an actual draft of my work and have my peers critique it. However, as the semester went on, the helpfulness of peer review kind of went to the wayside. It is really hard to get attempt to provide a meaningful draft when your peers are not going to. Add in the pressure of having things that would actually be due to turn in for grade due on the same days as peer review essays, and you have not much motivation to complete a full draft.

I think that I have learned to be honest with other people about their writing. If you sugar coat it for them, they will not learn anything. Fear of hurting someones feelings can just lead to them turning in a piece of bad writing, which would probably be more detrimental to them in the long run. If something sucks, let them know!

I have learned to take my classmates' advice into consideration. There are a lot of good writers in your classes when you get to this level in your education. Some are really insightful. Granted, there are still those that don't know what they are doing or talking about, but there are not too many of those.