Rob's 328 Blog

here!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

2005-04-23T11:36:00.000-07:00

what you type for this post goes here.

The Style Blog Writing Assingment: Prompt 5

2005-03-13T20:00:00.000-08:00

What is writing ‘Style’? Whether the question is framed within the confines of the books The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, or Williams’ Style: Toward Clarity and Grace, or it is open-ended and left hanging amongst the great unponderables of existence, it’s a big question.

In this case, the question is the narrower of the two; but also far more deceptive. We could be tempted to assume that the two aforementioned books, Elements, and Style, have different definitions – they do not. Even though Elements is a scant 108 relatively small pages, and the more regulation size Style weighs in at 212 pages, they both lead to the same conclusion.

Elements and Style are very different, not just in their respective sizes or publish dates, but how they convey their information. Style is certainly an instructional text, while Elements is literally a pocket reference book; both books also have their own separate uses, teaching versus reminding.

Their shared conclusion, though, is that writing ‘Style’ is writing that’s properly executed in both form and function. That is to say, a properly styled document is correct in both tone and syntax. An example would be sending a quick email to a friend, and sending a feasibility report to the head of your company.

We would most certainly use sentences, punctuation, and correct grammar when a job is on the line, but would likely be far more lax in a short message asking what somebody’s weekend plans are. In fact, a document that is written in the wrong tone can lead to problems due to misunderstandings, all writers must remember that readers have no aural or visual clues to help understand a situation.

Beyond simple misunderstandings, applying correct writing style can save time by reducing the number of explanations needed to get a point across. Unlike many languages from the past, Greek and Latin for example, English has been constructed with very specific rules, which can be broken, and many thousands of words to be used.

Using the simple sentence structure is the preferred way for the vulgar (example of word options, read as “normal”) population to write, without deviating too much from it. As a writer, however, gains confidence and a deeper understanding of the situations he finds himself in, he can properly break the rules. As is the case with life in general, breaking accepted rules usually makes a poignant statement, whether good or bad.

A prime example of breaking the rules is a writer who is considered by many to be one of the greatest modern writers, James Joyce, the writer of classics such as Ulysses and the Dubliners. Joyce will probably best be known for a book that has been referred to as “unreadable,” by many critics, Finnegan’s Wake.

Unreadable is a strong word, papers that go through a wash cycle are usually unreadable, Finnegan’s Wake is unreadable for a different reason, it broke virtually every writing convention. To be honest, with the exception of being written in horizontal lines, written left to right, and having had the pages numbered in ascending sequential order, Finnegan’s Wake has nothing to do with the English language. At this point, anyone unfamiliar with the book should go to a library and open it; the first page explains the book better than I ever could.

The reason this tangent has been gone on is simple – it illustrates that breaking conventions can make what might otherwise be an unremarkable story iconic. As students, we must remember though that we are neither James Joyce, nor likely to find the time to shatter the literary world. For us, it is far easier to follow conventions that have been created over the course of hundreds of years, hammered out by the likes of Shakespeare and Chaucer. While it may seem boring to have Spot run fast and Jane chase after him, Dostoyevsky followed these rules and we should as well.

Truth is the highest thing that man may keep.

Geoffrey Chaucer. Canterbury Tales, The Frankeleines Tale. Line 11789.

2 Writing Metaphores

2005-03-11T18:48:00.000-08:00

A metaphor without some type of explaination always seems a bit cheap, so here it goes:

1. Writing is surviving in the woods

2. A cd (both in its physical form and its metaphysical form) is writing

Ha-cha-cha-cha-cha

See you later.

Blog Prompt 4

2005-03-10T19:31:00.000-08:00

“It so often happens that when we are at our lowest, when even the dimmest flicker of hope is lost to the winds of despair, a freak occurrence can salvage our petty lives.”

I can’t really say for sure who said that, but it always sticks out in my mind. It’s close to, if not quite exactly the capital T truth, but once in a while when we’re ready to give up, shut down, and crack open a beer, luck throws something at our feet – in this case it’s Thomas Fuller. Don’t misunderstand, I’m certainly not calling him a freak, but it is rather strange that after having skimmed through a plethora of blogs, he had something I could write about.

“College students today tend to write much more poorly than they did a few generations ago. We’re sloppy, we make lots of mistakes. Quite frankly, Williams had a tougher task than Strunk and white did. He apparently really wanted us to understand the ideas behind how to write well, but in our society instant gratification, most people simply aren’t going to appreciate his efforts.”

Beautiful, first let’s bite generally into the first two sentences, “College students today tend to write much more poorly than they did a few generations ago. We’re sloppy, we make lots of mistakes.” True, or not, many history types theorize that we as humans tend to think that we live in the worst times and are nearing destruction. From the ancient Greeks onwards people have written about the end of the world in their own lifetime, we could therefore extrapolate that theory from destruction to stupidity. The idea is that people are faced with their own demise/insecurities and project that onto the rest of the world.

If you take all the relative factors into account, such as the availability of higher education and the number of things students are asked to produce, mistakes would probably level out quite nicely. I know when my grandfather was in college he wasn’t expected to produce a professional portfolio, a major design project, a speech, and numerous typewritten papers, for one class. As volume of production increases, so does the number of mistakes, but the proportions will stay the same.

Onward to, “Quite frankly, Williams had a tougher task than Strunk and white did. He apparently really wanted us to understand the ideas behind how to write well, but in our society instant gratification, most people simply aren’t going to appreciate his efforts.” Yeouch, true, many people simply are too dense to understand Dick and Jane sentences, but at the college level, do we need to have our hands held on the way to the john? Don’t mistake me here, I’ve met many engineering students who could use a good ninth grade grammar class, but will they take it? Not likely.

Consider the stop light. We stop at it because that’s what we do. IF the first time you approached a stop light the driving instructor said, “see that red light? It’s red because beginning in the 16^th century carriages were put under stringent controls in England to reduce the number of accidents, it was then established that a red light meant you were facing the rear of a vehicle of some type and should be wary of running into it...” By this time the student has run through the intersection causing a massive accident, once in a while we just need to be reminded that red means stop.

The driving instructor can be commended for trying to paint the big picture taking into account socio/political factors throughout the development of modern driving rules, but it’s also entirely possible that in all that chaff the most important point could slip through our fingers.

http://tfullerjr328.blogspot.com/

The Style Blog Writing Assignment: Prompt Three

2005-03-10T17:41:00.000-08:00

As far as comparing the contents of my first blog entry with the things in the Williams book, Style: Toward Clarity and Grace, I'm not sure I can. It is far more spread out than The Elements of Style, and the two really are hardly comparable.

Where as Strunk and White had a nice quick lookup feel, Williams’ book was surprisingly gray, without any eye-catching phrases like, “Do not construct awkward adverbs” (75), called out by numbers and formatting. For me, Style, is remarkably unstylish and difficult to use.

Of course I realize that by saying this, I’ve opened myself up to torrents of criticism that will no doubt wash over me like a coastal third world country. My only redemption lies in the “for me,” portion of the statement; that is to say that at this point in my life and intellectual development, Williams is more a hindrance than anything else.

At this point, I’ve already managed to cultivate an understanding of written language, along with its rules. Williams’ book seems to come from the perspective that poor writing is caused by a lack of knowledge, and it most certainly is – at times. Beyond ignorance, however, there exist other mitigating factors that can affect the quality of a document: a rushed writer, a too narrow or wide topic, a lack of interest, or merely misunderstanding an assignment. These are just a few of the problems that plague school documents, let alone “real world” situations.

In short, Williams’ book requires a reader to sit down and meticulously take notes on what they’re reading, much the same way a high school grammar book does. While books of this sort are useful to those who are less proficient at an activity, they can appear cluttered to people who need to quickly reference some idea. This leads us directly into the face of S&W’s The Elements of Style, which is not really comparable to Style; it is a reference book.

Elements, while it has quite a bit of actual text, is a compilation of rules, as opposed to the instructional book that Style is. For my tastes and needs, Elements is a far more useful and memorable text merely because it supplies reminders, rather than teaching the reader how to invent, or reinvent the proverbial wheel. A wise man once said, “knowing what to leave in is as important as knowing what to leave out,” as far as I’m concerned, Elements left out what they needed to for me.

To sum it up, Williams and S&W set out to do different things, Williams created a book to teach people how to write well, whereas S&W created a book to remind people how to write well.

The Style Blog Writing Assignment: Prompt Two

2005-02-20T18:07:00.000-08:00

This example was taken from a usability study I (and a number of team members) did for the ICT department about the old my.emich web service. I’m not sure who it was that did this part, but the odds are it wasn’t me; I was focused on doing the graphics integration. I am willing to take the heat for it though because I had the final say about the report before it moved out of our hands.

At any rate, this selection was part of the project final report that detailed some basic demographic information about the participants of the study. This particular paragraph was the second paragraph introducing the section and introduced the first of our pie charts.

The original text is as follows:

As requested, our sample population consisted primarily of non-EMU students who’ve never used the My.Emich system. We did this to minimize the effects of prior exposure to the system, and help recreate the reactions of new students when they first encountered the email system. Of the test participants, only 4 of the 24 had used the system prior to testing, further, only three of the participants were EMU students.

I revised it to:

As was previously agreed, our sample population consisted primarily of non-EMU students who’ve never used the My.Emich system. This was done to minimize the effects of test contamination due to prior exposure to the system. Of the test participants, four of 24 had used the system prior to testing, of those, three were currently enrolled as EMU students or faculty.

The first change was “requested” to “suggested”, this was simply a difference in word usage. For this part, I had been the one who’d been in the particular meeting referred to in this sentence. The discussion about a sample population contained no requests, instead, after exhaustive discourse on the subject, we came to a conclusion; nobody asked us to do it.

I trimmed off the second clause in the second because it was superfluous, it may have been filler, or leading to something else that got cut.

The major issue of clarity in this paragraph comes at the end, where we introduce some numbers about the test participants. The statement that, “only 4 of the 24 had used the system prior to testing, further, only three of the participants were EMU students,” seems to suggest that three students had been or currently were enrolled students, and one was a hacker or something who’d penetrated the system and played with it before we tested them.

The use of “further” in that sentence makes the ‘three participants’ reference ambiguous. For example, the three could be referring to the previously called out population of four, or the other 20 people, or all 24 of the participants.

All in all, this was shockingly muddy language that I’m surprised slipped by six people on the way out our door.

Blog Prompt Two

2005-02-18T08:23:00.000-08:00

Since I haven't been able to get onto Steve's site and read the assignment, I don't really have anything to put here.

The Style Blog Writing Assignment: Prompt One

2005-02-13T10:13:00.000-08:00

In reference to the question about the book, The Elements of Style, by Strunk and White, the useful elements are many, the useless one is strange. That is to say, from my point of view, many of the style elements are good, but one seemed almost dangerous to want to apply to the bulk of writing I’ve experienced with other students; however, since I’m not sure about the audience for this book, I’ll have to trust in their choices.

The two elements I found most useful to myself were more reminders than revelations, but they’re also necessary for me to keep in mind lest I fall back to bad habits. The first important and useful element is number 12, “Do not construct awkward adverbs” (75), granted, I don’t do this frequently enough for it to be a critical problem, but I like to do it. Awkward words are all around us, the very term ‘awkward’ is difficult enough; these words too, seem to vary from person to person, probably having to do with the ways in which we learn to read.

For me, words such as tangledly and tiredly are fine, in fact they sound nice to my own ear (75). I need to keep in mind that most of my readers don’t work in words the way I do. My next useful choice relates to this previous point; number 19, “Do not take shortcuts at the cost of clarity” (80).

“Write things out” (75), is something that I forget at times. In this department, we usually run into two kinds of people, those who think everyone is dumber than them, and those who think everyone is as smart as them. We can easily find documents that are full of repetitions where the author chose to write out the name of an organization the whole way through because they’re afraid the reads wouldn’t be able to keep up with an abbreviation or two.

My problem is in assuming that my audience is as ITK as I am, which means I often forget to write out abbreviations and acronyms first. No longer can I procrastinate in my censure of the rule I find to be wrong. The “Avoid fancy words,” of number 14 seems just slightly out in place in a book that claims to aid in the use of written English.

Granted, at times, authors can go overboard with the use of ten dollar words, but they probably aren’t concerned with what Strunk and White have to say about it in the first place. On the other hand, most young writers I’ve encountered seem almost afraid to use any word over five letters, which probably stems from a lack of mettle. The fact that Strunk and White would make a statement to impressionable young writers that reinforces their uncertainty is disturbing at best.

I will concede that there have been a few instances when a young writer got ahold of a thesaurus and things spun wildly out of control, but to say that we should avoid these words is a sever fix. A short discussion about audience or tonal language might be better here than a blanket statement, but I digress.

At any rate, The Elements of Style helped to remind me of some bad habits I have, and gave me some insight into the difficulties of others. I just hope that they know what they’re doing in telling people to go easy on the big words.

Blog Intro

2005-02-07T10:31:00.000-08:00

I am a 23 y/o college student currently interred at Eastern Michigan University. My major is Technical Writing, with a minor in Classical Studies. I am currently employed as a manager at a liquor store in Carleton, MI. I consider myself a loner, and am a huge fan of physics and astronomy

I've got quite a few prior writing experiences - editing master's thesis proposals, five year writing major, various web writing for the Salvation Army Michigan, some short term professional work, and various little side projects.

Writing is a skill that virtually any human being, with the proper training, can do - few of us, though, have the ability to do it well. To further muddy the water, some people are much better at different facets of writing than other people. Steve King may be a great novel and story writer, but he probably couldn't write a software manual as good as, say, Steve Benninghoff.

Like many skills, writing is something you gain a feel for, thinking in terms of how something would look and sound on paper is an ability that comes with use. Also, learning to find ones proper voice and style is also difficult, these things cannot easily be taught without doing.

I define style as the way a document is written. For example, certain companies require documents to be set up in specific ways; the font, size of headings, doc layout, and spelling rules amongst other things contribute to the style of things written.