V1: A Glimmer of Hope

The Glimmer

            "John, don't you dare buy a drink, we're loading the busses now." Mrs. Killroy was an exceedingly rotund woman in her late 40's to early 50's. The Orchestra and Guitar teacher at Redland Middle School. She'd only recently taken over after the previous teacher, Mr. Hudson, had left for a better job opportunity at a High School. He was a tough act to follow and because of that Mrs. Killroy was despised by every student who had spent the previous year with Mr. Hudson.

            John didn't bother to respond to her. He felt confident that he could get away with buying a soda even if it directly contradicted his teacher's command. There had been three people in front of him at the soda machine moments before who had ignored Mrs. Killroy's initial instruction to get to the busses. Why should it be any different for John? He had been waiting patiently for every other student to finish getting their drinks, and it was finally felt his turn. That sentiment, of course, lead to him choosing to blatantly ignore the seemingly powerless teacher. As he fished the dollar into the machine, he felt as if he'd escaped his drink-less fate and pushed down on the button for Surge as he turned his head and smiled widely at the teacher. Stop me from buying a drink when everyone else did huh? Hah!

            John must've drawn the short stick of karma that day as apparently the teacher was done being ignored. Her shoes clacked with harsh resonance on the ground as she burst forward and shot her hand in the vending slot. She pulled the surge that John had just bought and paid for and then threw it smugly in the garbage. "GET TO THE BUS!"

            John's pride was injured, his feelings hurt. In his mind he had done everything correctly from waiting patiently, to paying for the drink with his own money. The slight of ignoring the teacher a moment longer to get what he had felt he deserved seemed minimal in comparison to Mrs. Killroy's aggressive act. He felt his throat closing off slightly as he started to feel like crying, but he stuffed the emotion down deep and instead determined to hate Mrs. Killroy with an unyielding and destructive passion.

            This is of course just a brief description of a single event among many that steadily beat down on John until he became a child of sadness and despair, plagued by utter uncaring. A snapshot of the way in which he tended to be misunderstood as well as overdramatic. But its purpose it to show John's state of mind in his darkest hour, when the only thing that he cared at all for was music. 

Tension: How to Build it.

I was up by six in the morning yanking clothes on and grabbing my bag before flying out the door. I heaved down the sidewalk through the drizzling rain to a crescendo of monstrous barks as I flew past house after darkened house. As the doggy decrescendo finally played out I started to take a breath as I simultaneously heard a quick inhale directly beside me.

The throaty bark of the monstrous fiend beside me was enough to make me jump several feet off the ground. The fence that separated us acted like a counter for the dog to lay its arms on while it stared at me with it’s menacing little eyes. I rushed on past it but the black skin hot breath lingered in my mind.

When I arrived at my destination there were several other kids waiting around. Each one of them was older and more experienced than me. They all had dark skin, which scared me, and they had a funny way of talking. They grew quiet as I stood watching them. One by one they turned and looked at me as the dead silence started gaining momentum again and the whispers began to circulate. That was exactly why I’d never wanted to ride the bus to school.

Open Form Prose

How is a 60 second podcast like writing open form prose?

I'd say its pretty straight forward; Open-form prose is basically inviting the audience into a conversational setting where you can be yourself, tell a story, and communicate experiential emotion and knowledge. It's about forgetting the "rules to writing" so that you can just relax and let the narrative flow out in a very natural way. Open-form prose can be planned or unplanned, simple or complex, and either grammatically correct or not. In other words it can be anything the writer wants. As an example, the sentence I just wrote could have given off several different vibes. It could have been personal and relaxed; "In other words it can be anything you want," but instead I chose to make it slightly more professional by referring to the writer as impersonal. Changing just one word is enough to change the entire feel and flow of a narrative.

All that being said, the videocast that I did - in place of the required 60 second podcast - Was similar to writing open-form prose because, even though I planned it out, it was a very relaxed and personal message with a Pathos appeal to the listener. By inserting music created by me I was able to delve to an even deeper level of emotional appeal as well as to establish Ethos and to meet the exigency of the audience by providing them with a clear example of the story I was telling them.

Videocast: A History of Beauty.

Blog 1: A Little Thought Goes a Long Way

The obvious audience for college level writing would be a student's professors, administrators, and peers. Throughout my entire college experience the one element that has been consistently lacking in my own and my peer's writing was an adequate level of thought and time spent. It's likely that professors expect that the student puts in at least the same amount of time that he/she puts in. As a peer, there have been many times where I either felt ashamed of the fact that I was forcing my poorly written work onto other students, or times where I was frustrated by the lack of effort on the part of other students. It all boils down to time spent. If a student writes a paper for instance, and submits it without rereading it, then the audience then has to deal with tons of errors and is much less likely to appreciate the paper. If the same student takes the exact same paper, but instead of submitting it right away decides to take five minutes to read it, then they will have found a multitude of errors which can then be corrected and will no longer distract the reader from the core of what was written.

Tons of other groups are included in the audience for college writing. Companies, Grant Funders, Graduate programs, and even beyond that there are people who are affect by college writing whether it be fully developed or not. I think in this particular scenario the most fitting answer (although untrue) would be, "Practice makes perfect." The only way to guarantee that a writer meets the expectations of his/her audience is to just keep writing and to receive as much feedback as possible from positive and knowledgeable sources until writing becomes a honed skill and habit.