Blogging is the one thing I feel that I’ve learned in this class with Professor Wolffe. He’s got great ideas and is a great teacher, I’d love to take him again, but my connection with technology has never been great. I probably picked that up in my early years with no computer and no TV. Books are, and always will be, my first love. I tend to handwrite most of my projects. But blogging holds a certain charm for me, even if I’m just going on about something no one cares about.

It could be because no one can tell me to be quiet. Motormouth–as I’m fondly known as–, Nina Tales and Stories (tales are worth 5 to 10 minutes; stories, at least 15), or just talking and then realizing no one is listening is something I’ve dealt with my whole life. And learning to be quiet leads to even more questions–are you okay? Why aren’t you talking? Blogging I can talk to people and the ones who want to listen can listen, and those who don’t care for what I have to say don’t read them.

Maybe I’ll keep blogging and talk about my stories, my journey as a writer. And if I do, I can only hope it’ll help someone out there and not be just for me. At least I learned that something I can take back with me this semester could be useful, if not enlightening.

http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AYhI8a3ThaypZGZ2dDc1MnFfMGY3Y3BuM2Ny&hl=en

http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AYhI8a3ThaypZGZ2dDc1MnFfMjdxcDNudGd4&hl=en

http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AYhI8a3ThaypZGZ2dDc1MnFfMWQ2dzZjdmNu&hl=en

The first piece is a project that I previously spoke about in my blog. Here is the very long comment I got on the back page of my paper:

“The End” is crossed out.

There is no trigger for the dad to change his mind. Maybe the art teacher brings over Lizette’s portfolio, or he misses her and goes into her room and sees copies of her application materials- the artwork, the letters, the resume- and realizes that she is really talented. Maybe someone else in the art field tells him how talented she is. Then he has to acknowledge that an MD was his dream, never hers.

It would be nice if there were a symbol of Dad’s change of heart- maybe he tells her on the phone that a surprise is coming, and its tickets to the Picasso show opening at MOMA.

You’ve done what I told you, and put in lots of action and dialog tags. However, some of the action is mundane and should be skipped over. Do we need to know the woman went into her should bag, pulled out a manilla envelope and handed it to Liz? Why not just she handed Liz a manila envelope. All of the extra actions drag the story. Use your details for meaningful actions.

Also, group your actions and dialouge tags. Sometimes when you have an action, you don’t need the tag.

I crossed out all the interruptions (ok, well,oh,yeah, and names). You’ll find the text reads fine without them. They become annoying to a reader. Ok for spoken but not ok for written conversation.

Don’t tell the reader how or why the characters do things. Part of the fun of reading is is figuring those things out. Show how through actions; show why through context.

Liz and Jane are overly cheery sometimes, praising each other. You could do more with Jane’s financial situation (her reaction). Mrs. Holinday is clueless.

You use setting well to advance the plot and show character.

Voice is overly wordy (narrator). Simplfy. Liz and Jane could be more distinguishable from each other.

I don’t think the scholarship should fall into her lap. Besides that, the trigger and the symbol, plot is effective.

I think you’re still feeling your way with new techniques and haven’t quite found the right balance yet. This is keeping your writing from sounding light and natural. Ease up a little and trust your natural voice a little more.

93/100

I’ve never written so much in my life over the course of one semester. Three writing intensive classes are not to be taken lightly with a full work schedule. I haven’t take a single test all semester, but I oddly feel more drained than the days of Bio 101 and Abnormal Psych.

But there is a lesson to take in all that we do in life.

As I tend to do with all major transitions in life paths, I dove in head first with the first stretch of my Writing Arts major.

I can’t swim for the life of me, but I always dive in and see how long I can stay afloat before I start to sink and my lungs fill up with water. I usually stop treading water and wait for the better option to leap from it’s tall white chair to come save my stupid ass.

This time out, I feel like I’m getting the hang of this floating thing. If I survived this semester, I can survive the rest. Granted, I may ease my foot off the metaphorical gas pedal, but at the end of the day I’m still driving the car.

This semester, and this module specifically, have provided me with an opportunity to write for an audience outside of myself and my professors. By expanding the audience to a more public forum, I have started to become more comfortable with expressing my thought with my words.

Hopefully this semester has given fellow students something to take with them in the sense of learning something about themselves. College doesn’t just have to be about learning what the books and teachers tell you to learn. If you allow it to, it can provide an excellent opportunity to learn something about yourself when you look back and reflect on your experiences.

This site also allowed me to think that maybe…there is hope for the human race. We aren’t heartless drones after all. My favorite so far is from Michelle Bloom. She says, “how i interpret, how i see, feel, know, much more in paintings than anything i think, even words, even if words communicate easier with a bigger audience”. I can relate to this in a different way, in how words will make much more sense to me than a painting or a math equation. Finally I would like to say that while writing this, my computer crashed, and I had lost that quote. Sad, I started clicking through the interactive website once again and FOUND the same quote. I found this amazing, as there are so many, but if you do not specify a date, you will end up getting the “feel” words from the last few hours. Being able to click on the quote and being sent over to the person’s blog is rather useful as well.

But the second time I went on the website, what got to me was more the content. Do people know about this? I’m sure I used feel in my statuses on facebook without realizing I was being put on a website for everyone to see. But that’s not the point…or is it?

And that led me to think that maybe the point was for people to feel–pun intended–closer because everyone feels. It’s a human thing, and so we’re all together and connected on this one thing. We all feel. And this website shows one persons desire to bring us all together.

Either that or he was just feeling bored and creative one day.

Whatever. I know I can’t spell, and I’m doing the best I can to make sure that people can still read what I can write. And, no, my homeschooling childhood has nothing to do with this particular shortcoming. It’s mostly my inability to retain things like i before e and words like supercalifragiliciousexpealidocious. Is there even a right spelling of that word?

Of course, I have accepted this shortcoming. I mean, that’s what spell check is for, right? Unfortunately, one of my best friends has NOT accepted this. Why? Because she’s an English Major.

I have nothing against English Majors. They seem to be great people, even if they are so nerdy that they can tell you the difference between literature and novels, or why we should all learn important life lessons from the Producers and how their idea of light reading is all of Shakespeares plays. But the problem I have with them is when they start to read my writers.

It’s like I’m back in high school, with pen markings all over my writing. But the worst part is: it’s not even about the writing.

No, it’s about the spelling. And the grammar. Like the fact that apparently I still write in fragments or don’t have commas in the right place and somehow managed to spell wierd wrong. Again.

And next time I give her something I wrote, it’s going to happen all over again, the next time I give her something. It’s probably my fault, but I can’t help having an innate sense that she’s going to finally get that I don’t need more grammar mistakes pointed out–after all, I went through high school like everyone else–I just want to know whether or not the plot works or if my characters are believable. But she can’t help being an English Major any more than I can help writing.

Don’t even get me started on what happens when you tell a math major you’re failing an elementary statistics course…

I’m sure that most people are well aware of the arguments between twilighters and non-twilighters, since this series has blow up to be almost–almost–as big as the Harry Potter series. Lucky Stephanie Meyer. So I’m not going to waste your time and talk about the arguments. No, I’m trying to point out that arguing about it is completely pointless. If there’s one thing I learned from being a catholic in a Baptist School for four years, it’s that arguing with someone who has a closed mind isn’t going to do squat.

And why does it matter is people are getting fangs or trying to be paler? Is this different than when my friends planned a Harry Potter party, complete with Butterbeer and Ice Mice? Or the fact that I have two lightsabers, all the Star Wars movies and the books in my room, and a clone trooper picture on my wall? So, please, what makes Twilight different? Are guys threatened by Edward, a fictional character? Are girls killing themselves because Jacob isn’t real? No, people are just acting the way we always act when there’s a new star and a new plot to follow. It’ll die down.

So, please, no more twilight arguments. And no more judging people who read them–if I hear one more “You’re one of them?” while I’m trying to finish Breaking Dawn, I might hurl the book at them. And that’s no joke, not when 754 pages are coming your way.

My last required-by-class blog topic… review a Twitter related application. My Twitter related application… Twitteriffic.

Twitteriffic is a Mac specific, Twitter spun instant messaging application. It docks on the side of your desktop and automatically refreshes as your fellow twits tweet. There is a text box to post your own tweets and there is the option to reply to other tweets.

Essentially, it allows you to keep up with your Twitter account without having a web browser open. It’s a condensed version but it helps prevent complete and utter distraction. You can tweet without getting caught up visiting other peoples profiles or searching for other twits.

The relevance of this application is just that. You can dock it on the side of the screen and go about attending to your daily tasks without getting absorbed into the Twit-o-sphere.

Anybody who has used Twitter understands what I’m talking about. You go on to check in, maybe post a tweet or two, then before you know it, an hour passes by and your scrambling to logout and go about your day. Twitterific helps eliminate that sand trap.

It’s a simple application. There’s not much to it and there’s not much to say about it. But the positive effect it has on a users productivity is nothing to sneeze at. Distraction has been a continual critique on social networking as a whole. Twitterific can help silence those critics, at least a little bit.

I was intrigued and interested in who these people were that she followed and found a need to be connected by the purse. From knowing her, I kinda knew what to expect. And I was spot on.

Outside of her circle of friends, the list of people she follows goes something like this:
Nick Jonas, Adam Lambert, Jimmy Fallon, Justin Timberlake, Jesse McCartney, Taylor Swift, Perez Hilton, Ashley Tisdale, Ellen DeGeneres, and a handful of other lame celebrities.

This is my gripe with Twitter. It gives a local girl next door with a handful of friends this unfathomable connection to a playground of celebutards where she stalks and watches and grasps on to every last tweet the Jonas brothers thumb from their Twitterberries.

Am I being a bit harsh? Hardly. Case in point: This same girl logs on to Perez Hilton’s blog twice a day to get the inside scoop on all the celebrity gossip of the day.

This girl is pre-med. Intelligent. Bright. Distracted.

Who am I to knock another person’s interests? I imagine not everybody gives half a shit about things I’m interested in, like boxing and music that never sees the top 40 charts. I follow a guy by the name of R.A. The Rugged Man… yeah, seriously, that’s his name… I follow him because he’s an abstract hip hop artist and a boxing enthusiast. But at the end of the day there is a difference between a legitimate interest and a celebrity infatuation.

I should have never chosen this person to write this post about being that I have a deep-rooted, underlying annoyance for tabloid gossip junkies, but then again this is my space to write within.

But I’m a nice guy sometimes. To make up for my negative rant, I would like to add in a bonus Twitterer observation by going back to Mr. Rugged Man. As I mentioned, he is an abstract hip hop artist and a boxing enthusiast. If you browse through the people he follows on Twitter, you will find a majority of boxers and up and coming artists. This is where I point to the silver lining in the the clouds.

I don’t know how many times I have pointed out the pros and cons of social networking over the course of this semester. The truth is, it is all in how you use what is offered to you. There’s the option to use them to connect with people of like interests (and career paths) and build networks virtually rather that in the actual physical world, and there’s the option to go star-crazy and let your brain turn to a mushy, gossip laden paper weight. You can be professional about it, or you can be disillusioned and distracted. The choice is ultimately up to you.

As we, the people, twist and turn while adjusting to new media technologies and the way they change our lives, industries must in turn learn to do the same.

I read an article this afternoon by Arianna Huffington in which she defends her hybrid form of journalism against the lashings dealt by the tongues of corporate dinosaurs like Rupert Murdoch. I used “dinosaurs” as a metaphor because much like Rupert Murdoch, dinosaurs did not adapt to their environment.

Journalism became stagnate during the years leading up to the Internet boom. Even after, journalists in the newspaper business failed to report on the lead up to the Iraq War and the looming financial disaster. In complicated times, we need to deploy complicated tactics.

New media has that ability to compliment journalistic practices to produce what Huffington referred to as a “hybrid” form of journalism. With the ability to incorporate words with images, articles with videos, and a public forum supported by comment boards and blogs, journalism has no place to go but up. Right?

Not if old dinosaurs refuse to adapt to the changing times and don’t rethink and reinvent their way of production. Consumers know what the want. They have seen the light, so to speak. They know what options are available. Better options.

YouTube threatens television networks who refuse to accept it as a competent competitor. The Huffington Post threatens local and corporate newspapers alike who sit idly without producing a quality website to attract online readers.

With the rise of blogs and vlogs and their volunteered contributions by citizen journalists, the rules of the game changed. No longer does the phrase, “you get what you pay for,” apply. Understandably, professional journalism comes with a price tag. Let the suits figure out the details of splitting up the tab. At the end of the day, it will be their spin on revenue generation that will make or break their existence.