paper 4

Why do I write you ask? I write because there are constantly too many thoughts going on in my head for me to handle. I need to release them, see the words to make sense of them. Once they are written, my head doesn’t have to worry about remembering them. I can go back and focus on different thoughts at any time. Writing has become a library for my brain; stacks and stacks of documentation. That’s all my writing really is: my thoughts. Writing them has led to even greater ideas and connections that I’m sure I would have never been able to achieve before. There is so much running through my mind at all times that it can be overwhelming, especially because I’m the type of person that cannot let things go.

I want nothing more than for people to see things the way I see them. Joan Didion also feels this way about her writing and explains in her essay, “Why I Write” that, “In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.”(Didion 1). I have all of these strong feelings and opinions and I want others to look at and hear what I have to say and hopefully, agree with me. Nothing is simple and everything matters; every little detail of every little thing can cause a great impact. I truly believe that the smallest change, such as whether or not it is pouring rain outside, can affect everything and everyone. Didion is right when she claims, “Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel.” (Didion 4). We may not have all the answers but that is why we write in the first place, to find answers. Over-analyzing these small things around me is what causes my need to write. Eventually, those thoughts turn into stories and those stories turn into scripts, and those scripts turn into TV shows and movies. But none of those things would be possible without something so simple: sentences. 

A sentence starts out like...a seed on the ground, but not one that has been carefully planted. Instead, one that has been blown to the ground by the wind and just hopes to be picked up by the Earth's arms and formed into a full blown flower. It has no control of where it will end up but wants to be meaningful and beautiful. The seed then becomes a planted idea and continues to grow. It may need to overcome obstacles its environment will throw its way, like storms and animals, trying to stop its development. Turning into a flower will be the seed’s end of the journey until another seed from the flower falls off and starts its own journey to be significant.

Advice for those of you just starting that journey? You have to stop being scared. Stop worrying about who will or will not like what you have to say. You need to be able to believe in your ideas and opinions so that others can too. Build something that you love by writing every thought you have down. It does not matter how stupid or pretentious you may feel at the moment because it’s what is truly going on in your head. To be a great writer, to be able to push meaning out of your ideas, you need to understand the way that you think, and in order to understand your thoughts, you need to first accept them.

And maybe you think you already do understand, but I think you’re wrong. You have definitely tried to hide certain thoughts about life, death, love, etcetera out of shame.  We all do, but that is the line; the fenced in walls that prevent great words from coming together to make something important. Some advice for those who just started writing? Break down the walls you build around yourself and learn how to just be you.  Your writing will follow your lead in risking the judgement and rejection. 

I’m a writer and I don’t mean I write essays and assignments for classes because I’m being forced to. I mean I write to create something worthwhile. I do it for myself and I couldn’t care less about all those teachers and professors throughout my life who have told me that I cannot write. They’re wrong. I wouldn’t have made it this far in my life if I wasn’t a writer. My scripts wouldn’t transcribe to film and TV and the great communication and relationships that I have between my friends and family would not exist. That’s why I am going to push aside all those who ever told me that I wasn’t good enough. Watch me prove you wrong.

Works Cited:

1. Didion, Joan. Why I Write. 5 December 1976. New York Times Book Review. May 8th, 2011.

Presentation Reflection: Chapter 6

Our presentation on chapter 6 "Refashioned Dialogues" presented was clear and easy to follow. Communication, dialogue specifically, is always changing and growing with technology. Digital text has changed the way we speak with one another and our presentation had a strong emphasis on that.
We wanted to take a light humorous approach to prove some of the points we made. I think this was an effective way to make the subject more relatable and not boring. An example of this would be when we used the Movie poster from Hoodwinked. This may have started out as a joke to us because Bolter used a word like hoodwinked and it was the only thing that caught our attention on that specific page, but then we found this movie. Learning about how this movie was collaborated from classic fairytale characters made it have actual relevance to our presentation. It related to how fairytales used to be spoken orally and how stories have changed in dialogue to printed text to digital text. I think it helped the class pay attention and want to listen. We also used different mediums to communicate the chapter, visually stimulating the class.


An image of a New York Times newspaper and a tablet with the same New York Times edition showed how digital text is trying to copy the look of printed text and even how print text is trying to look more digital. We were asked why we thought that was happening and my response was because of commercialism and money. People who would prefer a digital form of text are more likely to buy a printed text that looks like digital text because it appeals to them and their needs. More and more books and newspapers are trying to look like eBooks and webpages. The same thing has been happening with websites and blogs trying to replicate books, notebooks, and physical paper. We chose the two productions of Taylor Mali's poem because it really showed the difference of communication between visually watching him speak the words and visually watching the words as he said them. We used a bunch of other images to similarly support our points.



If I could have changed anything about the presentation, I would have allotted more time to relate Bolter's chapter to even more modern day changes in dialogue. If we could have incorporated text messages and Instant messengers like AIM, facebook chat and gchat, we could have related how dialogue changes to each and everyone firsthand.
Text messaging has changed dialogue and the way we communicate forever and I feel like it would have brought on a million more points with Bolter's chapter about refashioned dialogues. Short hands, incorrect grammar and many other issues within our language becomes apparent when looking at text messages. These can be seen as obstacles to text remediating to digital forms and it would have been interesting to hear what the rest of the class had to say about it.

Paper 3

This is not new news. I could have predicted this. You could have predicted this. My ten year old cousin could have predicted this. That man who held the door open for you this morning could have predicted this. Writing is constantly changing. It does not take an expert scholar to figure that out. It is just common knowledge for anyone who is observant of their society and it’s surroundings. The materiality of writing has always been changing. So people used to write with sticks and now we type everything onto computers and word processors; just because the way we output text has changed does not mean the text is different. The text is still just words and words need to evolve with whoever is using them. It is completely logical for writing to be adapted into digital forms today. Our language evolves with these texts, creating new means of communication and forming dialogues within these texts. Connections that would have been impossible ten years ago are now second nature between writers and readers and print text and digital text.

Comparing printed books, magazines and newspapers to tablets and blogs and ebooks has become tiresome. Again, they are all the same words, they are just in different formats. It can be brought down to about two main different factors: mediums of communicating and distributing information to keep up with the latest technology available and personal preference of how exactly people want to communicate and distribute that information. 

Preference can become reliant on a generation’s way of thinking. The past twenty-five to thirty years have been full in the digital age but what about people who were born before all this technology and digital text was at our fingertips for easy access? People like what they know. So, maybe my Dad would rather hold a newspaper than read newspaper articles online or on a kindle like device. There is no difference in the text and it just comes down to plain and simple preference. Don’t get me wrong, I love technology. I would not be able to go through one day without it and my entire future and career rely on it, like most people today, no matter who they are or what their job is. But, why are we so concerned about loosing printed text? If enough people want printed texts and find proficient and appropriate use for them, they will not be eliminated completely. History may prove that technology overpowers most things. “Going digital” is usually the easiest, fastest, most efficient way to get whatever you need done. However, books have been around for so many years that it would be unthinkable to try to actually get rid of them instead of replace them. 

The different mediums of text today is never-ending. Between computers and tablets, which are the next best thing for digital text, options for finding texts are vast. Kindles, iPads, Moto Xooms, and more are being released to house ebooks and web capabilities that obviously uncover the endless texts on the web. Digital text enhances communication between all humans and is the most efficient way of sharing information. It is instantaneous and either free or much cheaper than a book. Today, institutions have taken advantage of the technology available to them, enhancing classroom and learning settings for students. Tools such as smart boards are being used with children as young as Kindergarteners. This gives them a favorable position in learning new technology, and for this kind of technology to become instinctual to them. Now children are growing up with an advantage in and out of the classroom. Bolter agrees that, blogs and virtual classrooms, originally based off of chat rooms and forums create a positive learning environment for students because they can interact while in class and/or outside of class, such as in their dorms, complimenting face to face discussion in the classroom (114). Examples of these types of online classrooms can range from things as simple as blogs or closed message threads to websites that allow students to post video, text, pictures, links and more, an example being voicethread.com. 

It is inevitable for the way we use words to change when the space those words are in changes. Jay David Bolter dedicates an entire chapter to talk about “Refashioned Dialogues” in his book, Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print. That is irony at its best: A man spends his time writing two hundred or so pages about how print is outdated and digital text is taking over, and then prints it in a book. The best part is that this is the Second Edition of this book which means that Bolter has printed two books about how printed text is being transformed into digital text. Although digital dialogues are not as structured as a book and can seem as if they are all over the place, digital dialogues create bridges and paths to conversations that would not be possible with a printed text. As Bolter explains, "A written text is a structure in space that also implies a structure in time...When a reader is reading a novel or an essay, the words create a rhythm of expectations" (99). You cannot have a conversation with the author of a book by writing notes on the pages, but you can comment on blogs and some authors even publish full essays and even novels online now. With tablets that let you read ebooks on them like the kindle, you can comment on anything publicly and then other readers of that same text can answer your comments and questions. Dialogue between the reader and writer, between readers and different types of media, and between audio and visual texts have recently changed the most. Conversations about anything imaginable are possible because of the web. Hypertext enables people to add on to any text imaginable and as Bolter explains it, “If hypertext could remediate the voice of the text it might suggest a return to oral forms such as dialogue” (112). Publishing text online is as easy as one click. These started with ideas as simple as chat rooms or MOOs, allowing people to communicate with others at any time, but now the have developed into full interactive blogs, ebooks, and webpages that are connecting people throughout the world. The internet opens up an entire new world that, “allows individuals not only to represent themselves in words and images, but also to publish these representations to an audience of million at almost no expense” (119).

Bolter seems concerned about having an option as a reader to choose your own path when reading a text. There are many books that can make you jump around and pick your own ending or path within the story. Bolter describes why it is so important to have these paths by comparing reading to choosing which path to take. "To read is to follow one path from among those suggested by the layout of the text...The codex and the printed book both allow the writer to suggest many paths throughout the same book" (100). However, hypertext similarly, if not in a better way can create an ongoing path or journey for the reader by just browsing the web through links. You may start out looking for one thing but after a few clicks, you could have travelled far from your original path, sometimes discovering great new things by just one simple click.

In conclusion, the way people communicate words is always going to change. These changes will occur slowly and over large periods of time but from rocks to paper to computers, text has progressed greatly throughout human history. Who knows what will be next after computers and tablets. Perhaps one day, we will be able to record text in mid air with our very own fingers. No writing space, no writing utensil, just our hands.

Works Cited:

1. Bolter, David Jay. Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. 2001. Second Edition. (p. 99-120) April 26th, 2011.