One more Good Bye...

Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain  -- unknown


This quote compelled me because in class we talked so much about language and it being a mediator, so this quote made me think of those conversations and just one more way in which language operates. It's funny as well, and that caught my attention. Plus, it's very true. I know too many people who use language a means to bitch more than they do to communicate praise or anything else. 


Like all of human kind's inventions, language is used and abused.


In my imitation I changed the pronoun "man" to include women. And, I feel that everything good is abused terribly by someone somewhere, and language is one of things. So much so, that people are starting to complain about language itself :-)

Last Week: Good Bye Post

It's something unpredictable, but in the end is right, I hope you had the time of your life--green day

I liked this line from Green Day's because I don't think anyone predicted how well this class would actually end up going. It seems we all learned so much and walked away feeling as though we had a little something extra in our writing toolbox now--by analyzing so many style manuals and creating our own in the end, we learned how to gauge the styles around us and even find our own. Plus we were the first participants of this course :-)

I really hope everyone had the time of their academic lives at least. I sure did :-)

Imitation: It's something predictable (class ending), but in the end it's not (can never know how well a class will go, how much  you'll actually learn), I hope you have the time of your academic life.

My imitation turned the original into a line that would apply directly to us. I butchered the original, but hey, what can ya do?

Khaled Housseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

A society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated.

This compelled me because a man wrote it for starters, and because I feel it's a very wise thing to say. It's one of those lines that really gets a person thinking. And with this one, I started to think of female history. I went as far back as I had knowledge about, and thought about how--for the most part--women have been chained down in societies. I find it particularly interesting how our world has evolved into this technological power house; how medical science has saved humans from conditions that no one would have survived even 50 years ago; how education has become available to anyone; how charity organizations have become common place; how class distinction no longer--for the  most part--determines the kind of life a person can lead; etc. And all of this has happened in the last hundred years; I don't think it's a coincidence that this new evolution started to pick up speed around the time women began fighting for their rights--when women won their rights. So, I believe the quote is truer than we might think at first. 

Imitation: Women make everything better, period. 

In my imitation I got more to the point and was bolder in the point I made. It was also just a more comical play off the original. 

"No matter if you’ve burned it in protest, used it to brandish your bosoms with pride, bemoaned its biting brace, benefited from its enhancing boost, or bought one for a boo, the bra has an interesting biography." - As found on plannedparenthood.tumblr.com
I thought this sentence was interesting due to the author's usage of consonance in order to highlight the benefits of wearing bras. This stylistic choice was an interesting way to highlight a woman's issue, in my opinion.
My imitation would be:
"Regardless of the roughness of what the average person thinks of as rhetoric, (which is related to the right or wrong applications in everyday life), if we understand the richness of rhetorical analysis and the rhetorical situation, real change is within the realm of possibility."
For my imitation, I chose to focus on rhetoric and the rhetorical situation (which is what this class is about, of course). I chose to use that same alliteration and positivity of message of the original.

Meta-Authorial-Analysis-Meta-Meta

Some writer recently said: "The story[titled "The Man Who Lived Underground", by Richard Wright] ending with the death of [Fred] Daniels shows this purposefulness in society’s refusal to accept the truth. Just as his killer, Lawson - who might be closer to the truth than anyone but Daniels - says, “You’ve got to shoot his kind. They’d wreck things” (Gates Jr 1470). They would “wreck things” by finding a way to share the truth: that all of American society is equally guilty for racism against African Americans in this country and the way to the truth is through accepting responsibility, just as Fred Daniels had." Is this author in tune with a certain style here? Is it good? Is it effective? Is there a voice, tone, or stylistic emphasis that would make it better? Does this writer owe it to his reader to be his best, or is it the readers duty to be HIS best - as one of us might suggest - ? What if he said "I", or "motherfucker"? Who is the audience? I say there is certainly a style, based on what is here. It seems efficient, but "good" - I do not do. Effective? - it seems, because I get the idea even with the short excerpt. The voice seems academic but interpretive. The final couple of questions are not for me - well who read this anyway naw? THE END IS NIGH! ?

Macrorie

"A great judge remembers how hard it is to be good." Ken Macrorie from "Circle of Implication" in College English 1967, page 459.

The context for this quote was Macrorie talking about how we are automatically judging when we decide to write. Just choosing to write about something is applying some judgement on the topic: "This is important", "this is beautiful", "this is wrong", etc.

I think this is good advice for anyone approaching a paper that is evaluative or argumentative in nature. It helps a person to remember empathy, and taking an empathetic position will only make a person more credible, more believable. As we all have experienced in life, taking a position of extreme judgement or anger only hurts our arguments in the end, squashing the logos aspect of any argument. It just sends the wrong vibe and makes ap person seem too heated or emotional about the topic to analyze it logically. That's why this quote appealed to me. It's a great view to adopt when writing, and it encourages empathy; which in the end can help me to understand the subjects of my topic even better.

"The best judge is an empathetic one."

In my imitation, I used a word choice that would sum up the last bit of Macrorie's quote: empathetic. I went with imitating the structure of those Chinese proverbs, trying to put judge and empathy in the same context in order to say they are one in the same--or should be.

Cracked.com cares about grammar

This article was on Cracked.com a couple of days ago, and I thought everyone might get a kick out of it (because it's Cracked, borderline-offensive material does appear, and it's probably NSFW, just FYI):

7 Commonly Corrected Grammar Errors (That Aren't Mistakes)

The author includes a nod to the long battle between the prescriptivists and the descriptivists, which the descripitivists keep winning, as well as picking up the performative technique of including grammar mistakes throughout the article like we saw Joseph Williams use in The Phenomenology of Error at the beginning of the semester.

The article takes an approach Crystal would approve of, for the most part, as it's examining how many of these so-called "grammar mistakes" that part of the population gets up in arms about have been used in common language for centuries.

But he does throw in a rather Trussian barb to apostrophe abusers at the end.

To Classmates - err Tiffany but not

I have placed the quote at the bottom rather than at the top this time, so that I can say fuck it why not, an then just to do it. I also was hearing classmates saying that they didn't blog, for whatever reason, so I assume you all don't read this anyway, and if you do, then this is actually geared toward an Ex... yes indeed. "This is an old well-known phrase that I have always loved and have made a part of my life. Although this phrase speaks for itself I love the meaning it has and the encouragement it gives when life gets rough and I find myself having a hard time with things I cannot change" Guess reason DOS for this dusey. Times up. I can't spell "dusey" - dewsy? doosee? Have we read each others' posts since Janruuarryeey? I just wanted to type "fuck", SLUT should be good too... Notice Tiffany's "dash-skewer" at "well-known" (didn't HAVE to skewer)... ya know, I just realized I have a hard time caring about writing this type of thing if no one will read it and if I am not being challenged more. I could challenge myself but time is an issue and who does that? I could just type words like tacit piss tacit words what is the difference the piss I guess the difference thank goodness and there you have it: STYLE.