Blog 10

The most outstanding thing this course has taught me is to be more meticulous about what I am writing. In my highschool career, my papers where governed by my internal mantra, “You already wrote it. Just leave it alone.” Though the teaching of Ms Sarah Marshall, and unrelenting feedback from my peers, I can say with complete confidence that this course is the most I have learned about writing and communication since elementary school.

    In the Snapshots assignment, I found myself vomiting words all over the paper. Nothing was telling me that it needed to be changed. I simply typed what my brain told me to in whatever order it happened to appear in my mind, often times sloppy and unprofessional. This course has served as a motivator and a steroid to my writing.

“In that moment, I was exposed to a completely new sound that blew me away, that rude, macho, guitar, the tribal rhythm that sprung from the drums, the bass guitar that thundered with every pluck, and those voices that twisted, intertwined, and supported each other. If you talk to middle aged men about their favorite music, most of the names would sound like something a diviner would read out of her ancient spell book. That feeling when you encounter that first song that changes your life. No, I do not mean that song that you like for a month and a half and claim “changed your life” because you like the hook. I mean that song that if you had not have heard it, you would be a very different person. That song for me was “Sunshine of Your Love” by Cream.”

That colossal mess was from the second draft of my Snapshots project. It seems to have a theme, but no particular structure. Looking at a more recent writing, the improvements in structure and meaning seem to lend themselves as evidence, such as this piece from my Short Story.

“I don’t care about this awful job, and I don’t care about you!” a woman screamed as she threw a plate against the drywall. “Honey, please. You know how important I am down at the Bureau. Isn’t that what you wanted? To marry a successful man?” Felix said pleadingly. “I wanted to marry a successful man, not a man who spend more time making love to his boss than me!” Another plate shattered. Felix spoke as he ducked. “Please, Christine, don’t do this. I can scale back my hours!” “Ohhhh, it’s too late for that. It’s been too late for that for two years!” Christine pulled a suitcase from under their bed and began filling it with clothes. “You can keep the house. You can keep the china. You can keep everything.” She screamed as she pulled a blue sundress from the dresser. “I am going to my mother’s.” The front door slammed. She was gone.

Although I would not consider it a professional work by any stretch of the word, it does seem to flow better, keep the reader involved as opposed to jumped randomly between ideas.