The Fifth Week

First and foremost I would like to say that I wasn't particularly happy with this reading assignment for one reason. The story in the beginning about the author and his high school girlfriend was never finished. I do realize he might have finished the story in the end of his piece but unfortunately I couldn't get to the end because the assignment kind of stopped in the middle of the authors little shpeel and so I was unhappy.

With that said everything else in this paper was, I think, very good. The author captured my attention in the beginning with his story and continued all the way to the end using metaphors like the one were he compared the elusiveness of getting a hold on a thesis, or main point of a paper to a slippery fish or comparing a researching student to a weak wrestler.

The real reason I was so interested in this particular piece wasn't the creative writing style of the author though. I think the real reason I was so interested was because this piece seems like it could be very useful in helping me re-vise my papers. He has some very good suggestions how to go about revising a paper. The assignment seems to be written as a step by step guide to revising. Yet, his suggestion to cut up the draft paragraph by paragraph scares me a bit. The idea of doing that and trying to piece everything back together again seems daunting. Plus I have somewhat of a fear that I will have a larger reject pile then save pile. He was right when he said that authors have a hard time messing with something they worked so hard on.

He also used many examples of how people should and should not write. For example he talked about sounding too “colloquial” which I must admit I didn't understand. However, he posted up an example of what he meant about being too colloquial and I got it. I was a little saddened when I read the example though because in all honesty I think that my writing style is kind of like that. Oh the sadness.

I really like the templates that the author used in his earlier writings that we have read. I found them to be pretty useful so when this assignment ended right where the templates seemed to begin that was a bit inconvenient. Yet I guess the idea of being a writer is to try to be original in your writing so using someone's templates won't help anyone accomplish that.

All in all it seems I have a lot of work ahead of me if I want my revised papers to be anything like the author indicates they should be