Wednesday, August 26, 2015

Reaction to "How to Say Nothing in 500 Words"

Coming into this reading I was critical to say the least, I was expecting it to be just another stuffy college level essay written by an old white guy. Even though I was correct on the “old and white” aspect I found the reading to be insightful. The author succeeded on multiple fronts especially on reaching his target audience but there are a few things I took away from the reading specifically that I want to focus on. The first is more along the lines of “Ok, now what?”

What am I supposed to do with all this great information? Personally I like to be told what to do, and while reading the article I was waiting for the section that would read “how we fix this”. I was disappointed to not be given this. However this may be the writer’s intent, to provoke different individual thought not only in writing but how we might fix it. This however greatly separated from my comfort zone. This being that I like to be instructed on exactly what to do, but that might be exactly the thinking that the writer wanted the audience and myself to secede from.


I now walk away with a bad feeling though, a feeling that says all my papers have been fluff. A shabby skeleton with feathery fluff to fill it in. I think now to my papers in high school and my freshman year in college which must have been painful for my teachers to read. I just focused on word count and bare minimum. But now I also see how my writing has progressed since then, and although it still needs work, I am proud of where I have come from. But even now I still struggle with separating from mainstream ideas in responses to research or readings. This struggle comes from not tossing those aside like the author addresses and digging deeper. Deeper into my inner most thoughts, ones that I have from personal experience and learning.

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