As I have stated in my previous Peer Review Recap Pt. 3, I wanted to give credit where it is due.  And for this project, Individual Essay, I wanted to focus on that.  I have to thank Tiffany, for contacting me via e-mail and in my page to help me get this comment.  I realized, after I published the page, that I was incorrect on my format and such.  I thought it was supposed to be like a blog, and I expressed that with her back and forth with e-mail.  But, even though she understood that it was incorrect, she helped me make it better and what I could focus more on.  I mentioned in my paper that I had done video editing before, and she said to use that process for my paper.  I took that into account and I took all the knowledge that I have from that and formed it into a paper.  This was extremely helpful.

Cherish’s answer was good too.  Even though she reinstated the information Tiffany had already given me, she also offered all the help she could give me.  And after looking at her paper, and peer editing it, I got a lot more ideas and information, since she had been in my group.  And when writing my final draft, I used all of that compilation of information into account.

I had already known what I needed to change, because it was my mistake, but it was also a lot of help from my fellow classmates.  And I was very impressed with the helpful hints and such they gave me.

Most of us, make videos to share with various people, to family and friends, to a specific group of people on one subject.  When it comes to videos to share with family and friends, most of us are sharing home videos, of our children taking their first step, of a child at the zoo or park, of a compilation of videos directed to a out-of-town family.  Those are like the writing process, and as I was writing that last sentence, I was thinking it wasn’t.  I didn’t think it was because you just grab your camera and take video.  But then comes in the bad word that someone said that the mic picked up on that they don’t want included, or just uploading the video.  But even before that, comes the idea.  Take this, for example:

Your watching your child at a friend’s house, petting a horse for the first time.  You are taking several pictures but then realize that you want to take video.  So you turn your camera to the video option and begin recording.

In your brain the person who is in this situation, thinks, “oh this would be great to share the actual petting and his reactions, instead of all these pictures”.  This would be your brainstorming that you would do if writing a paper.  And the actual recording of the video would be the rough or final draft, depending on what you want to do with it, and finally submitting the work on a video sharing website.

As you can see, the writing process is not just for writing term papers, it goes for everything.  The same steps, if you think about it, are used all around you, including the video making process.

McCloud, who published the book on comics, that I have discussed comes to mind when I think of short movies.  A short movie is kind of the same as a comic.  You have different clips in the comic, just as in a movie.  In our group’s movie, we had a scene of a person at a news desk telling us there has been an accident on… and another person “at the scene of the accident” and it was pictures of accident’s found on the Internet.  But if you were to see this short  movie in a comic, you would see the news anchor at the news desk, and the reporter at the scene of the accidents with other pictures.

This is helpful with my individual essay as I take a different approach to the process, and how I can focus more on the comics, rather than writing process that we have been, or I have been, focusing more on throughout the course of this semester.  Sometimes, saying something too much is almost as bad as not saying it enough.

Looking back at the projects, located on the right side of my blog, I looked at the rough drafts of the projects and briefly read the comments that my classmates left me.  I realized that I used a lot of their information that they gave me to help me improve and enhance my writing projects.  I also looked at other student’s projects to review their’s and also got information and idea’s from their projects as well.  More credit should have been received where it was due.

The actual process with the peer review went alright, for the most part.  Our English instructor would post the groups, with three individuals, that we would comment on each other’s projects.  I thought that went well, as sometimes, instructors would just say “please review and comment on three classmates blogs”.  I tried to go to different classmate’s blogs, but sometimes it was difficult.  I would pick and choose the “easier” blogs to comment on.  When I say “easier” I mean, ones that the comments on the project come easier to me than others, or one’s that pretty much need more work, to say it as polite as possible.  And those were the blogs that would get commented on the most, and sometimes you wouldn’t get any comments other than the instructor’s.  This process was much easier and nicer to follow along and make sure it is fair to everyone.  Within this class, I feel that some advice from the instructor would have been helpful, in ways that could raise our grade or just to tell us we are on the right track.  But, then again, comes the question that maybe, just maybe, he want’s us, as university college students to become more independent.  I don’t know…

I have learned a lot from these peer reviews.  I learned, for one, that I have major room for improvement.  After reading other classmates blogs, I became ashamed of my own projects and wanted to make several improvements and had a difficult time trying to make it look, and sound good.  Other things that I have learned is that, sometimes there may be no right or wrong answer, it’s how we perceive the situation or information given.  This may go back with the instructor comments too, that maybe there isn’t a right or wrong, and maybe it was all good, but the grades didn’t show that.  I just wish there could have been more with our rough drafts to help us understand what it is exactly, other than the directions on our course website, that our instructor is looking for.

Overall, the peer review process has helped me become a stronger writer, have thicker skin with being ashamed of my projects, and helped other students, or I think, become better writers as well.

These are correct, somewhat, but there is a lot more to style than that.  Style ranges from all types of writing or creating something, such as papers, comics, and videos.

The way a writer formats their paper is considered style.  The length of paragraphs, the length of sentences, both are simple examples of style within a paper, but there is also more than that.  The way a writer structures their paper also matters.  The introduction of the paper is the opening and one would want to include all of the information that would be covered throughout the paper.  Also, the transitions between paragraphs and the order of the paragraphs would also be considered part of style.

As far as the comics, there is a lot of different types of style that could be included in that.  From the way the comic is drawn, to the wording and conversations the characters have.  For someone to make a comic, the author would want to know what type of audience they are trying to connect to.  The author wouldn’t want to put lengthy words in a comic for a younger audience, and vice versa.  The drawings the author creates are also part of style.  The line usage in the pictures, if the pictures are formed for cartoons or a lot more detail.

Finally, a video can have style elements in it as well.  The language the characters use, if it appeals for the intended audience, is considered style.  How the creator(s) and characters organize the video and have it laid out is also considered style.  The video should make sense and not jump around.

As you can see, I was somewhat correct at the beginning of this English course, however, I have expanded my knowledge of what style is and it is far more dense than I thought at the beginning of the course.  =]

Eric makes a good point in the first paragraph when he discusses that the comic does go with Scott McCloud’s definition of a comic with the four sequential series of movement.  This is true and it does give the idea of imagination to the comic as well.

The characters of the comic Eric is discussing, are drawn very proportional and we, as readers, can see all of the facial features.  But I thought that the point of the comic was to give the reader some sort of imagination to use and to get from this.  As Eric points out, McCloud’s book Understanding Comics:  The Invisible Art goes into detail on the amount of artsy drawings and cartoons.  I think this is okay, but there is just a lot of detail to each of the panels and I find a lot going on.

I really dislike the fourth panel with the amount of wording on it and at first I thought it was just the author talking about the comic, but it was actually the character talking.  But we kind of want more of a visual representation of the words, as express on page 89 of McCloud’s book.  In my own personal opinion about the amount of word choices, if I wanted to read a book I would pick one up.  Hmmmmm….

This comic I found to be very interesting and I got really into the comic that is posted on Mr. McCloud’s website.

First off, Scott McCloud is the author of Understanding Comics:  The Invisible Art.  It is a very interesting book and takes a different route to a “textbook” as I would call it.  In this book, his words are spoken by himself as a comic.  It becomes very interesting and I don’t think I’ve ever been this excited to read a “textbook” like his.  I call it a “textbook”, not because it is thick, got the hard cover, and boring front that most textbooks do, but because it is teaching you something and I am using it for my class.  This book is even interesting to me, someone who’s never really gotten into the whole “comic” strip thing that some get into.  The extent of my comic reading was in the Sunday newspaper and it was usually something like the Peanuts or Family Circus.

Anyways, I need to get back to the point.  The point is that this blog is very catching and you get into it because it becomes something, and you can see it happening, it makes sense and relates to real life.  It isn’t just a “cartoon” it’s actual people and it feels kind of like a movie, in a sense.  It is also laid out as a movie, where you read what is happening and there are pictures there that show you who the characters look like.  Mr. McCloud talks about the idea that comics should feel like a movie on page 7 of his book, Understanding Comics, “each successive frame of a movie is projected on exactly the same space – the screen – while each frame of comics must occupy a different space.  Space does for comics what time does for film!”  This comic that Mr. McCloud has on his website, display’s this exactly.  I could see this comic going into a movie and it could happen in real world as well.

On pages 41 – 42 in Mr. McCloud’s book, he talks about the idea of realism.  That in a comic, the idea that you should have some sort of reality in it, but not in a world of “photo-realists” where everything is in great detail.  With comics, you should have some relax and have some room for imagination and somewhat be a “cartoon” in a sense.  And it’s even more with the story itself.  You want something to be realistic and you want something fun for your readers.  And that is exactly what this comic is.

One last thing with this is that you can “hear” the characters speaking, even though they aren’t speaking.  With your imagination you can see the characters and you can feel, somewhat, what they are feeling.  This may be only true with me, as I have a very vivid imagination and like to act things out and put myself in their shoes and “act” out the book in my head, but I feel it is true with others as well, only onto a different extent.

You can see different things with a comic, other than it being a “cartoon” as what I had previously thought of comics.  =]

I thought, considering, I was unable to finish completely my essay, that I received good feedback.  Eric H. pointed out something that I didn’t realize I was doing, and gave me a great idea on the health being a part of my essay and I will use that to my advantage.  I do have to change it though, I forgot to change my ideas when I was using different rules in my essay.

Kate did the best she could with the amount of information that I was able to give her.  I apologize deeply, but I can’t schedule family health issues.  :)

I am just beginning my peer reviews as we speak and I hope my comments will be helpful to the writers.

Deanna also shares her thoughts that she had while she was reading the two books and I couldn’t agree more.  She said “I can definitely say that throughout the whole time I was reading each chapter and each book they were making me think ‘do I do this correctly?  Or am I one of these horrible example I just read?’”  These book really make me second guess myself and make me extremely paranoid about my writing and I have to scramble and see if I did it correctly.  But like Deanna said also in the same paragraph, that the main point to these readings was to make ourselves better writers and we will never be “perfect” writers.  Even still, I feel like maybe they used some of my writings, or another author since these books were written before I started publishing things.

Kate B. took a different approach in her blog than Deanna at the fact she was saying Strunk and White were just saying “Do this and don’t do that” and Williams was going into much more depth.  While I agree with Kate, I also believe Deanna at the fact it is more of the why we want to write this way and what we are going to do.  But with Kate’s approach I feel as though I can also relate very easily and agree completely with her blog.  Strunk and White did read like a “rulebook” while Willams went into great detail on how and explained much deeper on the writing and why to write this way.

Kate discusses her revisions and her ideas about how she wants to change her writing and the fact of her teaching.  While I agree, with my writing Williams will be a better choice of book to get my revision ideas from and how to fix my writing, I feel good knowing that I did read Strunk and White as well.  Strunk and White did help out a lot with my writing with a straight dry and cut way of learning how to make my writings better.  If I was looking for a quick revision, I would use Strunk and White, but Williams goes into great depth and will take more than just a revision.  I feel like Williams is more of a guideline on how to write, to start from the beginning, not just revisions.

The first idea that was expressed in my previous entry about paragraphs comes up again, only in a different form, in Williams’ book.  In Strunk and White’s book they discuss that each paragraph must be a new topic or discussion.  Williams discuss that this is true, that each paragraph should contain new thoughts, discussion and topics, that you do not want to over-burden the reader by going on and on and on and on.  But, unlike Strunk and White, Williams goes more into depth about the topic sentences and where to place them in your paragraph.  As elementary students, we are taught to always start out with your topic that you will be discussing at the beginning of the paragraph.  Williams goes into great detail to explain the differences and how you can also place the topic at the end.

Strunk and White said in their book; “A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.  This requires not that the writer make all sentences short, or avoid all detail and treat subject only in outline, but that every word tell.”  (pg. 23)  Williams agrees with this idea but Williams goes on and also includes:  ”The ability to write clear, crisp sentences that never go beyond twenty words is considerable achievement.  You’ll never confuse a reader with sprawl, wordiness, or muddy abstraction.  But if you never write sentences longer than twenty words, you’ll be like a pianist who uses only the middle octave: you can carry the tune, but without much variety or range.”  (pg. 135)  To me, this seems to contradict itself.  Williams is saying that it is good to write short, concise sentences, but at the same time, use a longer sentence as well.  How does this make sense?

All throughout elementary school to high school, English teachers explain to their students the rules of writing.  We hear the same rules each year and we learn how to make our writings better.  But each year, students are taught about run-on sentences and to avoid them.  During peer-revisions we are asked to advise our peers to change and what to make better, and each year we are asked to make our sentences shorter.  But now, with Williams expressing that it is good to use a long sentence, just takes back from everything we’ve learned throughout our whole lives.  This makes it confusing and makes me wonder if the things my teachers taught me were wrong?  Well, no, I think Williams is just saying that if you can master all of the other elements expressed, you should be able to master a sentence longer than twenty words.  This will take time and this will make the writer think of ways to improve their writing to make it flow and be concise.

Strunk and White’s book The Element’s of Style is a good book for those in high school English classes, and Williams’ book Style:  Toward Clarity and Grace is a great book for those with years of practice with their writing.  Williams express the same ideas that Strunk and White do, but Williams goes into great detail and make great challenges to the writer in making their writing that much better.