Author: Benjamin Bugajski

I can’t believe it’s all over. This class has caused me more stress, sweat, and tears than probably any other this semester (no blood, thankfully). However, I didn’t get the sense of relief that I usually get by finishing the final or turning in the final paper. No, this time I feel accomplishment. This is the culmination of a tough semester, and unlike a paper or even a cumulative final, I actually care about this material (imagine that?). I’ve put so much thought, energy, and time into these assignments that now I’m excited to share it with the rest of the world, even if employers aren’t a part of that world thanks to my stubborn insistence on incorporating Pooh. I never thought that employers would be reading this; it was just for me, because I wanted to and because I could. This has helped me realize that there’s so much more to my writing than just what I’ve been forced to do my whole life, and the awful irony is that it took me being forced to complete it before midnight tonight to realize that. That’s why I feel so accomplished: because I actually wanted to do this, and I’m proud of how far I’ve come. I hope that now I’ve figured out what this all feels like that I can continue writing just to write, that I can write things that please me just because I want to. Because in the end, what will I remember from college? I have an awful memory, so I can already tell you that I’ve forgotten most of freshman year. But this course, these assignments, this mountain. I won’t forget that, and not just because it’s saved on the Internet forever. So without further ado, I release you!

http://benbug.wixsite.com/writing220

My life is irreversibly different than where it was when I originally read Andrew Sullivan’s Why I Blog, and, no, I don’t mean simply because it’s been a few weeks. No, I mean that now Donald Trump is President-elect. This shocked me. I’ve been in a daze for two days. Whenever I think about the election, it takes me a split second to realize that this nightmare, this that-will-never-happen scenario actually happened. Donald fucking Trump will be our President in less than 3 months.

This made me re-evaluate my life in jarring ways. For one, while I was considering switching my major to Sociology, that will no longer be happening; there aren’t any jobs in Political Science, but there certainly aren’t any jobs in Soc. Second, I realize I truly want to enter academia, now that it is, realistically, financially foolish to even consider. If the models hold true, there will be a global recession, and the last people to recover from this will be tenure-track-seeking academics. What university would hire people when their budget will be cut back and they will be faced with faculty they cannot fire? Unless the face of tenure changes, like having mandatory retirement at 65, academics will not be hired once economic catastrophe inevitably strikes.

I bring this up because what, then, is the point of my writing? If I discovered my true passion—to be an intellectual, to deal with concepts and data and counterarguments—but that passion, by all accounts, shouldn’t be realized in our current political climate, why continue honing my craft with research, papers, and blogging? Why write?

Out of the three authors, the only one that does not have an explicit answer to this question is, ironically, the one whose work I should be analyzing, Sullivan. Orwell thinks writing should have clear aesthetic value in the conscious choices of the writer as well as a (political) argument. Didion thinks that her writing is about seeing the true nature of the world, not in concepts and metaphors, but actual descriptions of the banal and the beautiful around her.

Sullivan, on the other hand, seems to analyze writing in every way but to question its purpose and existence. He sees blogging as an intimate experience, as bloggers can connect to each other via the hyperlink. Also, the sometimes-simply-receptive but sometimes-truly-helpful-authoritative audience is just a few keystrokes or clicks away from the author, adding a layer of anonymous intimacy. I, on the other hand, have an almost monastic view of writing: I lay out careful arguments over the course of days, weeks, and unless I ask for your advice, you won’t see it until I have a finished product. Thus, Sullivan’s main description of blogging scares me. I wholeheartedly embrace the truism of the thin-skinned writer, as I myself am scared of criticism (hence, my natural tendency to write in this elitist, pretentious tone). But even if blogging as a form of writing is not for me, there must be something that Sullivan offers that I can use.

It is, I think, when I combine all three that I find a truth that I can live with, namely the importance of beauty in writing. Sullivan never explicitly mentions beauty; the other two writers mention writing’s aesthetic as it relates to the meter and rhythm of prose or to the visual, colorful majesty one can but only hope to be able to one day capture in black on white on a flat page. Sullivan, however, displays the importance of beauty in the Orwellian sense, in that while Orwell explains it, Sullivan demonstrates it. His casual but intellectual prose seamlessly transitions from the history of the ship’s log to the analysis of writing to the history of “bloggers” in a way that makes me want to read it (well, almost; it’s just really long). I like Orwell’s writing style, and Didion’s is fine, however I prefer the slightly-pretentious style of The Atlantic over both of the other two. In this way, I receive the most important, resonant, unifying message in the meta analysis of the writer who refuses to meta analyze the subject on which he’s writing.

This is important to me because, as I mentioned in previous assignments (which none of you readers, unfortunately, can access), my goal in the gateway course, I realize, is to find beauty in writing. I hadn’t seen this at first, however now it all makes sense: from refusing to budge from the ruthlessly difficult Winnie-the-Pooh style, to writing a True Facts About the…-style script for my remediation project, the challenges for this course come not from posing the argument, but in how it is posed. I can already express an argument; that’s what I’ve done since 6^th Grade, and I’ve continually honed that skill since then. However, what’s been missing is the beauty in my prose. In this way, it is the presentation of the material that is most important, and this practice is challenging and stretching my writing skills in new ways I hadn’t considered before taking this course.

Overall, my voice and writing content in general is different from most blogging voices: it is verbose, unendingly analytical, and flowery, approaching flowery to excess. Blogging has me practice the stream-of-consciousness style of writing, and simply by doing it enough I’ve come to realize that I don’t want to write in the traditional blog voice. That’s just not me. I’m the one giving the 5-paragraph refutation on Facebook over a single (uninformed and obviously incorrect) political opinion on Facebook; I’m the one who scours the web for polarizing social topics so I can rewrite all the old arguments in a biting, satirical style, just to try on this new hat. Both display a kind of beauty, the first in bringing back prose to an otherwise barren landscape of mindless, unimportant updates on their days and the other in bringing a little color back into the now-archaic arguments’ sallow, sunken cheeks. I think both of these are worthwhile in bringing back an old convention of writing present in Dickinson, King, Plato, Salinger, and Fitzgerald, namely beauty. Writing should not be downgraded to its basic, utilitarian function; otherwise, why would novels exist? Why would this class, this university, this world, exist? I think that the late and great Robin Williams put it best when he said, “Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.” Beauty. This is what we stay alive for.

This chapter was all about how your storyboard becomes a finished product. The authors identify a few discrete stages: first, the rough cut, where you have everything basically in position just without any of the details; second, the rough draft, where everything comes together and you should theoretically be able to give it someone without any introduction and they should be able to critique it (unless they’re unfamiliar with the genre/audience, so you’d provide this information as well); and finally the revising stage, where you take said feedback and create a revision plan, updating your project from there. They also tell us how to give feedback, as that’s just as crucial as knowing how to make changes once you receive critiques.

I’ve never broken my writing process down so much, however I feel like this applies to the ePortfolio because, until we graduate from the minor, we will never have a finished product; there may, and will, be finished projects we can point to, however until we add the final project we won’t know the exact layout of the website, we won’t know the exact formatting of which hyperlinks go where. Every one in a while, we’ll finish a project and get a ‘finished product’; however, as soon as we add to the ePortfolio, it will change. Thus, as long as we have a project that we’re working on, we’ll be in a hybrid rough cut/rough draft stage.

I find this to be a comforting thought because it reflects the process of writing. Writing is never really done; even when you have a ‘finished product’ you can look back on your piece several years or even days later and you’ll find something to tweak. It also helps ease the anxiety of doing the re-purposing and re-mediation project at the same time. I’m the kind of person that likes to get one thing done before starting something else, however I’ve been challenged to multitask in both this course and my job writing for The University Record. Hopefully, it will help me grow and teach me better how to manage my time, and at the same time realize that just because I’m starting a different step in the project doesn’t mean I have to be finished with the jumping off point.

I’ve done a little bit more research since Monday, and I’ve decided to change my project very slightly. Before, I was going to write in an historical fiction genre for children, however after doing more research on Winnie-the-Pooh (which was what drew me to writing for children, anyway) I’ve decided not to model my project off of Magic Tree House and just stick with the children’s book genre, of ages about 5-7. I’m not doing this because I don’t want to write about the history; I’m going to keep the historical aspects because that’s part of my original piece, I just want to focus more on the writing style because that’s what I want to get out of this project anyway.

I do this also because I consider Pooh to be a genre of its own. No one else writes quite like that, and I think that his style bleeds over into genre. I say this because he writes (a) for a child’s perspective while adding in some sophistication only adults will understand (this in itself isn’t unique, as cartoons do exactly that), (b) as if the action is literally happening, and instead of conveying the actual action he’ll use one of the characters’ perspectives, making it playful (as seen here), and (c) he wittily plays with different writing elements (like breaking the fourth wall, having the omniscient narrator limit himself by taking on the characters’ positions, and using dry humor surrounding his characters’ childlike egocentrism to make the characters clearly absurd while retaining the own characters’ obliviousness and thus retaining the story’s childlike innocence). That was a lot to handle in one sentence. However, Milne’s style is inarguably unique, and the point of all of that was to argue that his style makes his genre like no other writer.

The only help I could use is to find more examples of writing like Pooh. My initial research hasn’t turned up anything (besides a movie review, though it’s not of the same caliber), so having one more example to base my writing off of would be great. Otherwise, I think I just have to write. That’s the only way I’ll know what I need to work on. I will continue my research tonight by watching the Pooh movies on Netflix (not just to watch them, but because part of the charm of the story is the pictures playing with it) and the movie plays with the words spoken because Pooh literally trips over the words on the page.