Discussion

What Ian brought up about Strunk and White saying you need to put your emotions on the back burner in his post titled Strunk and White’s EofS…Part Uno…, is also something I can relate to. I tend to write when feeling something other than okay. If I become angry I write, if I become ecstatic I write, but my writing tends to be a mirror of the emotion I am feeling at the moment I write it. So when doing a school paper, or something for a business it is important to put emotions on the backburner.

Also when Ian says that he was taught the bigger the words used in the paper, the better the better the paper became is another thing I can relate to. Teachers always encouraged me to use bigger words I had never used before, especially in middle school, in fact, for a few papers, one of our requirements were to use a given number of big words we had never used before. Blair brings up a point when talking about using big words in her post titled Style…from the yellow book. She says we make ourselves sound like idiots rather than educated people when we use the big words. I think this is part because we try so hard to use the big words we don’t necessarily use them correctly, and they just sound wrong in the sentence; even the uneducated that have no idea what the word means can tell when used incorrectly because of how wrong it sounds in the sentence. I remember in middle school when I was writing a myth, we had to use words we never used before. So I just chose a sentence, picked a word, and then used the Thesaurus to find a synonym. I looked up the words in the dictionary to try and use the right word, but I didn’t quite understand the definition of whatever words I was looking up. After putting the word I had chosen in the sentence the sentence just didn’t sound right, my instinct told me it was wrong, but I convinced myself that because I had looked up the definition and thought I understood the definition, that I had used it right. When I got the paper back, the teacher had a talk with me, and explained what the word meant; I hadn’t used the word right. My gut told me it was wrong even though my head said it was right. This shows that even someone who doesn’t understand the word can tell it is wrong. They may not know why it is wrong, like my gut couldn’t say why the word was wrong, but the people do know it is wrong, just as I knew the word I chose was wrong.

Ian also mentions the importance of writing having a rhythm, this I already knew but find to be very important. If writing has no rhythm then it discourages the reader from reading because nothing fits. When we get random bits of information we get bored. A piece of writing without rhythm is like a jerky car ride. You get frustrated in a jerky car ride because you prefer a smooth ride. The same goes with writing, if it has no rhythm, there is no smooth ride, it comes off as being all choppy. Everything should flow like a river. When we give writing that rhythm, then it has the flow, the smooth ride, we are looking for.