Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Blog Post #5
Mark Mason's essay about graphic novels and 1984 was actually quite boring. I could barely get through his monotone styled paragraphs, which essentially put me to sleep. And the kicker is, I actually like reading comic books and graphic novels AND I even had to read the book 1984 in high school and loved it, but somehow Mason is able to sing me to sleep. With that being said, I do think that he made some good improvements to his paper each time he submitted it, however, I do believe a writer can revise his or her paper too many times. To me, writing isn't about being perfect and critiquing every single line of your paragraph, I mean how can anyone like doing that? I believe that an essay should be perfect grammatically, but as long as the reader is able to understand what you are trying to convey without losing their attention, I believe that you as a writer have succeeded. 90% of the battle is trying to get a reader to sit down and take the time to read your argument without getting bored. His title does somewhat catch your eye and makes you ask as a reader, "ok what is this all about?”. The title plays to your curiosity but then Mason bores you with quotes from a book that if most haven’t read, will obligate readers to look to read something else. I think Mason definitely improved his paper but he also should have had different types of people read his article because he then would have realized, wow this is pretty boring. Sometimes my revisions help but what I would really like to learn is how to write an article in which, I have the reader's sole attention and the reader is actually interested in what I have to say. I believe the hardest thing about revising your own paper is that once you have written that final draft and checked that it is grammatically correct, it's hard to go back and rip it apart. You look at the finished product as a work of art, going back and changing it, at least for me, would be as enjoyable as pulling teeth.
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2 comments:
I agree with you completely Barron. I thought that the read was extremely boring and very monotoned. I disagree that a paper can be revised too many times. Writers try to make their work perfect and they accomplish this through revision. I feel that there can never be too many revisions. I think the title is a very good one for this paper because it accurately describes the rest of his paper. I do agree though that reading the same paper over and over again is way too redundant for me and I found it extremely boring. This wasn't a fun and interesting read.
Barron, I know what you mean when you said Mason's article bored you to death. I definitely lost interest throughout the article, even though I did think he made improvements throughout his editing and drafting. You made a good point when you said that a very important part of writing is to catch the readers' attention, and that we shouldn't always look beyond this aspect of writing when editing and revising papers. I thought it was interesting how you said that papers can be revised one too many times, because I agree that sometimes we tend to overthink some aspects of writing.
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