Reading Response for "Understanding Scenes of Writing"

The whole description of life and social interactions being "scenes" was a little unnecessary, I think, but I suppose it worked fine as a context to describe the different ways in which we evaluate and react to our surroundings. The "scenes" description felt unnecessary only because scenes themselves are meant to emulate life, whether in a movie or a canvas, and if you then use that emulation as a substitute for the real thing, you're redundantly describing reality with its imitation. In other words, if you're trying to describe a setting, describe the setting, not the thing that's already trying to describe the setting (the scene). People aren't acting in scenes during social interaction (most of the time), they are choosing how to act and speak based upon what is around them: this is not acting, it's a reflection of the self. The "acting" description, like the "scenes" description, is redundant. Actors imitate their character, not the other way around--go to the source.

Of course, given that "Understanding Scenes of Writing" is relating reality to scenes in writing, the description isn't out of place. It just bothered me a bit. The actual meat of the reading was detailed and helpful, but even there I hate to break down something like a scene into miniature rhetorical choices like the reading does. The chemistry within a scene between its characters and actions loses too much meaning when you break it down. I find myself wondering why people do this because people naturally react to these situations appropriately without examining them in detail. We know simply from basic observation why a scene demands a certain response. People live reality, reacting without breaking the "scene" down, so if you're writing (trying to emulate reality), I see no reason to do so either. No doubt, a writer is not going to be able to emulate reality perfectly at first, but neither do we fully understand how to act when we are children. The fact is we learn through experience and rarely require a detailed break-down to do so. I think the process of understanding different scenes and how they should play out in order to be convincing within writing should be learned from experience, not a complicated break-down.

Credo

I believe in truth. It has never been any family motto—never even been a personal motto—but my desire for knowledge and understanding brings me inevitably to the fact that what drives me, beyond having a good life, is finding truth. About what? I can’t specify: truth about anything that deepens my understanding of the world. School can bring some of it, personal discovery can bring a lot of it, but only when you look can you find this truth. So I look when I can, think when I can’t, and in the meantime, remember to have a good life.
Truth can even deliver a good life, where knowledge takes the place of gold, leaving you rich with potential, but as I mine this gold, it is not for economic gain. Having everything and knowing nothing may sound like ignorant bliss to some, but the thought is a cold rollercoaster at night: it may be fun and unexpected, but you will never see anything no matter how high you get. Some people like to work their whole lives to get a chance at riding that rollercoaster, never minding the featureless night, but I prefer to grab a flashlight and look around for a bit. Sometimes you are only walking for five minutes before you catch a glimpse of gold in your light, and sometimes you don’t find anything at all.
It all comes down to critical thought—people forget to look around, and they don’t scrutinize the beaten path, trusting it will lead them to the proper conclusion (or at least, the popular one, as some prefer). For me, the discovery is worth it, and the outcome, bountiful. That is why I follow truth with my little light onto the world. With the truth, you are ultimately free.

"This I Believe" Summeries

Listening is Powerful Medicine

Summary: In this essay, Alicia Conill discovers the power that simply listening has. In the story she tells, it affects both patient and employee in different ways. Conill is shaken out of her typical, interruptive medical questioning by a patient who feels that she is not being heard. Moved into acting the listener, Alicia begins to hear and understand that the patient has many problems, the stress of which might have been contributing to her medical condition.
The lesson is cemented when Alicia herself was later diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, leaving her in a wheelchair. She now understands the improvement that simply listening, or being listened to, can have on not only the psyche, but also entire situations. Within her wheelchair, Conill now personally knows the power of listening, and she now teaches this medical lesson from the perspective of a patient.


Caring Makes Us Human

Summary: Troy Chapman speaks of his prison experience with a stray cat, which taught him the fundamental human desire to care for others—including other creatures. He explains that after not touching a cat or dog for over 20 years, when one snuck into the prison grounds outside, he was reminded of the feeling of love. He recognized the fact that he could enrich the creature’s life simply by caring for it, and he found peace in that caring. Not only that, many other inmates who may or may not have interacted with each other before came together over the cat. They fed it, groomed it, took turns petting it, and were genuinely changed by the mangy cat. Chapman decided that prison inmates not only needed to be cared for, they needed to be given a chance to care for something else.


Always Go to the Funeral

Summary: Deirdre Sullivan has always followed her father’s teaching and gone to funerals. As a young lady, she never really felt the desire to attend funeral calling hours, but her father’s persistent teaching regarding funeral attendance kept her going, even though she felt inconvenienced by it. However, her perspective began to change when she noticed the influence that simply showing up to a funeral had on its mourners. She remembers a woman whom she gave condolences to in a very slight, verbal gesture. Though Deirdre’s experience at that particular funeral was a boring one, the affect her simple gesture had on the woman who was mourning was emotional and very supportive.
Following her father’s death, Deirdre is ultimately shown the value of a funeral full of people who might be “inconvenienced.” She recognizes the support it provides, whereas an empty funeral is much more akin to a “painfully under-attended birthday party” or a “hospital visit during happy hour.”

Letter of Introduction

I don’t think there is much that can be said about my background that would be informative and entertaining, short of full anecdotal recollection. I came from the San Francisco Bay Area—Redwood City, specifically—when I traveled up to Humboldt State for my first semester, but I have never really been a city person. One of the major reasons I decided to come to Humboldt State was the beautiful surroundings, both near and far. I love the outdoors, being active outdoors, and bringing my roommate’s dog outdoors. Like many of my fellow students, I love videogames, food, music, and all of the usual suspects. Beyond that, I enjoy keeping up with worldly events (the striving journalist in me, I guess), different aspects of science, and even writing. I believe that, aside from complete, unintentional ignorance to current events, there is no excuse not to be informed about our world and the people who run it—especially with the way that the world has been turning lately. I am very political, but I hate politics. I think Bush was horrible, and Obama is much worse. Moving on, I prefer to keep as environmentally friendly as I can, and I support environmentalism at almost any turn. However, it may come as a surprise that I am one of the many people within the environmental perspective who understand that anthropogenic global warming is a falsity (just to give an idea of how quirky my perspective is to the average person).

As I mentioned earlier, I like to write. Recently, most of my writing has been in conversations over the Internet, or within a journalistic field, here at school, but the writing experiences most important to me are those that I contribute to in my free time: small and large bits of expressive writing, and stories of an initially mindless fantasy that I write simply for fun. Call them useless (because, aside from their affect on me as a writer, they probably will prove to be), but they do have a strong influence on my writing and have certainly been the cause of the more important moments of my literary improvement and influence. These personal works of written amusement may not be the greatest works that anyone has ever read, but to me they are much more than the sum of their letters—at least, if only from a practical standpoint, as they have provided me with untold hours of writing experience, albeit at a bit of a crawling pace.

As far as a writing process goes, I have never retained any particular outline or step-by-step plan to help me complete writing assignments, but I do stick to a general progression. I begin by outlining in my head what each of the bodies of text will cover, sometimes breaking it down to sub-points within the bodies and writing it down, and I use all of that to create my thesis. I then fill in those bones by simply getting started with the first draft. After it’s done, I review the paper to see if I missed anything relevant to the topic, and I begin to correct, rearrange, and generally revise to paper. After a few revisions, depending on what I am writing, I iron out the kinks and it’s finished.

I understand the English language fairly well (although I am far from an expert, obviously), so aside from a few things here and there, what I hope to get out of this class is a more firm grasp on the language. I’m not sure precisely where I need improvement, but I know that I do. In this class, I expect to have exactly that: improvement.