my forum posts.

Wednesday, August 31st, 2011

BEV:
      For awhile, I was unsure of how I was going to respond to these essays. Finally, I realized it would be best to begin with a confession: I have been guilty of being an “English snob,” because I never took the time to see things in another point of view.

     For me, when I read Seymour’s "Black Children, Black Speech" there was a line that really caught my attention and made me seriously consider a different perspective. “Actually, black speakers aren’t ‘leaving off’ any sounds; how can you leave off something you never had in the first place?” This question made a lot of sense, if you never learned something you aren’t forgetting it because you don’t know it.

Another point that stood out was when Seymour mentioned the phrase, “I can hep you.” When I lived in Tennessee and this question was first stated to me I was taken back a bit. At the time I had assumed it was sloppy talk.

     This brings me to a late night interview with Jennifer Hudson on the Jay Leno show. She mentioned that her song, “Where You At,” is improper grammar and although she realized that when it was being written she said that’s just how she would say it, so why not write it that way. At first I thought this was unprofessional on her part, for having incorrect grammar in her song that would be heard by a wide audience and could possibly influence their speech. It wasn’t until I read the four essays that I realized this type of talk, Ebonics, was really a dialect of its own, not just a way of speaking that shows stupidity.

Wednesday, September 7th, 2011

Hunt and White:

     I enjoyed reading both of these essays. In White’s “The Essayist and the Essay,” I liked how he compared an essayist to being an egotist, with the, “childish belief,” that people actually care about what one has to say. While reading this I was reminded of keeping a blog, who knows if anyone will actually bother to take the time and see what’s been going through your head- that you’ve offered to share with the world- via the internet. It’s a risk you have to take, but in the end though I find keeping a blog to be more for your own personal enjoyment than for the sake of pleasing others.

     In Hunt’s, “Introduction: About Essays and Essayists,” I found two parts that grabbed my attention most. The first being the beginning sentence, in the attempt to define an essay. It struck me how much easier it was to say what an essay was not, than what an essay is. The second part that stuck my attention was the editing process of E.B. White’s comment, or mini essay, about landing on the moon and the revising process it went through. In his beginning draft he left out words, which is something I have found myself doing. Although usually instead of a horrifying blank spot on the page I put something along the lines of, “Insert appropriate word here.” It also caught my attention how the beginning sentences from the first draft disappeared in the second, yet reappeared in the third. The end result being something practically new, with only the catchiest phrases from the first draft making their way into the final one. Thus showing us that writing gets better with time, practice and editing.

Wednesday, September 14th, 2011
Montaigne:

     For me, Montaigne’s essays were complicated and difficult to understand. To begin with, his first paragraph of the essay, “Of Idleness,” baffled me. I have read it through a handful of times and it’s still confusing. At first I was thrown off by the line, “…produce mere shapeless masses and lumps of flesh…” Was he talking about babies, and if he was, why? Or was he comparing it to some of your thoughts, mere, shapeless? Another part that threw me off were the breaks where he quoted another’s words. Who was Virgil, what does that quote have to do with the price of tea in China? (He was a Roman poet born in 70BC.)

     There were a few shining lights where I understood what he was saying. For example, in his essay “Of Practice,” on page 468, there was a story about falling off his horse. It took me a few reads through before I understood what the point of the tale was. It tied back into his second paragraph at the beginning of the essay where he stated, “But for dying, which is the greatest task we have to perform, practice cannot help us…we can try it only once: we are all apprentices when it come to it.” For Montaigne, falling off his horse was the closest he had come to death, and that was all the practice he was going to get;-aside from sleeping.  At least that was my take on the situation.

     Overall, I found Montaigne’s writings puzzling, a challenge. I had to look up multiple words whose meanings I did not understand. Some of his essays seemed quite pointless, especially, ”Of Smells,” and his A, B, C’s to represent different years just made matters worse. Although, for being the first of his kind, trying, I applaud him for being so bold as to try something so new.

Virgil-http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/1425