My Preferred Writing Genres

I prefer to write in one of two genres. The first technical genre as defined by Yagoda would be persuasion, but more specifically I enjoy writing in the legal genre. I also sometimes enjoy writing fiction, although I do not do it on my own and have only written fiction pieces for classes. I think that I prefer fiction because I enjoy reading fiction, in fact it accounts for almost all of my recreational reading. I also think that I prefer to write in the legal genre because it really interests me. Another reason that I think I like writing legal documents is because I plan on using it as a career. I don’t think that the constraints associated with fiction have really influenced the form of my writing in a large way. I tend to be brief with my adjectives and descriptions which, someone pointed out to me, is a technique that Stephen King employs. So that probably influenced me subconsciously because I really enjoy his work. I would really like to someday write a novel, but in realistic terms I think I will most likely end up doing only legal writing in the future. As far as the legal genre goes, they tend to talk in circles and aren't always clear on what they are saying. Law briefs and legal opinions also like to use a lot of jargon that doesn't really mean anything to anyone outside of the law community. I deliberately try to avoid this. I still use legal jargon that is necessary to sounding professional in this genre, but I don’t use it excessively and I try very hard to make my points clear in my legal writing. I would really like it if people outside of the legal community would be able to understand most of my legal writing. I feel that would be very useful because people outside of the law community do often have to read law briefs, and speaking from experience it’s really frustrating when you've read eight pages of a brief and you still have no idea what they are saying. That has definitely consciously influenced my legal writing.

The Evolution of My Voice

I have noticed different changes in my writing, in both the creative genre and the professional genre. In the creative genre I've found that I’m more willing to take risks. For example, I wrote a short story “The Flowers” this year in the third person. In the past I would have never written something in the third person because it can be hard to maintain, and honestly a bit intimidating. Another risk in my creative works that I have noticed I am more willing to take is the avoidance of clichés to describe something. For example, instead of using the red hue of a fire truck in a story I described a more muted shade of red. While this may be a bit more difficult for a reader to envision, I do not believe that it will be so difficult that it causes them to put down my story. As for my professional writing, I have noticed more subtle changes in my work. One thing I have noticed is that I am more efficient in using the technical terms I need. It seems that I used to sometimes just drop jargon into a paragraph where it didn't really fit, just so I could seem like I knew what I was talking about. Now, I use jargon correctly and recognize that it is not always needed to get my point across. In my creative writing I think I still write a lot like I talk, which helps me with dialogue. In my professional writing I still use an appropriate vocabulary for the level of knowledge I have in the field I’m writing about, but my level of knowledge has increased. In my creative writing I hope my voice will develop in a way that is recognizable, but not out-of-date. I want people to be able to know I wrote something, but not to be writing the same type of thing that eventually becomes dated and stale. In my professional writing I would like my voice to develop in a way that adds clarity to my work, but still allows me to utilize the legal and professional terms that I must use in the field in which I am writing.

Notes on Final Speech

Stephen King sounds like:

·         Some of his work is didactic (desperation for example)

·         Most of his work is colloquial

·         Could be opaque? If you don’t catch onto his themes right away? Maybe?

The first problem I faced with this particular part of the assignment was figuring out how to describe any author’s work. After doing some research I decided the best way to do this was by just telling you how I think they sound. So, this brings me to my author Stephen King. The main adjective I would use to describe the most of King’s works is “didactic.” Didactic means “intended to teach, moral instruction as an ulterior motive.” For Stephen King, it could be argued that his ulterior motive is to show the power of God, or that good often triumphs over evil. He does this in a number of his works, including The Stand and Desperation. In both these novels God’s representatives triumph over the Devil’s representatives. In Desperation, a little boy who is very religious defeats a demon and in The Stand the representatives of God’s community eventually overthrow the Devil’s community. An example of good versus evil could be found in Salem’s Lot, which is about a small town that is plagued by vampires. In this novel the protagonists, one of whom is a priest, eventually prevail over the vampires. So, while there are many adjectives that could be used to describe Stephen King’s many novels the one that I feel is most appropriate is “didactic.”

Second Presentation Comments

Good:

• I know what I'm talking about.
• involve the audience and talk about things they know
• my personality comes through well
• gave specific examples
• less um's

Bad:

• Lots of awkward pauses
• Didn't know what the sentence comparison meant for the works
• could use a bit more of a conclusion
• don't use any visual aids ever. maybe could use a chart like Nicole did for the sentence structure

Influences Presentation Notes

• King’s Influences were:

o   Peter Straub

o   HP Lovecraft

o   Raymond Chandler

o   Ross MacDonald

o   Robert Parker

o   Dorothy Sayers “wrote the clearest, most lucid prose of our century.”

o   Ralph Ellison

§  This list came from an encyclopedia about Stephen King that was written by George W. Beahm in 1998

• Peter Straub writes horror like King. Stephen King said of his book Ghost Story “The terror just mounts and mounts.”
• HP Lovecraft writes Sci-fi which is an element that King incorporates into many of his novels
• Parallels between Carrie and the Salem Witch Trials

o   Ingebretsen points out, “…very interesting comparisons between the social/religious/psychosexual morass of the Salem witchcraft trials and Carrie, Stephen King’s novel of a teenage girl who responds to the torments of her religiously fanatical mother and her cruel, sex-obsessed classmates with an explosion of telekinetic fury” (Bulkeley).

§  This quote is from a review of Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell: Religious Terror as Memory from the Puritans to Stephen King by Edward J. Ingebretsen

• When I read an author’s writing I can’t help but wonder, what made this person write like this? Well, one answer to this question is that a writer is often influenced by other writers. Stephen King is no exception. Stephen King was influenced by: Peter Straub, HP Lovecraft, Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald, Robert Parker, Dorothy Sayers, and Ralph Ellison. These influences are listed in Stephen King from A-Z, which is an encyclopedia about Stephen King and his works written by George W. Beahm. Ok so, I know what you’re thinking. Those are a whole lot of influences. Well, I’m only really going to talk about two of them. The first is Peter Straub. He’s a horror writer like Stephen King, and King said about Straub’s book Ghost Story, “the terror just mounts and mounts.” So obviously, King thinks very highly of Straub if he allows Straub to put his quotes on the cover of a novel. I actually went through and compared Straub’s sentence structure to King’s and found that King and Straub have a similar usage of Adjectives. The second influence that I want to talk about today is HP Lovecraft. Now, we all read at the beginning of the year part three of Call of Cthulu. This introduced us to the sci-fi element of HP Lovecraft. Stephen King also relies on sci-fi elements in his horror novels. When I compared King and Lovecraft on a structural level, I found that King and Lovecraft both use a lot of nouns. I also found that all three authors had similar usage on the use of prepositions throughout their works. While these two individual authors have had an important impact on King as a writer, there are far more that I would have loved to discuss if there had been time. Any questions?

Presentation Notes

Bad:

·         Lean on podium the whole time

·         Lots of ums

·         Same hand gesture over and over

·         Look at notecards a lot

·         No transitions from topic to topic

·         What do literary critics say? Why don’t they like it?

·         Too long. I went over the time limit.

·         Kinda repetitive sometimes

Good:

·         Eye contact

·         Ignored guy when he walked in, didn’t let him distract me

·         I seem to know what I’m talking about

·         Use examples to back up my points

·         I talk about what I was supposed to, and hit on those main points

·         Good use of vocabulary.

·         Use the same story to support different points, so I end up referring back to what I’ve already said

·         Tied in conclusion with the introduction

 

Audience Presentation Notes

Audience Invoked: usually positions the reader on the side of God, or good. Often his conflicts are God vs. the Devil, or good vs. evil. The name of the genre “horror” in which Stephen King writes provides its general purpose “to promote… a sense of horror” (Carroll). Carroll also says that “…to distinguish the horror story from mere stories with monsters, such as fairy tales, is the attitude of characters in the story to the monsters they chance upon. In works of horror, the humans regard the monsters that they encounter as abnormal. In fairy tales, on the other hand, monsters are part of the everyday furniture of the universe.” “In examples of horror, it would appear that the monster is an extraordinary character in our ordinary world, whereas in fairy tales and the like the monster is an ordinary character in an extraordinary world” (Carroll). The characters react in ways that we would expect them to in response to the monster (Carroll). Emotions of characters and audience are the same in horror (Carroll).

 

Audience Addressed: normal people who like horror and sci-fi. Definitely not literary critics; most critics don’t think much of his work.

 

How he established a relationship with his audience: provided good stories, and relatable characters

 

How he continued that relationship: maybe because of the genre he writes? Because horror allows the reader to feel the emotions of the characters it allows the reader to establish a kind of connection with King.

 

• What do you think about when you think about horror?
• If monsters are mentioned then point out that monsters are in fairy tales too. For example, the giant in Jack and the Beanstalk. Use this quote from Carroll to explain the difference: “…to distinguish the horror story from mere stories with monsters, such as fairy tales, is the attitude of characters in the story to the monsters they chance upon. In works of horror, the humans regard the monsters that they encounter as abnormal. In fairy tales, on the other hand, monsters are part of the everyday furniture of the universe.”

o   Also, another difference is that in horror the reader gets to feel the emotions from the character.

• I’ve told you all of this so that I can tell you about King’s invoked audience. One of the traits of an invoked audience is that the author can put them in a particular place, such as on one side of a conflict. King sometimes presents an overall conflict of God vs. the Devil

o   Desperation

o   The Stand

• King usually places his audience on the side of God. He does this by aligning us with the characters that represent God, and making us feel contempt for the characters that represent the Devil.

o   In The Stand the Devil character crucifies people for any crime where the God aligned characters welcome people with open arms.

• King’s actual addressed audience is different

o   Addressed audience is basically anyone who likes horror and sci-fi type works. Definitely not literary critics.

• So how did King establish this relationship with his invoked and addressed audiences?

o   He gave good story lines

o   He had relatable characters

o   Plot often has twists and turns

• How did he continue that relationship?

o   Because he writes in horror he could have similar story lines

o   Still lets his reader connect with the emotions of characters

o   Tells the story through multiple character’s point of view

• So Stephen King’s novels seem like he’s doing a lot of the same stuff and he is. But his genre allows him to do these things.

Relationship with Audience

I think that the relationship that Amanda Baggs is trying to establish with her reader is that of a type of equality. She wants to show that she is the same as everyone else. She does this through her comparison of her language to that of Standard English. I think that she is openly combative to her audience because she feels strongly about her topic. Her obvious passion for, and sometimes anger about, the fact that her language is not actually considered communication very obviously shows through in the duration of her video. She uses anger to promote the issue of equality between her audience and herself to show that autistic people can often communicate and show anger just like anyone else. I think that she makes a good point when she talks about the fact that she feels, touches, smells, and tastes things to communicate with them. Often, communication is focused on speaking, writing, and things of that nature. In this video Amanda makes her readers confront an issue that she feels is very pressing. In order to establish Amanda as an equal with the rest of her audience, she becomes combative. Now, my first reaction when someone is combative is to be defensive. I think that Amanda wants the audience to feel defensive so that they will automatically respond to what she is saying, instead of stopping to consider her “disability.” I also think that she is combative towards her audience because she is angry with the overall attitude that people have toward her “language.” I also think that she is trying to establish an overall feel of authority toward her audience. It seems to me that she comes across as kind of yelling at her audience, which I associate with a figure of authority. I could be completely off track with that one though.

Written Proposal for Author Project

The author that I chose to work with for this assignment is Stephen King. I was first drawn to his writing because I really like the subjects that he writes about. I want to work with him because he interests me and I like the stories he tells. Most of his books are very similar to one another, but he has many loyal readers who will read anything he writes simply because he wrote it. In this project I will try to research the way that Stephen King uses elements from both the sci-fi and horror genres, as well as how he established (and continues to maintain) his ethos with his audience. I will do this by re-reading (or reading for the first time) some of his works, in junction with reading academic articles that have been written about his various novels and interviews he has given about his own writing process.

Pepsi, Dove, and IKEA

On first glance the Pepsi website has a lot going on. There are many different colors, there’s a video that starts playing when you open it, and there’s all kinds of tweets from people about The X Factor. There are actually only three Pepsi logos/cans on the site, where there are twenty three tweets about the X Factor. This obviously says that Pepsi is a sponsor for the show. There’s a lot of colors that are very loud, and a lot for the eye to take in on this page. It seems to me that Pepsi is trying really hard to look exciting, and I think that this says that they are trying to stay current with the things their audience likes. When I visited the Dove website, it was much simpler. There was lots of white, which makes me think of cleanliness. This is an important strategic move for Dove because they mostly sell soaps, shampoos, and other personal hygiene products. The website is immediately broken down into different categories that a consumer can click on for different needs. To me, this website is much more user friendly and promotes the company’s physical product a lot better than the Pepsi site. The clean kind of style that the Dove website utilizes seems like it’s trying to get the customer to associate Dove with cleanliness. This makes sense because of the type of products that Dove sells. So, that leaves us with the IKEA site. IKEA utilizes the use of different colors to make things stand out, but not so to the point where it hurts the reader’s eyes like Pepsi’s site did. IKEA is also separated into different categories that are clickable to help a consumer navigate the site. It has a very relaxed kind of feel because of the cool colors I think.

Hemingway vs. Smittenkitchen

The styles of Hemingway and smittenkitchen are very different. Hemingway is very formal, where smittenkitchen has a much more conversational type of tone. Hemingway also writes in a very short and to the point way. There aren’t any unnecessary words in his story, where in the smittenkitchen blog post there were lots of opinions and back story that weren’t really essential to the recipe or what happened when she tried the recipe. The language used in Hemingway is very direct, where the language in smittenkitchen is much more flowery. It’s almost like Hemingway had a word restriction on the story he was writing, and smittenkitchen was allowed to ramble on as much as she wanted. Hemingway’s style almost makes me feel like there’s a sense of urgency with the story he’s telling, even though there really isn’t. Smittenkitchen seems like I’m having a conversation with a friend who found a really great recipe for me to try. The difference in effect from these two pieces is a large one. In Hemingway’s story you can tell that it’s a bit dated from the language used and also that one character at least speaks Spanish, if he doesn’t live in a Spanish speaking country. The effect of the blog is that the author is speaking with a friend, and one can tell from the language and grammar choices that it is a fairly recent piece of writing. Hemingway’s language also leaves the reader feeling an abruptness because of his use of short sentences and to the point details. To me, it seems that the smittenkitchen blog flows better. It also seems that the smittenkitchen blog is more natural. This could also be because Hemingway is trying to tell a specific story where smittenkitchen is just talking about a recipe she tried and why she chose to try it.

Voice vs. Persona

I don’t think that LoveCraft the man was necessarily the same as LoveCraft the voice, although I do believe that the two were probably very similar. Unfortunately, this was the first example of his writing that I’ve ever encountered so I could be completely wrong. Basically what Thaisia and Wall say is that the voice an author writes with is their own unequivocal personality. If you apply this to an author such as Stephen King then one would assume he went around swearing like a sailor all the time; I don’t know him so maybe he does, but I don’t imagine that is automatically the case. In the case of LoveCraft the language he uses in his writing is pretty typical for the time period in which he wrote. LoveCraft could have used his own personality for inspiration for his characters, but he could also have characters that are vastly different from the one present in this story. While an author’s overall personality must definitely affect the way that he or she writes, it does not mean that every character or story is written with the exact same voice. Many authors draw upon people they know for inspiration for their characters. This means that they aren’t using their own qualities as inspiration, but the behavior of someone else. The very fact that an author can base characters on anyone else shows that an author’s personality and his or her voice is not the same thing. I do think that an author’s personality is intertwined into any given work though. Their sense of humor or their general outlook on life may affect the twists and turns a story goes through before it reaches its dramatic conclusion. The voice of an author is a very important tool for writing, but I don’t agree that it is the same thing as their actual persona.