A Fan of Writing

Having taken a sophomore-level English class before, I had low expectations for how interested I would be with this class.  I was surprised to find that the class was engaging and fun to be in during group discussions.  The quick-writes and the blog post discussion helped me understand what everyone else in the class was thinking about while they were writing.  It helped me understand how they write, and it helped me understand how I write as well.

I’ve had a lot of experience writing narratives.  Fan fiction is a good source of entertainment for me, both in reading and writing.  I use it as an outlet when my head gets too full of ideas.  I took a break from writing any during the summer since this writing class was making me write and helping me clear my mind.  That’s what I think writing does for me: it clears my mind.  I never really thought about this before entering this class, but writing helps me.  I enjoy it whereas most students see writing as just another assignment to be done.

Because of my work with fan fiction, I already have a little experience with web-based writing.  When the first pieces of fan fiction were first written, the Internet hadn’t been invented yet so they were shared locally and at conventions.  Star Trek is usually recognized as the first well-known series to have fan fiction written about it.  Today, almost all fan fiction writing is done on computers and shared electronically.  Fanfiction.net is probably the most well-known online source for sharing and reading fan fiction.  It houses literally millions of stories from hundreds of different series written by authors from all over the world.

Despite my experience with fan fiction, I have never extensively used a blog for any kind of writing.  My previous sophomore English class dabbled in some Twitter posts, but blog websites like WordPress and BlogSpot were left alone.  I have learned to appreciate what the Internet is doing for us now.  Using literally hundreds of different websites, we can share our opinions, thoughts, and daily lives with millions, even billions, of people.  What amazes me is that all of this is done without a second thought, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

This class has helped me greatly to realize the importance of my writing voice.  When it comes to narratives, it’s easy to overlook the author’s voice because it gets masked by the characters of the story.  Analysis and research papers allow the author’s voice to reach directly to the audience, giving it a much more important place in those writing styles.  I’ve never really paid attention to my writing voice outside of my narrative work.  For high school- and college-level essays, teachers and professors tend to want a stoic, nearly emotionless writing style that meets the criteria and doesn’t exceed it.  In retrospect, that kind of expectation is harmful since it gives the impression that the real world won’t want you to exceed expectations.

My writing voice is certainly a weak point for me.  My mindset defaults to the simple, guided essay that everyone was taught in middle and high school.  We were all told that using first person point-of-view is the worst thing for any kind of paper, but that keeps the author from really connecting themselves with what they’re writing, especially in an argumentative essay.  Being unable to use the first person handicaps the author and prevents them from really expressing their own true feelings.  No matter how much research you have to back up a claim, it doesn’t help if you can’t get the words out.

Research papers have always been my weak point.  Especially for papers that require a set amount of sources to use, I have problems finding sources.  I tend to choose topics that either don’t have any kind of written sources or the sources deal with a very similar issue that kind of skirts around my topic without mentioning it.  Narratives, on the other hand, have always been my strongest writing style.  I can’t write a narrative from scratch like a professional author, but if I can have some kind of premise to start with or character to borrow, I can crank out narratives like there’s no tomorrow.

For example, in my high school English class, we were required to write a narrative that resembled a Native American folk tale dealing with the creation of the earth.  While everyone groaned and whined about the assignment, I had already begun forming the premise of exactly what I wanted in my head.  I borrowed the idea of the creator being a wolf from a video game I had been playing at the time, and I set up a monologue for the creator-wolf character to speak without anyone to answer.  This solitude would give the wolf reason to create the earth so that he would have companionship.  The ideas flowed easily for me, whereas my classmates had trouble wondering where to even begin.

For me, writing is an escape.  It helps me release pent up feelings in a way that doesn’t harm anyone.  And web writing, like fan fiction, can even help other by providing entertainment.  Despite my irritation for research papers, I still find that I enjoyed the process once I look back over them, particularly is I chose an interesting topic that will get the readers’ attention.  Because I enjoy writing, it’s easy for me to enjoy reading as well.  I can understand my own work that much better because of that.

Creativity in Schools: Preventing Kids from Building a Better Mouse Trap

           Creative and critical thinking are two different processes that use many similar and divergent techniques to accomplish great outcomes.  Creative thinking is what pioneers the human race forward through innovation.  Critical thinking applies analytical skill in discovering why something is the way it is.  Both creative and critical thinking are highly important for a growing mind (and for those already grown). Despite this, schools today often give way to a curriculum focused more on critical thinking, which hampers the growth of creative tendencies in children.

            To clarify, I’m certainly not trying to say that learning critical thinking skills is bad.  Obviously, understanding why events took place in history, why rhetorical appeals work, and why a certain compound is made when combining two elements are all important as a general education.  Being able to apply that critical thinking to other areas of learning and teaching is wonderful as well, but there comes a time when someone has to say “I understand how and why it works, but how can we make it better?”  This is the main idea behind creative thinking.

            One can analyze something all day long and never find anything truly new; someone will likely have analyzed it before and found the same thing.  Creativity works differently, though.  It requires one to think of something that no one else has thought of before.  Robots are a good example: robotic craft sent to other planets in our solar system analyze materials and objects found there, but it requires the ingenuity of a live person to understand it and do something with it.  As Soichiro Honda, founder of Honda Motor Company, said, “It is when man starts thinking of ideas that the difference between man and machine emerges.”

 

            Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, famous for both his work in the study of creativity and his incredibly difficult-to-pronounce name, separates creativity into two separate categories.  “Big C” creativity is described as “paradigm-shifting” and encompasses events that are generally out of a person’s control.  “Little c” creativity is commonly experienced, usually in everyday life (Mihalyi 30).  Tina Sue Fletcher, who referenced Mihayli as a reference in her Creative Thinking in Schools article, further explains, “A person may not be able to change his world in a big way, but in the spirit of building a better mousetrap, he can come up with new ideas, explorations, and solutions that are both stimulating and satisfying.” (Fletcher)  It can certainly be difficult for a single human being to change the world, even with a creative mind, but it is this mindset that allows technology and culture to advance.

            The best place to start cultivating creative thinking skills is with early education.  Obviously, some parts of the education system are fixed for certain schools; financial resources and learning environments generally remain the same over a particular child’s school career.  However, the teaching techniques and curricula can be altered to nurture the creative thinking skills that will help children become highly active and intelligent members of society (Fletcher).

Positive motivations have been known to encourage greater productivity that negative motivations, such as times constraints.  Giving children opportunities to foster their own creativity by themselves is a great way to avoid these problems, Fletcher suggests.  Short creativity exercises, less busy work and more free time, encourage risk-taking and preserve integrity even when the children’s efforts may fail are excellent methods to nurture creativity for young children.  The same methods can be applied to more mature groups in middle or even high schools; some changes would have to be made for conflicting interests, but the main ideas of encouragement and integrity would remain.

            According to Sir Ken Robinson, a well-known author, public speaker, and advisor on education, the current environment for teaching children makes them frightened of being “wrong.”  Robinson says “[…] if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.”  The stigma that we as human beings place on making mistakes frightens children and even grown adults into remaining commonplace.  Children are known for their innate curiosity and their ability to say and do anything that comes immediately to mind (TED.com).  School systems tend to look down upon this behavior, particularly in talented children who may seem non-conformist and hard to deal with (Fletcher).  By the time the children are adults, Robinson says, the innate curiosity and creativity has been mostly washed away.

            Phineas and Ferb, a popular cartoon show on Disney Channel, provides a good humorous and satirical example of what Sir Robinson is saying.  Phineas and Ferb are two young boys with enormous amounts of imagination and creativity; they spend every day of their summer vacation (which seems to never end despite the series broadcasting a special Christmas episode) building huge constructs like roller coasters, proving accepted ideas of history and science wrong, and even crafting a working airplane out of paper-mache.  In one episode the boys get caught by their parents, who were previously unaware of the boy’s creations and adventures.  They are sent to a reform school because of their dangerous “overly-creative” behavior.  Through a series of punishments and warnings, Phineas and Ferb eventually become brainwashed drones that speak in dull tones and refuse to even touch a screwdriver.

            Even though the cartoon is based on humor and this particular episode involves a lot of humor and satire, it provides a good example of what schools and parents may resort to in order to squash creative tendencies.  Obviously schools, parents and even reform schools never take their actions to this extreme, but it does serve as a sort of warning for what can happen if society were to ever place such an extreme stigma on creative thinking.

            In order to build the original mousetrap, someone had to first analyze the initial problem and come up with a creative solution.  After that, someone else designed a new model that worked better.  This process of build and redesign happens all over the world, combining thoughts from great creative minds from over thousands of years.  If school systems stifle those creative juices in children today, it is unlikely that they will be able to build upon the ideas of the current generation much like we have in recent years.  Even if no one person can dream big enough to change the entire world, it only takes one idea to make a difference.

Works Cited

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihalyi.  Creativity: flow and the psychology of discovery           and invention.  New York: HarperCollins, 1996.  Print.
Fletcher, Tina Sue. “Creative Thinking in Schools: Finding the “Just Right”           Challenge for Students.” Gifted Child Today Vol. 34 Issue 2 (2011):           37-42. Web. 25 July 2011.
"Ken Robinson Says Schools Kill Creativity | Video on TED.com." TED: Ideas           worth Spreading. June 2006. Web. 28 July 2011.
          <http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng
          /ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html>.

(Images used from http://beamazinglearning.wordpress.com/tag/creativity/, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dx2mGZ52WSM, and http://www.flickr.com/photos/23486066@N04/2242941795/)

A Farmer's Market

           It seems like commercials today are beginning to use more humor to persuade the populace to buy products.  Recent examples of this can be found in advertisements for insurance companies. These companies tend to use humor in their commercials to make them memorable; if people remember an advertisement because it was funny they may buy the product or be interested in using a certain insurance company.  State Farm and Farmers Insurance are two of the more recent companies to enter the humor-in-insurance-advertising game.  Both provide substance to what they are attempting to sell while still using humor, logic, and each firm’s established credibility to push their products.  The rhetorical appeals presented in the two chosen advertisements[1] by these companies make them stand out from each other.

            The main reasons that the two advertisements are so memorable are humor and credibility.  The credibility and humor together help people remember the commercial because of the way the products are presented.  State Farm is widely known for their “Like a good neighbor” jingle while Farmers Insurance is popular because of their recurring use of J.K. Simmons as the Professor Nathaniel Burke character; Simmons is known for several popular movie and television roles and is very recognizable in person and voice.  By using these recurring themes in their advertisements, State Farm and Farmers both implant their products on the viewers’ memories.

            The Farmers commercials always show a group of insurance agents who are supposedly students at the fictional University of Farmers learning from the Professor Burke character.  State Farm’s commercials almost always only show a single agent in the field, inspecting the damage to whatever the focus of the commercial is.  The Farmers agents learn together and work well with each other, giving the feeling of a comfortable working environment.  On the other hand, State Farm’s humor comes solely from the “average” people who are making the insurance claim and the only logic comes from the end of the commercial where the voice over explains that State Farm insurance can “save you hundreds.”  In this respect, it seems to be that Farmers treats the viewers more like people actually looking for an insurance company rather than people just looking for a laugh.

            The advertisements used by Farmers Insurance display more logic than those aired by State Farm.  In most of State Farm’s commercials, humor turns out to be the main focus, usually centered on how people use “the jingle.”  On the other hand, the Farmers Insurance advertisement shows that the company can help them avoid disasters by explaining what can happen and what choices can be made.  This difference begins to show that Farmers takes a much more logical approach to their commercials than State Farm, but still retains enough humor to be memorable.  Because of this, it seems that Farmers provides[2] better rhetorical persuasions for their product compared to State Farm.

One could say that that State Farm’s jingle, “Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there,” appeals to the viewers’ logic by saying that the company will always be there for them.  It is meant to give a sense of trustworthiness to the viewers to that they will know that State Farm will be looking out for the customers’ interests first.  On the opposite side, the jingle that Farmers Insurance uses is simply a string of onomatopoeia, sounds that are not actually words.  It is catchy and easy to remember and connect with the company, but it does not give the same feeling that the State Farm jingle does.  Instead the Farmers jingle expands upon the idea of the agents working together.  The jingles work almost like slogans: easy to remember and mean to signify an individual company.  Most slogans, however, usually evoke some kind of emotion from the viewer that will make them want to buy or at least test the product being advertised.  Farmers manages to make their jingle easy to remember but fails to evoke the feeling of desire for the product.

Humor can go too far, though.  A friend of mine decided to test the State Farm jingle several weeks back.  He said aloud, “Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there with a million dollars.”  He said he was quite upset when nothing happened.  Obviously, my friend was joking and he hardly expected a State Farm agent to suddenly appear to give him a million dollars.  But this does show that humor, while it can be a good way to implant an advertisement in memory, can sometimes go too far.  It just so happens that going too far is all in good fun for my friend.

            The opening scenes of each commercial give the viewer an all-important first impression about what each insurance firm is selling.  Even though the State Farm’s advertisement begins with the main characters talking, the dialogue is unintelligible and mostly unimportant to the actual commercial; even the extended version not shown on television does not add any real importance to the opening, making longer and more uneventful.  The Farmers ad begins like all of their commercials: at the fictional “University of Farmers.”  Even the extended version of the State Farm commercial does not explain the opening frames, but the university opening provides a feeling of safety in trusting Farmers Insurance.  The idea that anyone who works at this insurance company must attend a “college” means that they obviously value the knowledge that their workers use.

            It is always important for the writers of an advertisement to know who they are aiming their product for.  In the case of almost any insurance company, that audience tends to be young to middle-aged adults, particularly those with a middle-class income.  Both of the chosen commercials deal with home or apartment damage.  These specific advertisements would appeal more to homeowners in the same age group, likely unaffected by gender or race.  While the State Farm advertisement shows the agent appearing (after the jingle) and inspecting the damage, the Farmers Insurance group observes the test demonstration going on involving water damage to a home and explain that agents should sit down with their customers to discuss what can be done to prevent this from happening and what should be done if it does.

Farmers again shows[2] a more logical approach in their advertising angle by attempting to be more personal with the potential customers.  Just the fact that the agents would want to “sit down with our clients so we can get to know them” is entirely different from the agent in the State Farm commercial that seems to ignore the boys in the commercial and go about her business.  Obviously, both commercials involve different situations, but the Farmers Insurance piece shows the viewer that a personal relationship is important for discussing and preventing future damage, an important issue to anyone buying home insurance.

After reviewing and analyzing both advertisements, Farmers Insurance seems to appeal to the logic of the audience more while the State Farm commercial uses humor to bring enjoyment.  Since both commercials likely target a similar audience, young to middle-aged home-owners (or those leasing an apartment), it seems the Farmers Insurance commercial would be more successful in keeping the viewers’ attention and evoking a desire to purchase an insurance policy.  While the State Farm advertisement would accomplish this as well, its focus on humor could possibly drive away some older viewers that would then be attracted by Farmers or another insurance agency.

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[1]  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SauUa5Z4Ihw  State Farm

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNY98KN4p6c  Farmers Insurance

[2] The firm’s name is listed as “Farmers Insurance” so these are not grammatical errors.

What the People Want

David Lebovitz, owner and operator of the blog bearing his name, made a wonderful post that ties his normal food blog-related posts with some rules and expectations about web-writing and blogs.  One of the most important points that David makes, in my opinion deals with writing something that readers will find interesting.  Obviously, pretty much any piece of work that is or was written by a competent author wants to be entertaining to its readers, but doing that can be difficult.

One big idea that David gives is for you, the writer, to write about your own interests.  If you enjoy a certain type of food, or like playing a board game, make posts about those things.  Others may share the same feelings about what you posted.  Don't write about things that bore you; that's worse than writing about something you dislike.  At least if you dislike something you can make an argument for why you feel that way.  If something just holds no interest for you at all, how can your audience hold interest in what you write?

While David never specifically says this, it seems to me that a big part of his post deals with a writer's personality.  David mentions several times that many bloggers focus their work on earning as many hits as possible.  Instead of just writing to make it to the top of Google's search listing, bloggers should write for the sake or writing and to hold a conversation with the people that view their blog.  Personality is what defines any writer's style, and according to David, highlighting your own personality "is the most important thing you can do to differentiate yourself from others."

Presentation is another key point that David makes, the website layout can make or break a viewer's decision about your blog in one glance.  David even says that having his website designed by a professional was the most important thing he ever did for the site.  Drastic measures like that may not be the way to go for every website, but making your blog look clean and organized can certainly help shape the opinion of anyone that sees it.  Along with the layout, having more than just walls of text can help.  It's very easy to just skip past large blocks of text with no breaks in between; adding pictures or videos can help give your audience a break from constantly reading.

David's own entry follows these ideas well; he presents his post with an excellent layout, separating diverse ideas while still keeping a good flow between sections.  He also breaks his sections up by providing a list of resources and links that let the viewer rest from continued reading.  He also uses quotes to connect different ideas easily and shows that he knows the topic that he is writing about.  Rather than just telling the viewer what to do, David provides suggestions and even explanations about things that may not be common knowledge (such as the information about taking pictures).  David's post combines many different elements of good web-based writings and uses them to give an excellent guidebook to writings blogs.