ENGL 324 (Spring 2018) Writing the Radio Essay

I have to say, I was surprised by the jump of complexity in getting this second project completed. After all, wasn't it just the same project, but more? I continued to fight my own personal demons, those of brevity (or the lack thereof). I really struggled to get this down towards the expected word count. Even after removing a third of the piece, I was still a hundred words over. I have to say, if I was going to critique the structure of this class, I think we spent too long working on drafts before we transitioned to recording. After writing two different sketches, the step of revising one sketch (before revising that sketch again, into a script) felt extraneous, as it was really in the conversion from sketch to script that most of the editing happened, and it was at the end that I felt I needed more time. Partly because it was harder to get a handle on the music than I'd expected, although I've learned something: I need to work on my project with speakers, not headpho...

This project was extremely difficult for me. I have a lack of aptitude for musical awareness so that was an early roadblock. In the recording process, I found it difficult to identify where to pace my narration and later the placement of music was a challenging and trying element for me. I also struggled to incorporate enough music and find music that fit my subject which lends to identifying subject audio agreeance. There is also the fact that I think I need to practice with audacity as the tech side of this was hard for me.  Ultimately I ended up severely displeased with my recorded draft but that's the benefit of drafts, there is room for improvement. The class workshop has been of a significant help to me I especially like that I now have an awareness of the concept of where to add pause. Beng able to hear how other people put their pieces together has been helpful in showing me how these types of projects should be structured. How to queue music in and where to ...

This assignment from start to finish has been a pain in the butt for some reason. I wasn't able to really think of a topic to write on, then it was too short and barely made the minimum word count. Then it took me hours to find the right music file I wanted to use. Then it took like 5 tries to get my audio right without stuttering or flopping around over my words. The topic I ended up settling on that I thought was Eh was when we did the writing assignment where we wrote on one of the titles from the list that was handed out. Once I wrote it down I realized it was still too short so I looked for places to expand but barely found one, which I only wrote only like two sentences on. I feel like if I focused more on the assignment at home I could have come up with something better but with how everything at home has been it was not gonna happen. I will say I am pretty excited for the doc assignment we are doing next, I had the topic for it in mind saved since I first learned about ...

I found this particular project to be easier than that previous one. I think this is mainly due to the fact that I wrote about a story that I have told and retold frequently over the years. So, basically I already had a revised story ready when I started drafting and recording. With that in mind, there were a few things that surprised me. As I've said, this is a story I share a lot, but not one that I've ever really deeply thought about. During the writing process for class, I gave a lot of thought to what the story actually means, and why I tell it. It's a funny anecdote, for sure, but what it meant (if it meant anything at all), I had no idea until I started really examining it. This, I think, was the most beneficial aspect of this project for me. A little self reflection can go a long way, especially when the story is stripped down to the core. Playing with the musical elements was interesting and even fun. I was surprised by how easy and naturally it all seemed to c...

Made this draft on Wednesday, couldn't figure out how to post it until now. When it comes to how much writing for speech has changed my writing, I'm embarrassed to say it hasn't changed that much. I've always written with a strong awareness of voice, for better or worse, especially because all of my proofreading includes listening to how my writing sounds. I've always written this way  and it hasn't lead to any objections... yet. However, I will admit there is some difference, at least when it comes to reading. I make rhetorical corrections on the fly, and feel much more comfortable writing longer sentences as I can make them less 'droney' with my voice. I mostly just feel embarrassed I didn't take the time to really find out what I was trying to say, as I think I would have created a much more compelling piece if I had, but as I already said in class, I can forgive myself as I needed to take care of my family at the time. I'm almost done ...

I've completely spaced this blog!!! WHOOOPS!!! I found simplifying the way I write to be the most difficult part. However, after I decided to just say it how I would tell a friend about it, the writing became a lot more fluid. This was also very rewarding as direct communication is something I struggle with in my writing. I am loving the radio essay genre and the recording process in general. I will be applying this to future projects for sure!

It is interesting to have to keep in mind that writing for listening is vastly different from writing that will be read. I changed so much from my first draft to make it sound better, and there is so much more I want to do before my final draft to make it sound and flow better. Oddly, I found the actual recording of this audio to be really painless, almost to the point where I was worried I was forgetting something. It was just recording it on my phone, transferring it to my Drive, then dragging it into Audacity to fix it up a bit. During recording, if I noticed a mess up I had made, I would pause then restart the sentence, knowing I could cut out my errors in editing and record the whole thing in one go. That I think made it easier for me in dealing with only one track. I had a friend over last Sunday night when I remembered I needed to record this assignment and get it uploaded. We paused our movie and told my husband he had to be quiet so I could record. Taking out my phone and op...

When working on my first audio draft for the commentary project, I found that the most difficult thing or me was keeping the story brief and under 400 words. I struggled with finding the right balance of details that would help move the story along and would help with narration. The main problems i had with audacity was getting my laptop accept the headset mic i was using and to get my laptop and audacity both agree on which setting of the mic i was using. I think that also being constantly conscious of how my voice infliction is influencing the interpretation of certain words, and the importance of a sentence.

I always knew that creating essays for the radio had to require a substantial amount of work and revision but I never fully considered everything that goes into creating recordings for the radios until I had to do it myself. The thing that was the most challenging in the process of recording my radio essay was the scripting. We are so well trained from primary school on to write analytically and formally so to break that cycle and write something with a casual talking style was a difficult transition for me. I found myself having to simplify statements and break down descriptions into what was fundamentally necessary for a conversational typesetting. The experience of recording was also interesting in that I had to become analytical about my actual speech patterns and styles. There were the basic issues of listening to my own voice and talking too fast but beyond that, I began to notice certain speech tics such as abbreviated pronunciations of words lik...

Well here it goes, So far this class is like learning a second language, as in you know a few words and can almost understand it but its going to take a lot of practice. I know how to write an essay, so there's that. I know how to talk ( that's obvious) and I have listened to a pod cast before, so there's a few pieces. Now I just have to put them together and try not to mess up! The biggest struggle I had while doing our first few assignments was getting ahold of the basics, how the heck do I use this audacity thing? My first few tries with the soundscape project were well, lets say they were interesting. I had no idea how to piece the sounds together without them playing on top of each other. After some unnecessary frustration I decided that YouTube was the answer, and it turns out it was. I figured it out, ok now I just had to make them sound good, which I think I did an ok job, but with that being said I managed to somehow stretch the sound waves and it looked a ...

   Three students from another class stared at me intently, curiously pondering about what my response might be, as one of the students asked what the most difficult aspect of our class was. I felt a great deal of pressure fall on me at the moment because it is almost impossible to explain this new process through words. I can tell someone what it is like for me, the experience, but they will never truly know unless they experience it themselves. I am personally very happy with the way this class presents constant challenges. Regardless of what your particular major is, I think we can, and will, become stronger writers after the revision processes and tips we are gaining in class. Through these assignments, we are making small, condense pieces, but it feels like our work in under a magnifying glass. Our work is more crucially analyzed because there is more to be remembered in small body of work. Each error sticks out blatantly. There is reall...

This project has gone against my instruction in creative writing to this point. I wouldn’t say that my writing is verbose, per se, but I use complicated sentence structures in writing. One writing technique that has transferred is my use of em dashes. I’ve started using them more often when writing my script, because they’re a great cue for me to change my enunciation. It felt counter-intuitive to pare down my writing and simplify my sentences, but that’s really the only way to get my writing to translate verbally. I’ve been surprised at how a beautiful, complex written sentence (…not mine, obviously, just one in general! haha….) becomes clunky and laborious when spoken aloud into a microphone. The biggest challenge for me so far has been deciding which details to include as I’m cutting my material. Ideally, in writing, every detail/metaphor/allusion/imagery, etc. has a specific purpose and furthers the plot in some way—given the brevity of the spoken essay, purposeful detail is impe...

As I signed up for this course I wasn't expecting this course to be what it is. I am not quite sure what I was expecting but it has challenged me in ways I never thought were possible. It has been extremely difficult to adjust and adapt my writing style and skills to work with being read aloud. I have always been used to writing normal essays, papers, blog posts, and journaling. I have also been challenged by the software we are using because I have never used anything like Audacity before and it is extremely challenging when you don't understand how it all works. I have spent numerous hours playing around and trying to get the hang of it, yet I am still struggling. All I know how to do so far is add files together and move them to match up on the track. I never understood how I needed to write differently when I my work was going to be read aloud because I have always written the same way when I was told to give a speech. It never crossed my mind that the things I wrote wo...

Writing this first radio essay was an interesting experience, and I'm pretty happy with how my essay turned out other than the fact that my voice doesn't sound like Ira Glass... I'm working on that. The length of this essay was really challenging for me, but it allowed a lot of easy and quick revision that I felt like I wouldn't be able to find time to do in a longer piece. What was frustrating was that I had to be so brief while still trying to tell a 'story'. I had a hard time trying to milk a 'purpose' out of my writing, and I think if I continue to revise this piece I will have to focus on this more. Actually recording the essay was really fun! I've loved learning how to use audacity and edit my tracks. Being forced to speak my writing definitely keeps me honest, but I like that I can write in a less conventional style and use my voice to add punctuation, emphasis, and tone. In my other writing (mostly academic stuff) I've tried to move awa...

For this first major assignment, the Commentary/flash audio essay, the most challenging part was to write it how I would speak when telling a story to a friend or a group of friends. I have not been able to write freely in such a long time because with many of my classes, the professors want clean, professional essays, not casual, relaxed narratives. I worked with my piece many times and it still came out halfway sounding like an essay. This project greatly influenced my thinking about writing and genre because it taught us to write the way we speak and to make sure our piece has an overall meaning, aka SOFT. When reading it for the audio portion and being kinda forced to listen to it over and over, you are able to pick out the misgivings in your own writing and where inflections should be if not already. It is actually quite helpful even if the writing is not going to be turned into an audio essay like this piece for the class. A sound essay like this one actually taught me a lot abou...

The flash nonfiction radio essay is an enlightening assignment to the sophomoric writer in the sense that, instead of writing towards a page number, the writer must take extra care to condense and compress their writing down to its basest, most essential elements. The course curriculum so far has done a great job in directing us to think about how to communicate greater meaning with less words. My biggest struggle with the flash nonfiction essay was a fear to truly explore the subject matter I wanted to. Indeed, my first date was ruined by the death of two people who I did not know - and the biggest emotion I felt was a disappointment that the date didn't go the way it seemed it was meant to go. I feared this would paint me in a very selfish light (which, admittedly, it still does), however, the class's reaction to my piece informed me that I really should've pushed the boundaries and taken the risk. In a way, having to compress the language caused me to fear that this me...

I’ve been writing for a few years now. I started telling stories and jotting them down before I was 10, but by no means am I (or will I ever be) an expert. I’ve taken quite a few writing classes, but they always teach you the same things: “This is an essay . This is how you outline said essay. This is is how you write said essay.” Those classes didn’t teach me how to be a better writer, only a better bull-shitter. Once you’ve mastered the craft of bull-shittery, there’s not a lot that a typical writing classes can teach you. This is why I was very excited to come upon ‘The Radio Essay.’ The concept of transitioning a written piece into an audio recording astonished me. I had never taken a second to actually think about my pieces being read aloud, nonetheless myself being the reader. After the first assignment, I realized just how complex a spoken story is. It’s much more difficult to write a story that’s meant to be heard. I had to think about my word choice, diction, and senten...

I have to admit I was initially nervous about recording my writing for this class at the start of the semester. Turns out I was worried over nothing. The hardest parts of the process have been learning to use the program and adjusting my writing to be more effective to be spoken aloud. For me, working with Audacity was tricky for about two seconds. The program is pretty similar to some of the video editing software I’ve used for projects in other classes, so I suspect that there may have been a shorter learning curve due to that familiarity. When I write, I try to read my work aloud, this helps me to catch a lot of simple surface level errors (like dear or deer, which Word typically won’t catch), and can help with awkward sentences. So, it wasn’t much of a stretch to read out loud to make sure my writing was not only correct, but also pleasing to the ear as well. The hardest part, for me anyways, was the actually recording. Trying to get through a section of my writing wit...

I discovered two different areas of the genre while working on this piece. While I knew the concept of jumping right into the fire I didn't understand how powerful it was until I heard it. The vocal element adds even more emotional punch to strong first lines. As I read it I found myself stumbling over formal words and slipping into more contractions and slang. I edited as I was reading it to make it flow more naturally. Fragments can work in your favor here as there is no long written twisting sentence for the reader to get lost in and instead a natural way of speaking.