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 about my own writing but a lot about a radio essay. A radio essay needs to be engaging, conversational, interesting, and is a complete piece that is not misleading, at least this is what I believe it to be so far!
Pitch #1: Differing Perspectives
Pitch #1: A documentary focusing on African refugees who have made their home here in the United States. I know several people born in the Congo, and had to flee to America under violent regimes. One of them witnessed his grandfather get executed. These folks have made a home here in America and have become an integral part of the community here. An angle I think would be interesting to explore is: how does their perception of world and political events inform their view on America's current situation? Many prominent government officials - the president, attorney general, president's advisors, etc, have been accused of or have a provable history of racist behavior. What are these folks' thoughts on America's current political situation, with the perspective they have from a much more violent country? I plan on incorporating backstory from their experiences before coming to America. I may choose to completely focus the story on their experiences as well, withou...
A lot of us are pointing out that one of the challenges here is to write the way you speak, an idea you echo here, Anne. One of the things I hope we can do in class is identify what exactly that means. How does it change the way we write sentences? Any thoughts about your experience with that?
ReplyDeletePersonally I think that it changes the way we write sentences by having us think less about how we write them. When writing research essays, we have to make sure that it sounds professional and concise, and although we should always make sure our sentences are concise, professionalism in this sense does not need to be included completely. We are free to be... creative with our words. At least that is how I see it.
DeleteHello Anne,
ReplyDeleteI think what you have said holds a lot of truth. The SOFT is super helpful to us as writers because it allows us to really concentrate on our writing and find the point in it. It's like if you are watching a movie and finish it and feel like "well that was a waste of my life" we as writers have a challenge to have people not have that feeling. I agree it helps us narrow in on what it is that we need to actually say, and give it some more contextual meaning.
I think one of the nuances that we haven't really started talking about yet, is that there is still a world of difference between "writing the way you speak," and just speaking.
ReplyDeleteWhy, if the goal is to sound naturalistic, did we write scripts at all? Why didn't we do like we might do before giving a speech, put some bullet points down on a note card and just go for it?
This comes up a lot in writing dialog too, in fiction but especially in scripts. You want people to sound like they're real people who are really talking, but.....you also don't, kinda?
Our natural speech is filled with tangential asides, ums and likes and other pauses. Which is the bigger sin? Unpolished and off-topic rambling? Or reading from a script like you're made out of wood? How do we find the middle ground between the two?
I think, in part, by reading what we've written out loud, over and over, before we ever hit record. Which brings us to another way that this process can help us with writing in general--we have to get even closer to our material. How would I feel about my stories, if I read them into a microphone and played them back? Even if I didn't cut the flowery bits because it isn't this genre, I'm sure I could still learn about dialog, about pacing, about pauses...I think there is something here more than just unlocking one new genre.