Mark Twain

In the reading, Twain's primary point was that writing shouldn't be too wordy. He says that too many adjectives actually lessens their impact,which is something I agree with. When you use too many adjectives together they lose their meaning because it seems like you are overstating your point. One really profound word is always better than a collection of overused and understated ones. Twain also warns against fluff sentences in your writing, which I also believe to be sound advice. Any intelligent person can pick out fluff anyway so there's no point in putting it in since it only makes writing more convoluted. Twain's view definitely applies to blogging because brevity and conciseness in a blog can make it easier to read. I'm less likely to read a long wordy post online than one that's only a few paragraphs for a couple of reasons. The most important one is that I really don't like reading any form of extended writing online so sometimes I lose interest in something that is too long even if I do find it compelling. The other reason why I feel blogs shouldn't be too wordy is that someone who is able to get their point across clearly in just a few paragraphs is probably a better writer than one that needs pages of text to accomplish their task.

Jonathan Lethem's "The Ecstasy of Influence"

The text isn't so much an excuse for plagiarism or telling you to pass someone else's work off as your own as it is a statement that everything is borrowed from somewhere, whether intentionally or not, and that that is the beauty of writing. More readers nowadays should be more forgiving of writing that seems too similar to another's because it's very difficult, if not impossible, to come up with a totally original thought. It's a tricky subject because the sharing of ideas among writers is something to be celebrated but you hate to see someone profiting off of someone else's work without giving them credit. If one writer comes up with a thought and another one comes along and packages it better and makes it famous, the first writer probably would feel cheated but the second writer probably wouldn't feel like they did anything wrong. Of course, it's hard to say if the idea really belonged to that first writer to begin with. But in a way that's what makes the sharing of ideas so interesting because thoughts get passed around and everyone that hears/reads them can interpret them differently and use them to different ends. That is the ecstasy of influence that Lethem is talking about. The danger comes when someone hears a thought and doesn't add their own influence it or take something away from it and reuses it for the same purpose as the person they got it from, because then there is nothing unique about what they are writing.

AT&T Commercial Analysis

I thought the commercial did a good job in serving its primary goal of being a commercial and making people want to buy an AT&T phone with a GPS. It's very visual, with basically no dialogue and yet it was very clear from the imagery that the boy and girl were supposed to be Hansel and Gretal and that they were lost in New York. It shows that the the GPS could come in handy, and it has a nice happy ending. When looking at the commercial as closely as we did in class, you realize the story doesn't make a lot of sense (why didn't they use the phone right away? how did they get there?) but that's not the point. The point is "we've fooled you into watching our commercial by drawing you in with Hansel and Gretal, now our logo and phone are stuck in your head", and the logo at the end makes that perfectly clear.

Writing At Hofstra

So here I am at Hofstra, and I am blogging. Writing online makes me feel...

...like a bit of a liar, because I'm not actually at Hofstra writing this. But more to the point, writing online makes me appreciate how far we've come technologically. I'm used to writing stuff online by now, I do it a lot, whether on Facebook, Twitter, AIM, or commenting on a video or post on another site. I can't imagine most people older than I am ever expected the internet to become the normal medium for sharing ideas in our society. But I grew up with a computer, and I guess I always assumed they would just keep getting better and better, not that I was thinking in the context of improving as a means of communication. I just assumed I'd be able to do more and more with one as I got older, and I was right. Personally I like the fact that communication has gotten so much easier. Opinions are shared much faster on things like posts and videos that wouldn't even have existed to comment on years ago before the internet became so widely used. I like the idea of being able to tell someone something or show them something right away, or that if I want to write something and post it online, I can be reasonably sure that someone somewhere is going to find and and read it. It's sort of a scary thought but in a way its kind of cool because that person would not have any idea what I was thinking if we had never entered into the digital age.