TA: Wow...

Talk about one of the coolest realizations... I wish I had known this before. So, during English class one day, my professor showed us what the difference was between writing with passive voice and active voice, and what targeting "to be" verbs does for your writing. Holy freaking amazing. It makes sense... in one of those "oh, duh," ways that you have to be told in order to realize. I've been in creative writing and advanced english classes ever since I can remember (I mean, I signed myself up for a reading class without my parents knowing during preschool. I've been an english troublemaker from the beginning :D ) but I have never, even once, had a teacher who talked about nixing "to be" verbs and replacing them with active ones. Oh, they talk about active and passive voice, but I looked at my writing and it made such an incredible difference. I had heard, from one professor during a summer camp, to avoid "ly" adjectives and the like, but my professor explained why and how to do it effectively. SO much better. But, now I have a problem because anything I wrote previously to finding this out (which is a lot...) I'm going to want to completely revamp every verb (well, many.) Talk about cool.

Freewrite: The day in the life of a flower

So... I have roses sitting in front of me, and my brain is in its mushy stage where I don't have to think about anything, so I won't until I have to do my soc homework. So, the mush sits there, and thus my inspiration will be whatever happens to be in my immediate attention; hence the roses.

So. There are two vases. One, with a concoction I made myself (woo, my first ever flower arrangement), and the other a simple design I helped pick out and make for my roommate. She was having a rather crummy day, so I grabbed 3 long-stem roses from the plethora available to me and found a beautiful gold ribbon to go with them. It made her morning, which made me happy.


We also ended up making an arrangement for my ickle sister, who happened to be very sick. (Not that I'm surprised, I think she keeps herself busier than I do, which is saying something. 'Cept she still manages to do it all :) .) It was pretty-- lots of fall colors in the flowers, of oranges and crimson reds with some sunflowers. *sigh*. I love flowers. They make any dreary jail-esque cinderblock apartment happier...

RA, because I felt like it.

Rhetorically Analyzing...

A thought on technology

We've been having presenters for our upcoming paper on technology, so here are some thoughts on their presentations:

* This last group was extremely well-organized. I very much liked how they gave their presentations and split up the time and topics. I admit I had to laughingly gripe a little bit at the "Mac vs. PC" presentation, because I hate Macs, but that's just a personal quirk. I thought the presenters brought up a lot of good points and discussion material.... ie. talking about how new forms of technology (texting, internet, email, social groups) are affecting the way we live and interact with each other (and write english papers, according to N :) ).
*The discussion on intellectual property was interesting too. The group talked about who should have what rights, and whether it's right for companies to endorse certain technologies.
*One guy talked about whether we should "simplify" our technological world and only allow one kind of format (ie. Blu vs. HD DVDs), or whether that promotes monopolies and unfair business/ethical practices. Personally, I'm more of the opinion that I love standardization, but I dislike the idea of technology monopolies (mostly because I work with tech, and so often things don't work in one format that prove more useful in another format in certain situations. I'm all for options.)
*I also liked the way they presented their slides... yes, it had a lot of technical information, but it was done for comparative reasons and you weren't expected to read the whole thing.