The Craft of Writing
Links
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwEBvlmiB9E&list=PL6JcE9XKo7QGHbeIcrszNA6dQVB32ZFGT&index=8&t=0s
https://margaretatwood.ca/news/
https://online.clickview.com.au/libraries/videos/78bdac1c-4e36-eee6-df64-f7e04312626c/effective-essay-writing-for-senior-students
https://online.clickview.com.au/libraries/videos/7fa86795-89a6-6d2c-42ee-68d93818ec06/writing-narratives
https://online.clickview.com.au/libraries/videos/5793833/writing-style
https://online.clickview.com.au/libraries/videos/d9eb5be6-7488-4d52-0c16-c674e268334d/writers-on-writing-playwrights
https://online.clickview.com.au/libraries/videos/7fa86795-89a6-6d2c-42ee-68d93818ec06/writing-narratives
https://online.clickview.com.au/exchange/videos/5679079/writers-on-writing-the-write-stuff
https://online.clickview.com.au/libraries/videos/3789914d-a55e-281e-30b8-018eadecd3ee/writers-on-writing-in-the-beginning
Why everyone should read Geraldine Brooks The Guardian Published January 28 2016 Rightly revered in Australia for wide-ranging fiction and reportage, Pulitzer-winner Brooks has never written a bad book – and more people should read her. Here are five titles everyone should pick up. The most confounding thing about Geraldine Brooks’s writing is how consistently good it is: it doesn’t matter if she is recalling an interview with a disarmingly amiable Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran or spinning a Pulitzer-winning yarn about the missing father from Little Women – every book is remarkable. Working as a journalist did not beat the poet out of her – Brooks’s fiction is frequently beautiful, poetic at times, packed full of sentences to relish aloud – a river of “water as unlike our clear fast-flowing freshets as a fat broody hen to a hummingbird” in March; the hero who “walked through the woods like a young Adam, naming creation” in Caleb’s Crossing. Australia Day honour 'hits me in a very deep place', says Geraldine Brooks The American-Australian author was awarded the Order of Australia on Tuesday, to mark her “essentially Australian” contributions to writing, as she called them in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald. It’s an apt description: whether the setting is the rocky American wilderness or pre-biblical Israel, all Brooks’s books have an underlying fascination with the wider world, frequent references to multiculturalism and mutual understanding, and warnings against the corrosiveness of class prejudice – all wonderfully Australian roots. As a fan, it is nice to see a self-described “feminist tree-hugging pinko” officially recognised for her body of work. Given how universal Brooks’s books are, why then does she remain so under-appreciated outside of Australia? In her fiction, she returns most frequently to the beauty and blood found in religion, exploring faiths in a quiet, reverent voice that recalls Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. She also writes often about nature, painting landscapes of brutal, untamed beauty reminiscent of Annie Proulx. But she is not as famous as either, at least outside Australia – in Australia, Brooks is a national treasure and shifts hardbacks accordingly. The Secret Chord by Geraldine Brooks review – portrait of a humanised King David For all yet to discover her, I envy you: Brooks somehow manages to write both clear, authoritative non-fiction – she is about to return to the Middle East on an unnamed assignment – as well as warm, overwhelming lyrical fiction. As she wrote in March: “To know a man’s library is, in some measure, to know a man’s mind,” and only good things could be said about a shelf with even one Brooks title sitting on it. Here are five to get you started on a Brooks bender: 1 Nine Parts of Desire: the Hidden World of Islamic Women (1995, revised 2007) While working as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, white female Brooks had a hard time doing her job; shunned by Muslim men for interviews, refused access to politicians and denied opportunities that were offered readily to male colleagues. Brooks made use of these obstacles, focusing instead on telling the personal stories of women in Islamic countries, getting intimate access to women in royalty and the poor. Twenty years on, this collection of interviews and features remains one of the best dissections of the contradictions, hypocrisies and joys women experience in Islamic countries. 2 People of the Book (2008) Caustic rare-book expert Hanna Heath is given the chance to conserve the Sarajevo Haggadah, one of the oldest surviving Jewish illuminated texts. In this fictionalised retelling of the book’s already remarkable life, Brooks documents the tragedies and misadventures the manuscript has gone through – saved from fire by a Catholic priest, protected by a Muslim from Nazis, the cause of exile for a 14th-century Barcelona scribe. It is grand, intense, romantic; all in all a thoroughly enjoyable page-turner for book lovers. 3 March (2006) Brooks won the Pulitzer prize for this expansion of the world Louisa May Alcott created in Little Women. Patriarch March is long gone in Alcott’s book but is front and centre in Brooks’s, following his survival of the American civil war and the effects it has on his character and marriage. March makes you feel like you are roaming untamed America, alongside a main character so gentle and stoic he outdoes even his lovable daughters in charm. 4 Caleb’s Crossing (2012) A beautiful work of historical fiction set in the era of American pioneers. Bertha meets Caleb while attempting the escape the boredom of growing up in a 17th-century Puritan settlement near Martha’s Vineyard; she the daughter of a minister, he the son of a Wampanoag chieftain. But the story that unfolds is much more than the expected tale; Caleb enters a world of Latin lessons and white privilege, while Bertha becomes obsessed with the culture Caleb leaves behind. It is a beautifully written exploration of religion and spirituality, culture and ethnicity. 5 Foreign Correspondence (1997) As a child, Brooks escaped the banality of the everyday in Sydney’s western suburbs by writing and receiving letters to pen pals around the world. Swapping stories with people in the Middle East, the US and Europe for years painted a picture of the wider world for Brooks, who would go on to be a foreign correspondent later in life. In adulthood, she decided to track each of her pen pals down; the resulting interactions – with people who have lived through mental illness, political aggression and war – forcing Brooks to confront the dissonance between her exotic childhood imaginings and what she sees as an adult. https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2016/jan/27/read-geraldine-brooks-march-australia-pulitzer GERALDINE BROOKS Links: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHTFK8BF5_U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHTFK8BF5_U https://hscnoteshertel.weebly.com/module-a-1984metropolis.html https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/boyerlectures/lecture-4/3724604 https://www.tsfx.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Year-12-English-Advanced-Speeches-A_1.pdf |
TEXT TYPES
Discursive Text
Circle Gets the Square
The internet has shape preferences, and they’re more meaningful than you think On Thursday, Twitter threw us a curveball (sorry) and smoothed out the once-square avatar photos into orbs floating around the timeline. The change is notable, but the circle vs. square debate is far from new. There are arguments in favour of both when applied to internet design; circles indicate a person rather than content, which typically comes in a grid-like shape. So what is the current state of shapes on the social web?
Instagram ditched its hard rule for square posts in 2015. Instagram Stories and profile icons are circles. Snapchat chat icons are circles; profiles are ghosts within squares. Google Hangout profile icons (are these Google+ icons? Does anyone know anymore?) are circles. App icons are squares. The Facebook profile photo is a square. Slack avatars are square. The Square app is a square inside the app icon (which, to review, is also square).
Despite Twitter’s change, the world is still safe for squares, or so I thought. I was wrong. There are no squares. (Just ask Windows Phone, a now-defunct defender of squares.) Squares are dead. The entire internet is now just a series of curvy, swoopy lines. Cliff Kuang, the director of product at Fast Company and author of a forthcoming book about design, pointed out to me exactly how wrong I was about squares. I started running down the avatar inventory in my iPhone. Facebook, for example, was one of the very few square holdouts. “I imagine Facebook has tested this like crazy, but I bet you if you looked at it hard enough that it’s rounded in some way.” So I zoomed in, and there they were: rounded edges.
The same is true of app icons. Most of the favicons I checked — same. Facebook post boxes — those too. Even Instagram, formerly the most aggressive purveyor of square culture, has rounded edges on its web viewer. Slack avatars, as it turns out, are not square. Nearly every “square” on the internet is not actually a square.
“A lot of this talk about rounded corners began with, as you can expect, Steve Jobs,” says Kuang. “There’s a famous anecdote about him berating one of the original engineers of macOS about button shape. The engineer was like, ‘Let’s just do squares; it’s a lot easier to render,’ and Jobs took him on a tour of the parking lot and pointed at everything that was a rounded shape. The yield sign, the parking sign, everything. If you think about it, it’s very rare to find a straight, pointy corner in the natural world. It’s a very rare shape.” “He always wanted his interface to essentially look as natural as possible, so he had a philosophical bias toward that,” Kuang continued. “The world is made of rounded corners. Sharp corners hurt you; sharp corners are things to be avoided. So [Jobs] has this almost spiritual take that rounded corners were friendlier.”
True circles, Kuang explains, are the superior eye-grabbing form. “You’ll notice that a lot of things that are supposed to be perceived very quickly tend to be round. There’s something about circles that draw our attention more easily.” A trick he asked me to try: Draw a square with rounded corners and draw something inside of it, then draw a square with sharp corners with something inside of it. “You’ll see the rounded one makes you pay attention to what’s in the centre of it.”
One more trick Kuang suggests: Trace your eyes around something round and then something square. “Notice your eyes following the edge of something if it’s round, versus if it’s straight. Notice how your eyes move and how your head moves. You naturally follow the contour of something when it’s rounded, it’s very easy to follow the contour of something when it’s rounded.” According to research, it’s harder for the brain to process sharp edges — the cognitive load is lessened with rounded shapes. Essentially, softening things allows the brain to be a little lazier and more easily interpret what it’s seeing. A useful explainer from UX Movement puts it this way: “The sharper the corner, the brighter it appears. And the brighter a corner appears, the harder it is to look at.”
The explainer also features this effective illustration to demonstrate the point:
Fork vs Beachball
(My answer: neither! You can’t trust children.)
The rounded shapes vs. hard edges debate also informs visual cues in the internet’s history; when I think of boxy squares, I think of pixelated Oregon Trail games. (Kuang thinks of the Prodigy log-on button.) Back then, hard edges were easier to render because we had such low resolution, but as resolution becomes greater, it’s easier to soften shapes — so designers have. Taking this line of thinking to its ultimate conclusion, circles are an indicator of the most sophisticated, accessible execution of web design.
Writing seriously about Twitter design feels sort of … silly. That the smoothing of some hard edges can inspire outrage and adoration is dumbfounding. But there is one line of defense for such reactions, and it’s that we simply cannot help ourselves. Our brains are what they are, and the way our eyes interpret and react to the things we stare at everyday matters deeply to the parts of our mind we don’t know, and it’s why shapes and colors make us feel things. Even if the things we’re feeling are, again, sort of silly. But this is a roundabout (again, I’m sorry) way of saying that Twitter’s new design choice is rooted in what we already neurologically prefer — whether we realize it or not.
“[Rounded corners] create a visual order,” says Kuang. “It’s something you can perceive, but you can’t put your finger on it right away.”
Persuasive Text
Deadlier Than The Male: Femme Fatales, from Eve to Amanda Knox by Tara Moss
Throughout history many – if not most – cultures have perpetuated the myth of the evil woman. In a recent Lunchbox/Soapbox address, Tara Moss discussed evil women, female criminals and the demonisation of the female gender: from Eve and Pandora to Elizabeth Bathory and Paula Broadwell.
Women are a necessary evil, the famous proverb says.
Pandora – the first woman on earth, created by a male god (Hephaestus) on the order of a male god (Zeus), as a wife for a male (Epimetheus) – was perhaps not an ideal first. She famously opened that box - in fact a jar - back in the days of ancient Greece, letting all the evil into the world.
From her is the race of women and female kind: of her is the deadly race and tribe of women who live amongst mortal men to their great trouble, no helpmates in hateful poverty, but only in wealth. – From Hesiod’s Theogony (8th–7th century BC)
Eve – the first woman on earth, created by a male god from a man’s rib as a gift for a male (Adam) – was also not without flaws. She sought the Tree of Knowledge and famously bit into that apple in the Garden of Eden, ending Paradise and letting all the evil into the world.
And the Lord God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done – Genesis 3:13.
(Perhaps if Adam had met some Greeks, he would have known what was coming.)
Eve and Pandora were the first bad girls, and ever since, women have been linked in the popular consciousness with the concept of sin and their sins with sex.
Mae West once quipped that there are ‘no good girls gone wrong, only bad girls found out.’ And she has a point, if you consider that Eve’s sin was to ‘eat from the Tree of knowledge’. The Good Girl standard then, of passivity, obedience, lack of curiosity about flora and fauna, (including speaking snakes) and a general disinterest in knowledge, would surely make being ‘a good girl’ a near impossibility. And not much fun, by the sounds of it.
If you believe women to be morally weak, as did Freud, who wrote that we possess ‘little sense of justice’, or the Greek philosopher Plato, who in Timaeus offers that women are the reincarnation of men who have lived evil lives, and as such, are morally flawed … well, no wonder women can’t be trusted, and men need to be ashamed of their emotions, as they so often lead them to women and therefore to their own demise.
Sherlock Holmes – that popular fictional character of great logic and high intelligence – was very clear on the matter of that other gender. ’Women are never to be entirely trusted, not the best of them,’ he warned.
Women exist at the peril of men like Holmes. In a perfect world they are best avoided. But as things stand, wise men know that women are a necessary evil, because although a male god reportedly birthed the world, these days women tend to have the monopoly on the birthing of humans.
https://www.wheelercentre.com/notes/25b5dc3f2ac (The Fictional Woman - Tara Moss 2012)
Informative Text
TEENAGE VANDALS WERE SENTENCED TO READ BOOKS. HERE’S WHAT ONE TEEN LEARNED
A Virginia judge handed down an unusual sentence last year after five teenagers defaced a historic black schoolhouse with swastikas and the words “white power”.
By Christine Hauser 7/4/18 The New York Times
Instead of spending time in community service, Judge Avelina Jacob decided that the five youths who defaced a school house with racist graffiti should read a book. But not just any book. They had to choose from a list of ones covering some of history’s most divisive and tragic periods. The horrors of the Holocaust awaited them in “Night,” by Elie Wiesel. The racism of the Jim Crow South was there in Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” The brutal hysteria of persecution could be explored in “The Crucible” by Arthur Miller.
A year has passed since the youths spray-painted their hateful messages on the side of the Ashburn Coloured School, a one-room, 19th-century classroom that had been used by black children during segregation in Northern Virginia. The swastikas and words were long ago covered with paint. The teenagers have read their books and written their reports. The charges, destruction of private property and unlawful entry, were dismissed in January, Alejandra Rueda, a deputy commonwealth attorney who suggested the reading sentence, said. “I hope that they learned the lesson that I hoped that they would learn, which was tolerance,” Ms. Rueda said. So, did they?
The juveniles who vandalized the old schoolhouse in Ashburn, a community of about 43,000 people northwest of Washington, D.C., could not be identified because of their ages. But the commonwealth attorney’s office has said they were public school students ages 16 and 17. Two were white, and three were non-white. One of the teenagers agreed for this article to share the list of books that he chose. Among them were “The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini, set in Afghanistan; “To Kill a Mockingbird,” by Harper Lee; “The Tortilla Curtain,” by T.C. Boyle, about a Mexican couple trying to make a life in California, and “Things Fall Apart,” a tale of Nigeria by Chinua Achebe. He wrote that two books affected him deeply: “12 Years a Slave,” a memoir by Solomon Northup, a free black man who was kidnapped in 1841 and sold into slavery in Louisiana, and “Night.”
An excerpt from one of his court-ordered essays was provided to The New York Times, with his permission, by his defense lawyer. He describes not fully knowing what a swastika meant, and that he thought it “didn’t really mean much.” “Not anymore,” he wrote. “I was wrong, it means a lot to people who were affected by them. It reminds them of the worst things, losing family members and friends. Of the pain of torture, psychological and physical. Among that it reminds them how hateful people can be and how the world can be cruel and unfair.” Now, he wrote, he sees the swastika as a symbol of “oppression” and “white power, that their race is above all else, which is not the case.” He also wrote that while he had studied this period in history class, the lesson lasted only a few days. “I had no idea about how in depth the darkest parts of human history go,” he wrote. He wrote that he feels “especially awful” that he made anyone feel bad. “Everybody should be treated with equality, no matter the race, religion, sex or orientation,” he wrote in his essay. “I will do my best to see to it that I never am this ignorant again.”
Authors hope their messages got across since the Ashburn case, the reading sentence has been applied to another case, one involving a 14-year-old who threatened a black student with a noose, Ms. Rueda said. She gathered a list of 36 books with input from librarians who emphasized that the most enlightening could be “A Wreath for Emmett Till,” a poetry book about a black youth of the same age who was murdered in Mississippi in 1955. Marilyn Nelson, the author, said she was concerned it might have the opposite effect to what was intended. “I can’t say I’m pleased to know that my work is being inflicted as a punishment,” she said. “Will kids punished by being made to read poetry ever read poetry again?” Other authors expressed hope that the underlying message in their works was not lost.
Mr. Boyle, whose “The Tortilla Curtain” is told from four points of view, said he hoped the teenager “will be able to live inside the skin of someone unfamiliar to him, whether that be the Mexican immigrant couple or the Anglo couple living in a gated community, and that the experience will enrich his social perspective.”
Mr. Hosseini, who wrote “The Kite Runner,” a story of Afghan boys struggling against cruelty, said he hoped the teenager was inspired to overcome an “us against them” mind-set. “Engaging with characters that differ from us in race, religion or culture, helps us feel our immutable connections as a species,” Mr. Hosseini said. “Books allow us to see ourselves in another. They transform us. I hope reading ‘The Kite Runner’ was a small step along that transformation for this young man.”
How the community reacted after the graffiti episode in September 2016, the Ashburn schoolhouse underwent a renovation organized by students from the Loudoun School for the Gifted, a private high school that owns it. Money was raised, work teams were drawn from community volunteers, and the little schoolhouse eventually opened as a museum. Some criticized the sentence. For example, an English teacher at Loudoun balked at the idea of associating reading with punishment, said Deep Sran, the school’s founder. Kamran Fareedi, 17, a senior at Loudoun, had been working on the renovation before the vandalism said he thought the sentence “reeks of pampering and no consequences.
When I heard that the punishment was that they were going to have to do homework assignments, I was very disappointed,” he said. "All over the country we have a giant mass incarceration problem. And particularly African Americans who do the slightest thing, their interaction with the criminal justice system is way more harsh. When people of colour make mistakes they don’t get the chance to start over.” He said the fact that three of the youths were minorities also reflected the economic privilege of youths in the Ashburn area. “It is astonishing that they are that disconnected from the serious implications of their history and their heritage and people of their background today in non-privileged areas,” Mr. Fareedi said.
Shailee Sran, a 16-year-old student at the school, said she hoped that the teenager learned the value of bravery in defending what is right from his reading of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” “I actually thought the punishment made sense,” she said. “I feel like if they don’t understand what they did wrong it is not helping the problem. It is just teaching them not to get caught. It is like what we were doing in trying to restore the schoolhouse,” Ms. Sran added. “We are trying to remember and trying to show people what happened and what is still happening. This shouldn’t be forgotten.” In both cases, the youths also had to visit museums and had the option of watching relevant documentaries and speeches. Ms. Rueda, the commonwealth attorney, said she saw the sentence as an opportunity to expand their minds. “Is it going to change their perspective on swastikas if you put them in the juvenile centre and lock them up?” she said.
Reflective Text
What are some typical features of reflective writing?
Reflective writing may include some of the following features:
The Soul-Crushing Student Essay
By Scott Korb - Mr. Korb teaches writing to first-year college students
Last August, as college started up again, I hadn’t quite finished my beach read, William Finnegan’s “Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life,” so I brought it to my freshman writing class. I tried reading a few passages aloud to break the ice. I thought my students might relate to one in which the writer first wonders about turning his surfing experiences into something worth reading:
“Our queer devotions, frustrations, little triumphs, and large peculiarities, plus a few waterfront characters, plus photos, could probably keep a blog burbling along.”
“What do you make of that?” I asked. “Large peculiarities — what do you suppose he means?”
Crickets.
Sand I’d smuggled back from California slid from between the pages to my desk. Maybe they were wondering what a blog was.
We expect college freshmen to feel at least as comfortable with self-expression as the burbling bloggers and writers of yesteryear. Something beyond stylized selfies must populate their social media streams, after all.
But every year I find that getting them to admit to feeling devoted or frustrated, to being peculiar in any way (much less in a large way), verges on impossible. And as someone who has read thousands of student essays over the past 10 years, few things are more dispiriting — and as the pages mount, soul-crushing — than those written by 18-year-olds who can’t see themselves as peculiar.
But why can’t they?
One reason reveals itself when someone finally asks the clarifying question: “Do you mean we can write with the word ‘I’?”
The class looks up in wonder. This happens every semester.
Somewhere along the way, these young people were told by teachers that who they are in their writing ought to be divorced from who they are on their phones, or as the writer Grace Paley may have said, with their families and on their streets. They know a private “I” who experiences devotion and frustration. I see them text in class and talk and laugh and sometimes cry in the halls. They wear band T-shirts, often from my era, so I assume they have taste. I watch them read.
But no matter who they are in private, when I first encounter their writing, they use only the public passive voice: The text was read. The test was taken.
It’s never: I read the text. I took the test. And it is never ever: I loved the text with queer devotion.
It’s true that a student’s writing style isn’t everything and that much of what we call good writing cannot be taught. (Bad writing apparently has been.) One can be devoted to something — a band from the ’90s, surfing, YHWH— without being able to put that devotion into words.
But my experience with students has me worried that years of “texts being read” and “tests being taken” have created the sense in them that whatever they’re devoted to doesn’t matter much to the rest of us — so long as they know the answers to our questions, so long as they pass the test. Writing so passively and with what they’ve been taught is appropriate and “objective” distance from topics they often seem disinterested in, these young people signal to me that they’re still waiting for something important or real to happen to them.
Perhaps they feel that only someone who has lived through something momentous — like the teenagers who survived the Parkland, Fla., shooting — has earned the right to be heard. It’s hard to imagine any of those young activists writing, “The rally was held because Congress was lobbied and guns were purchased.”
But what about those queer devotions and frustrations, experiences and ideas that have stirred an individual heart into peculiarity?
A decade teaching young writers has taught me a great deal. First, we need to value more the complete and complex lives of young people: where they come from, how they express themselves. They have already lived lives worthy of our attention and appreciation.
Second, we need to encourage young people to take seriously those lives they’ve lived, even as they come to understand — often through schooling and just as often not — that there’s a whole lot more we’ll expect of them. Through this, we can help them learn to expect more of themselves, too.
Some lines from the great writer John McPhee have helped me consolidate these lessons over the years. Reflecting in The New Yorker in 2011, he wrote: “I once made a list of all the pieces I had written in maybe 20 or 30 years, and then put a check mark beside each one whose subject related to things I had been interested in before I went to college. I checked off more than 90 percent.”
I always tell my students that I find these lines heartening. As a writer, I’ve spent more than 20 years reckoning with the joys and tragedies, the shame and grief, commitments to sports and study, of my own pre-college years. A good deal of my writing continues to take me to northern Florida where, when I was young, my father was killed by a drunken driver; the stories I continue to uncover there — about justice and race and addiction — begin with me at 5 and continue through my adolescence into this adult life.
Mr. McPhee, and Mr. Finnegan, too — who at 13, he writes, found in the obliterative sea that “the frontiers of the thinkable were quietly, fitfully edging back” — tell me that there’s no good reason for me ever to stop going to Florida and attending to what happened there. At the start of this semester, I read some passages from Barry Lopez’s wintry classic “Arctic Dreams.” The descriptions are incomparable, even as the setting itself remains ineffable: “The physical landscape is baffling in its ability to transcend whatever we would make of it. It is as subtle in its expression as turns of the mind, and larger than our grasp; and yet it is still knowable.”
This has been the lesson for my students this term. Look around at what baffles you; look in at your peculiar self and how your own frontiers continue to edge back. Don’t worry, you’ll never fully grasp how the world transcends you and your ability to describe it. I surely don’t, and I’m 41! But don’t forget: You’ve been trying to understand and triumph in the world for as long as you can remember, even as a kid. Now go and write.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/21/opinion/the-soul-crushing-student-essay.html
Discursive Text
Circle Gets the Square
The internet has shape preferences, and they’re more meaningful than you think On Thursday, Twitter threw us a curveball (sorry) and smoothed out the once-square avatar photos into orbs floating around the timeline. The change is notable, but the circle vs. square debate is far from new. There are arguments in favour of both when applied to internet design; circles indicate a person rather than content, which typically comes in a grid-like shape. So what is the current state of shapes on the social web?
Instagram ditched its hard rule for square posts in 2015. Instagram Stories and profile icons are circles. Snapchat chat icons are circles; profiles are ghosts within squares. Google Hangout profile icons (are these Google+ icons? Does anyone know anymore?) are circles. App icons are squares. The Facebook profile photo is a square. Slack avatars are square. The Square app is a square inside the app icon (which, to review, is also square).
Despite Twitter’s change, the world is still safe for squares, or so I thought. I was wrong. There are no squares. (Just ask Windows Phone, a now-defunct defender of squares.) Squares are dead. The entire internet is now just a series of curvy, swoopy lines. Cliff Kuang, the director of product at Fast Company and author of a forthcoming book about design, pointed out to me exactly how wrong I was about squares. I started running down the avatar inventory in my iPhone. Facebook, for example, was one of the very few square holdouts. “I imagine Facebook has tested this like crazy, but I bet you if you looked at it hard enough that it’s rounded in some way.” So I zoomed in, and there they were: rounded edges.
The same is true of app icons. Most of the favicons I checked — same. Facebook post boxes — those too. Even Instagram, formerly the most aggressive purveyor of square culture, has rounded edges on its web viewer. Slack avatars, as it turns out, are not square. Nearly every “square” on the internet is not actually a square.
“A lot of this talk about rounded corners began with, as you can expect, Steve Jobs,” says Kuang. “There’s a famous anecdote about him berating one of the original engineers of macOS about button shape. The engineer was like, ‘Let’s just do squares; it’s a lot easier to render,’ and Jobs took him on a tour of the parking lot and pointed at everything that was a rounded shape. The yield sign, the parking sign, everything. If you think about it, it’s very rare to find a straight, pointy corner in the natural world. It’s a very rare shape.” “He always wanted his interface to essentially look as natural as possible, so he had a philosophical bias toward that,” Kuang continued. “The world is made of rounded corners. Sharp corners hurt you; sharp corners are things to be avoided. So [Jobs] has this almost spiritual take that rounded corners were friendlier.”
True circles, Kuang explains, are the superior eye-grabbing form. “You’ll notice that a lot of things that are supposed to be perceived very quickly tend to be round. There’s something about circles that draw our attention more easily.” A trick he asked me to try: Draw a square with rounded corners and draw something inside of it, then draw a square with sharp corners with something inside of it. “You’ll see the rounded one makes you pay attention to what’s in the centre of it.”
One more trick Kuang suggests: Trace your eyes around something round and then something square. “Notice your eyes following the edge of something if it’s round, versus if it’s straight. Notice how your eyes move and how your head moves. You naturally follow the contour of something when it’s rounded, it’s very easy to follow the contour of something when it’s rounded.” According to research, it’s harder for the brain to process sharp edges — the cognitive load is lessened with rounded shapes. Essentially, softening things allows the brain to be a little lazier and more easily interpret what it’s seeing. A useful explainer from UX Movement puts it this way: “The sharper the corner, the brighter it appears. And the brighter a corner appears, the harder it is to look at.”
The explainer also features this effective illustration to demonstrate the point:
Fork vs Beachball
(My answer: neither! You can’t trust children.)
The rounded shapes vs. hard edges debate also informs visual cues in the internet’s history; when I think of boxy squares, I think of pixelated Oregon Trail games. (Kuang thinks of the Prodigy log-on button.) Back then, hard edges were easier to render because we had such low resolution, but as resolution becomes greater, it’s easier to soften shapes — so designers have. Taking this line of thinking to its ultimate conclusion, circles are an indicator of the most sophisticated, accessible execution of web design.
Writing seriously about Twitter design feels sort of … silly. That the smoothing of some hard edges can inspire outrage and adoration is dumbfounding. But there is one line of defense for such reactions, and it’s that we simply cannot help ourselves. Our brains are what they are, and the way our eyes interpret and react to the things we stare at everyday matters deeply to the parts of our mind we don’t know, and it’s why shapes and colors make us feel things. Even if the things we’re feeling are, again, sort of silly. But this is a roundabout (again, I’m sorry) way of saying that Twitter’s new design choice is rooted in what we already neurologically prefer — whether we realize it or not.
“[Rounded corners] create a visual order,” says Kuang. “It’s something you can perceive, but you can’t put your finger on it right away.”
Persuasive Text
Deadlier Than The Male: Femme Fatales, from Eve to Amanda Knox by Tara Moss
Throughout history many – if not most – cultures have perpetuated the myth of the evil woman. In a recent Lunchbox/Soapbox address, Tara Moss discussed evil women, female criminals and the demonisation of the female gender: from Eve and Pandora to Elizabeth Bathory and Paula Broadwell.
Women are a necessary evil, the famous proverb says.
Pandora – the first woman on earth, created by a male god (Hephaestus) on the order of a male god (Zeus), as a wife for a male (Epimetheus) – was perhaps not an ideal first. She famously opened that box - in fact a jar - back in the days of ancient Greece, letting all the evil into the world.
From her is the race of women and female kind: of her is the deadly race and tribe of women who live amongst mortal men to their great trouble, no helpmates in hateful poverty, but only in wealth. – From Hesiod’s Theogony (8th–7th century BC)
Eve – the first woman on earth, created by a male god from a man’s rib as a gift for a male (Adam) – was also not without flaws. She sought the Tree of Knowledge and famously bit into that apple in the Garden of Eden, ending Paradise and letting all the evil into the world.
And the Lord God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done – Genesis 3:13.
(Perhaps if Adam had met some Greeks, he would have known what was coming.)
Eve and Pandora were the first bad girls, and ever since, women have been linked in the popular consciousness with the concept of sin and their sins with sex.
Mae West once quipped that there are ‘no good girls gone wrong, only bad girls found out.’ And she has a point, if you consider that Eve’s sin was to ‘eat from the Tree of knowledge’. The Good Girl standard then, of passivity, obedience, lack of curiosity about flora and fauna, (including speaking snakes) and a general disinterest in knowledge, would surely make being ‘a good girl’ a near impossibility. And not much fun, by the sounds of it.
If you believe women to be morally weak, as did Freud, who wrote that we possess ‘little sense of justice’, or the Greek philosopher Plato, who in Timaeus offers that women are the reincarnation of men who have lived evil lives, and as such, are morally flawed … well, no wonder women can’t be trusted, and men need to be ashamed of their emotions, as they so often lead them to women and therefore to their own demise.
Sherlock Holmes – that popular fictional character of great logic and high intelligence – was very clear on the matter of that other gender. ’Women are never to be entirely trusted, not the best of them,’ he warned.
Women exist at the peril of men like Holmes. In a perfect world they are best avoided. But as things stand, wise men know that women are a necessary evil, because although a male god reportedly birthed the world, these days women tend to have the monopoly on the birthing of humans.
https://www.wheelercentre.com/notes/25b5dc3f2ac (The Fictional Woman - Tara Moss 2012)
Informative Text
TEENAGE VANDALS WERE SENTENCED TO READ BOOKS. HERE’S WHAT ONE TEEN LEARNED
A Virginia judge handed down an unusual sentence last year after five teenagers defaced a historic black schoolhouse with swastikas and the words “white power”.
By Christine Hauser 7/4/18 The New York Times
Instead of spending time in community service, Judge Avelina Jacob decided that the five youths who defaced a school house with racist graffiti should read a book. But not just any book. They had to choose from a list of ones covering some of history’s most divisive and tragic periods. The horrors of the Holocaust awaited them in “Night,” by Elie Wiesel. The racism of the Jim Crow South was there in Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” The brutal hysteria of persecution could be explored in “The Crucible” by Arthur Miller.
A year has passed since the youths spray-painted their hateful messages on the side of the Ashburn Coloured School, a one-room, 19th-century classroom that had been used by black children during segregation in Northern Virginia. The swastikas and words were long ago covered with paint. The teenagers have read their books and written their reports. The charges, destruction of private property and unlawful entry, were dismissed in January, Alejandra Rueda, a deputy commonwealth attorney who suggested the reading sentence, said. “I hope that they learned the lesson that I hoped that they would learn, which was tolerance,” Ms. Rueda said. So, did they?
The juveniles who vandalized the old schoolhouse in Ashburn, a community of about 43,000 people northwest of Washington, D.C., could not be identified because of their ages. But the commonwealth attorney’s office has said they were public school students ages 16 and 17. Two were white, and three were non-white. One of the teenagers agreed for this article to share the list of books that he chose. Among them were “The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini, set in Afghanistan; “To Kill a Mockingbird,” by Harper Lee; “The Tortilla Curtain,” by T.C. Boyle, about a Mexican couple trying to make a life in California, and “Things Fall Apart,” a tale of Nigeria by Chinua Achebe. He wrote that two books affected him deeply: “12 Years a Slave,” a memoir by Solomon Northup, a free black man who was kidnapped in 1841 and sold into slavery in Louisiana, and “Night.”
An excerpt from one of his court-ordered essays was provided to The New York Times, with his permission, by his defense lawyer. He describes not fully knowing what a swastika meant, and that he thought it “didn’t really mean much.” “Not anymore,” he wrote. “I was wrong, it means a lot to people who were affected by them. It reminds them of the worst things, losing family members and friends. Of the pain of torture, psychological and physical. Among that it reminds them how hateful people can be and how the world can be cruel and unfair.” Now, he wrote, he sees the swastika as a symbol of “oppression” and “white power, that their race is above all else, which is not the case.” He also wrote that while he had studied this period in history class, the lesson lasted only a few days. “I had no idea about how in depth the darkest parts of human history go,” he wrote. He wrote that he feels “especially awful” that he made anyone feel bad. “Everybody should be treated with equality, no matter the race, religion, sex or orientation,” he wrote in his essay. “I will do my best to see to it that I never am this ignorant again.”
Authors hope their messages got across since the Ashburn case, the reading sentence has been applied to another case, one involving a 14-year-old who threatened a black student with a noose, Ms. Rueda said. She gathered a list of 36 books with input from librarians who emphasized that the most enlightening could be “A Wreath for Emmett Till,” a poetry book about a black youth of the same age who was murdered in Mississippi in 1955. Marilyn Nelson, the author, said she was concerned it might have the opposite effect to what was intended. “I can’t say I’m pleased to know that my work is being inflicted as a punishment,” she said. “Will kids punished by being made to read poetry ever read poetry again?” Other authors expressed hope that the underlying message in their works was not lost.
Mr. Boyle, whose “The Tortilla Curtain” is told from four points of view, said he hoped the teenager “will be able to live inside the skin of someone unfamiliar to him, whether that be the Mexican immigrant couple or the Anglo couple living in a gated community, and that the experience will enrich his social perspective.”
Mr. Hosseini, who wrote “The Kite Runner,” a story of Afghan boys struggling against cruelty, said he hoped the teenager was inspired to overcome an “us against them” mind-set. “Engaging with characters that differ from us in race, religion or culture, helps us feel our immutable connections as a species,” Mr. Hosseini said. “Books allow us to see ourselves in another. They transform us. I hope reading ‘The Kite Runner’ was a small step along that transformation for this young man.”
How the community reacted after the graffiti episode in September 2016, the Ashburn schoolhouse underwent a renovation organized by students from the Loudoun School for the Gifted, a private high school that owns it. Money was raised, work teams were drawn from community volunteers, and the little schoolhouse eventually opened as a museum. Some criticized the sentence. For example, an English teacher at Loudoun balked at the idea of associating reading with punishment, said Deep Sran, the school’s founder. Kamran Fareedi, 17, a senior at Loudoun, had been working on the renovation before the vandalism said he thought the sentence “reeks of pampering and no consequences.
When I heard that the punishment was that they were going to have to do homework assignments, I was very disappointed,” he said. "All over the country we have a giant mass incarceration problem. And particularly African Americans who do the slightest thing, their interaction with the criminal justice system is way more harsh. When people of colour make mistakes they don’t get the chance to start over.” He said the fact that three of the youths were minorities also reflected the economic privilege of youths in the Ashburn area. “It is astonishing that they are that disconnected from the serious implications of their history and their heritage and people of their background today in non-privileged areas,” Mr. Fareedi said.
Shailee Sran, a 16-year-old student at the school, said she hoped that the teenager learned the value of bravery in defending what is right from his reading of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” “I actually thought the punishment made sense,” she said. “I feel like if they don’t understand what they did wrong it is not helping the problem. It is just teaching them not to get caught. It is like what we were doing in trying to restore the schoolhouse,” Ms. Sran added. “We are trying to remember and trying to show people what happened and what is still happening. This shouldn’t be forgotten.” In both cases, the youths also had to visit museums and had the option of watching relevant documentaries and speeches. Ms. Rueda, the commonwealth attorney, said she saw the sentence as an opportunity to expand their minds. “Is it going to change their perspective on swastikas if you put them in the juvenile centre and lock them up?” she said.
Reflective Text
What are some typical features of reflective writing?
Reflective writing may include some of the following features:
- Use of first person to express self-assessment
- Use of evaluative language
- Considered use of examples
- Use of anecdotal references, imagery or metaphor
- Explanation, description or justification of the use of specific language or stylistic devices
- Connections between what students learn about writing and the writing that they craft
- Self-awareness of the learning process
- May be objective and/or subjective
The Soul-Crushing Student Essay
By Scott Korb - Mr. Korb teaches writing to first-year college students
Last August, as college started up again, I hadn’t quite finished my beach read, William Finnegan’s “Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life,” so I brought it to my freshman writing class. I tried reading a few passages aloud to break the ice. I thought my students might relate to one in which the writer first wonders about turning his surfing experiences into something worth reading:
“Our queer devotions, frustrations, little triumphs, and large peculiarities, plus a few waterfront characters, plus photos, could probably keep a blog burbling along.”
“What do you make of that?” I asked. “Large peculiarities — what do you suppose he means?”
Crickets.
Sand I’d smuggled back from California slid from between the pages to my desk. Maybe they were wondering what a blog was.
We expect college freshmen to feel at least as comfortable with self-expression as the burbling bloggers and writers of yesteryear. Something beyond stylized selfies must populate their social media streams, after all.
But every year I find that getting them to admit to feeling devoted or frustrated, to being peculiar in any way (much less in a large way), verges on impossible. And as someone who has read thousands of student essays over the past 10 years, few things are more dispiriting — and as the pages mount, soul-crushing — than those written by 18-year-olds who can’t see themselves as peculiar.
But why can’t they?
One reason reveals itself when someone finally asks the clarifying question: “Do you mean we can write with the word ‘I’?”
The class looks up in wonder. This happens every semester.
Somewhere along the way, these young people were told by teachers that who they are in their writing ought to be divorced from who they are on their phones, or as the writer Grace Paley may have said, with their families and on their streets. They know a private “I” who experiences devotion and frustration. I see them text in class and talk and laugh and sometimes cry in the halls. They wear band T-shirts, often from my era, so I assume they have taste. I watch them read.
But no matter who they are in private, when I first encounter their writing, they use only the public passive voice: The text was read. The test was taken.
It’s never: I read the text. I took the test. And it is never ever: I loved the text with queer devotion.
It’s true that a student’s writing style isn’t everything and that much of what we call good writing cannot be taught. (Bad writing apparently has been.) One can be devoted to something — a band from the ’90s, surfing, YHWH— without being able to put that devotion into words.
But my experience with students has me worried that years of “texts being read” and “tests being taken” have created the sense in them that whatever they’re devoted to doesn’t matter much to the rest of us — so long as they know the answers to our questions, so long as they pass the test. Writing so passively and with what they’ve been taught is appropriate and “objective” distance from topics they often seem disinterested in, these young people signal to me that they’re still waiting for something important or real to happen to them.
Perhaps they feel that only someone who has lived through something momentous — like the teenagers who survived the Parkland, Fla., shooting — has earned the right to be heard. It’s hard to imagine any of those young activists writing, “The rally was held because Congress was lobbied and guns were purchased.”
But what about those queer devotions and frustrations, experiences and ideas that have stirred an individual heart into peculiarity?
A decade teaching young writers has taught me a great deal. First, we need to value more the complete and complex lives of young people: where they come from, how they express themselves. They have already lived lives worthy of our attention and appreciation.
Second, we need to encourage young people to take seriously those lives they’ve lived, even as they come to understand — often through schooling and just as often not — that there’s a whole lot more we’ll expect of them. Through this, we can help them learn to expect more of themselves, too.
Some lines from the great writer John McPhee have helped me consolidate these lessons over the years. Reflecting in The New Yorker in 2011, he wrote: “I once made a list of all the pieces I had written in maybe 20 or 30 years, and then put a check mark beside each one whose subject related to things I had been interested in before I went to college. I checked off more than 90 percent.”
I always tell my students that I find these lines heartening. As a writer, I’ve spent more than 20 years reckoning with the joys and tragedies, the shame and grief, commitments to sports and study, of my own pre-college years. A good deal of my writing continues to take me to northern Florida where, when I was young, my father was killed by a drunken driver; the stories I continue to uncover there — about justice and race and addiction — begin with me at 5 and continue through my adolescence into this adult life.
Mr. McPhee, and Mr. Finnegan, too — who at 13, he writes, found in the obliterative sea that “the frontiers of the thinkable were quietly, fitfully edging back” — tell me that there’s no good reason for me ever to stop going to Florida and attending to what happened there. At the start of this semester, I read some passages from Barry Lopez’s wintry classic “Arctic Dreams.” The descriptions are incomparable, even as the setting itself remains ineffable: “The physical landscape is baffling in its ability to transcend whatever we would make of it. It is as subtle in its expression as turns of the mind, and larger than our grasp; and yet it is still knowable.”
This has been the lesson for my students this term. Look around at what baffles you; look in at your peculiar self and how your own frontiers continue to edge back. Don’t worry, you’ll never fully grasp how the world transcends you and your ability to describe it. I surely don’t, and I’m 41! But don’t forget: You’ve been trying to understand and triumph in the world for as long as you can remember, even as a kid. Now go and write.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/21/opinion/the-soul-crushing-student-essay.html
Clickview Exchange/Secondary Library
Sign in to Clickview then click on Exchange or Secondary Library then English & you will find many helpful examples including those listed below.
Crafting the Story - The Art of Creative Writing
Writing a Comparative Essay: What Is It?
RBSC Clickview Collection
Sign in to Clickview then RBSC Video Collection, click on English then click on Writing, Language and Grammar.
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