Noise Hurts

Nobody seems to value moments of silence anymore. Some people dismiss it as socially awkward, painfully boring, or unbearable for their conscience; however, it promotes concentration and improves cognition. Of course life for most is not an anechoic chamber, unless they are deaf, but at least a reduction in detrimental noise of the surrounding digital and working worlds may improve personal experience of life. Ambient sounds bring serenity to the mind and counteract the annoyance of vehicular traffic and ranting media. It may also be better to avoid bombarding the mind with constant, everyday auditory information. For instance, take out the headphones when reading, working, driving, and even sleeping. Polluting the mind with loud sound may even cause mental problems. Usually, a person overexposed to loud sound may suffer form migraines, anxiety, tension, and emotional disturbance.  This does not surprise me that a known method of interrogative torture is dulling and shredding a mental state by ceaselessly playing loud music until the subject becomes emotionally disturbed.  Therefore, for those who live stressful lives and feel overwhelmed, try reflecting on your daily exposure to unnecessary noise and consider a life with better auditory peace.                

Reference on Noise Pollution: http://www.buzzle.com/articles/noise-pollution-effects.html

image source: http://mikeeisenhart.blogspot.com/2012_05_01_archive.html

Reflection on Christo's Valley Curtain Summary Project

Christo's Valley Curtain

Christo's Valley Curtain is a short 1973 documentary film directed by David and Albert Maysles that features a passionate artist named Christo and his industrious efforts to resurrect a personal art piece identified as a valley curtain.

My summary on Christo's Valley Curtain definitely qualifies as one of  my most interesting assignments. I have written many papers in my academic career, but I have never written one that solely focused on descriptively summarizing media, especially a film! So, I take the holistic rubric as my backbone for this honest reflection on my film summary project.








Rhetorical Knowledge

I must confess that after I watched Christo's Valley Curtain the first time, I could not conceive any idea to commence my writing. I usually have writer's block at the beginning of each assignment, but I believe the mind stirs it up in hopes of giving the writer a false impression about instantaneous analysis. In other words, I mean that the writer might think that the he or she will hyper analyze and suddenly the ideas write themselves on paper, but not everyone is a creative writing magician.  So, the problem for me, as also with most other writers, lies in organization. I usually think of the act of writing as a pile of Legos that I must re-organize and piece together to construct something insightful. Christo's Valley Curtain is a thirty minute short documentary film; every minute may not be summarized. When writing my first draft, I faced this thirty minute giant by cutting him up into specific scenes, briskly summarizing the gist of each scene, and trying to create natural transitions from scene to scene. However, there lies an issue with such a methodology; it becomes a repetitive listing of events, such that transitions between similar scenes will create boring and recursive syntax. To fix my problem, I worked on my kairos, syntax, and flow. I watched the film again and weeded out all the unimportant scenes and details of the film in my writing, while I synthesized other key-note scenes. This methodology reduced any hectic and abrasive transitioning between scenes; thus, my writing gained natural syntax flow.

Critical and Creative Thinking

Well, let's be honest, we all are brutally biased sometimes, and we often don't account for potentially offensive, stereotypical judgement in our writing. At least in my case, once I realized that the main character in the film is a Frenchman, I felt an excruciating temptation to include a subtle, yet outlandish, impression in my writing about the French being snotty and lazy. These assumptions are logical fallacies; they qualify as generalizations and ad hominem arguments, which should never be included in a summary. These issues usually occur when the I, as the writer, am not "showing" what happened, but I am rather "telling" what happened by including qualifying statements instead of descriptive syntax. The creative notion on the technique of "showing" rather than "telling" also played a vital role in my writing. Personally, "telling" type of writing always tempts me to jump to conclusions and fire quick simple statements. However, "showing" type of writing challenges me as a writer to reflect and to paint a scene or a complex idea using creative description and vivid diction.

Genre Knowledge

Different types of writing require different uses of language, tone, and syntax. A simple example that defines this notion may be a comparison between my film summary and a research lab summary. When writing a research lab summary, the writer is persuaded to use a complex or compound syntax so that a didactic and explanatory tone may serve the purpose of presenting technical procedures and data. Other aspects of research lab writing include maintaining a monotonous passive voice and a robotic diction. By using passive voice, the reader must have the impression that a ghost preformed the experiment because no proper noun commits an action; research genre writing only implements passive voice that the reader may focus on the details and the information. On the other hand, writing a film summary requires a style of contained narrative and descriptive writing. To reiterate, the writer must "show" what happened rather then "tell' what happened. The writer develops the tone of a story teller, filled with vivid verbs and lively actions. An active voice helped me shape my film summary into a story-like summary rather than a debriefing. Films are motion pictures that attract the eyes to movement and action, so a film summary must mimic a film screen in directing words into life, action, and movement.

Mechanical Knowledge

I have concerns that my writing may be sometimes infected by a virus called complex sentence-itis. That means I overuse complex sentences to communicate too much information at one time. So, I have been revising my papers, especially my film summary, to fluctuate between the use of simple sentences and complex/compound sentences. Grammar wise, my issue may also include inserting too many participle phrases and extraneous clauses into my writing. This type of cluttered writing may exhaust my readers and dull my tone. Again, I think that film summary writing should be lively, and the use of varied types of punctuation, syntax, and diction must also add vibe to the writings mood and tone. For example, for the my film summary, I tried using words with varied length and compact but powerful sentences. This may only be achieved through constant revising and editing.  



 image source: http://www.polyvore.com/valley_curtain_1972_signiert_poster/thing?id=21324727
 image source: http://www.polyvore.com/cgi/img-thing?.out=jpg&size=l&tid=21324727

Technology Doesn't Make You Look Weird

Technology has improved incredibly over the past decades and never ceases to become innovative in new ways. It governs actions and dominates decisions. For instance, most people never do math in their heads any more. They shuffle for their phones and "touch" the magic square called an "app" with a calculator graphic pictured on it. These types of fast-paced user-interface applications have enhanced people's status quo  and performance rate in our fast-paced society to that of a "multi-tasker." Technology users can now do literally thousands of things almost simultaneously: text, search the web, play games, and listen to music all the same time conveniently on their  phones or tablets. Moreover, teachers no longer must painfully write and rewrite lectures on the board, and students no longer must take endless pages of notes now when PowerPoint invades the classrooms.  Just to further illustrate the pervasive use of technology in contemporary society, one of my college professors, as probably many others also, prepares and lectures his class from his phone! Everything is now at the fingertips, even the job materials! This isn't at all  a rant about the maybe not so seemingly malicious ways technology has suppressed our lives and numbed our minds; however, on the optimistic side, technology may at least make its users not look blatantly awkward for once. Many times when I am at the store or on campus, I might see someone presumably talking to a cereal box on the shelf or another person sitting alone and talking to thin air. These kinds of confusing moments in life might evoke the intention to just politely ask the person, "Are you talking to your self?" Well, surely they are not! Is it not obvious that they have the new wireless bluetooth earpiece or the intriguing mobile, hands free headset with a bluetooth microphone? Thus, it is preposterous to notion a personality disorder. Thank you, Technology, for changing human perceptions on social awkwardness. At least now if I want to think out loud and still be normal, I can simply wear a headset.
 


image source: http://www.123rf.com/photo_14024174_businessman-talking-on-mobile-phone-with-handsfree-headset.html

A good sentence ending with a question mark

One stormy and rainy night, two sage philosopher's sat in a mansion's study engrossed in tomes and tomes of books. While tucked away comfortably on their leather manor chairs, one of them, setting aside an opus of great thinkers, stared blankly into the fire place and asked the other in a sunken voice of despair, "What is a good question?"  The other, stirred away from his musings and likewise perturbed  after some lingering, respond, "Hmm... might that be good question?"

The moral of my story isn't to ask questions that intend an absurd reinstatement of the prior question; rather, I just wanted to induce a meditative air as I consider a hint of a plethora of aspects that accompany the art behind questions that simply seem good. An imperative quality to "good" questions is that they comprise of a relevant context and an appropriate purpose. Context, in a sense, demands a question's correct correlation between its circumstances of a situation and the response(s) it intends to obtain. For example, someone would be bizarre for asking a zookeeper a question on quantum physics because it has no context in zoology, which I assume would be the context of a question posed to a zoologist. Let's suppose an analogy, if a question were an animal, like a kangaroo, the context would be it's indigenous habitat, the Oz. Moreover, questions relying primarily on context tend to be vague and mechanistic; they just lack flavor. Context may be the outline of a question, but the purpose animates it with color. Purpose implies intention. It paints the question with all the colors of mood, tone, and rhetoric. Questions may be informative to seek knowledge or conceptual to create new philosophy; rhetorical to make a point or Socratic to generate discussion, and sometimes they may even be sly to deceive. The tone of a question usually reveals the inquirer's intention for asking the question, and it creates the mood for the question's context. For instance, the question "What are you looking at?" may evoke varied responses based on the question's tone and mood. A curious professor may politely ask a biology student studying plant cells through a microscope, "What are you look at." On the contrary, a frantically self-conscious woman might rudely query a person looking at her and intolerantly ask that person in a voice of absolute mockery and derision, "WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT?"    
I believe it to be important on how to construct good questions in daily conversation and writing, because the context and the purpose of questions often imply the type of reaction and answer they receive. Questions will always be self evident of man's intrinsic nature to inquire and pursue the truth, then it's worthwhile to appropriately ask the relevant ones.

image source: http://www.123rf.com/clipart-vector/difficult_decision.html