When we first read "All Seven Deadly Sins Committed at Church Bake Sale" I thought it was another paper that we were forced to read in English. It was not exceptionally good, didn't catch my interest, and I only read it and studied it because I had to for a grade. I got no pleasure by reading it but I do value my grade. I can hardly remember it now. Our assignment was to copy it with a different setting, which did not give us as much creative leeway as I would have liked. I like writing stories; the whole he said, she said, then suddenly kind of paper. This was the first assignment of the year that pushed me away from that. I started the assignment writing a story but after a day and a half of work realized that it was not connected to the assignment and had to scratch the entire essay, plot, and ideas and start over, outside of class mostly. This makes this piece probably the worst piece I have written this year because I don't work well at home and felt very rushed into finishing it before the deadline. You can almost see the shift from detailed "usual Sam" work to "I need to finish it no matter how bad it is" work. The part that I thought I did the best came from the beginning, my characterization of Betty White, the exemplifier of sloth.“You look like a blob!” he (husband) would yell at her unmoving face where she sprawled on the couch. So she would slowly blink, slowly rise, and then slowly walk to the gym next door to her house where she would plop down in the cushioned stool in the corner by the door and sit there and rest for hours before reversing the process. I think that is really good and unlike most of my work sums it up in a reasonable length paragraph. Conversely I found the difference between greed and envy hard to portray. Their characters came out the same, both the kind of spoiled brats who want more and will physically fight and yell to get it. The only difference between them is that greed (Betty More) wants more of the same stuff and envy (Betty Want) wants everything. Though in revision I intend to develop Betty More more so that she can become different than Betty Want. As I said before I like to write and read stories so writing an exemplification paper was different. I had to write about things in general versus a specific day. I became the calm observer of facts versus the in the moment bias narrator. I had to spend time informing and describing rather than on a plot. All of those were difficult for me to do, it went against the grain. With this paper I did successfully get over that hurdle and I found that once I got going it was easy to continue.
When I read the paper again for the first time it was immediately obvious that the time constraints affected my quality of writing. The time spent characterization of the separate sins was very uneven. Betty Rage has only 3 lines of type and is never mentioned after or before that, the time scrunch shows. Usually my standard of writing is higher, that said I thought that my beginning minus my introduction was really good. And I really was minus an introduction, I just dove in with a one sentence introduction. Perhaps this is because I don't have a point, I meant this paper to be an over the top artificial account of an imaginary workout center, not an account of how the seven deadly sins are reflected in our world today in workout centers. If I was writing that kind of paper then it really doesn't need an introduction in the traditional sense like the green sheet that we had to complete yesterday suggested I needed. I really can't think of much that needs saying before the guts of the paper. I do need to make it more clear that this is about the seven deadly sins so that the reader would know that. Once that is stated I believe there is enough examples to thoroughly support my story of sins. I need to expand Betty Rage and Betty More and shrink Betty Snotty but other than that the lengths were good, I like writing long papers. Especially Betty Rage because she only has 3 lines.
Usually that was when Betty Rage would start. First it would be a bench that was not clean, then a lack of dumbbells. When ever something set her off she would start throwing fists. She had such bad aim she would rarely hit anyone but most steered clear of her general direction.
I will try to put in a more emphatic introduction because Mrs. Basko says it is better for papers. As I said before the best part of my paper was Betty White at the beginning, but after I got into it I realized I had a really strong tone going on. It sounded like I was actually having you look in the window of the workout center and pointing at the different people.
See, look over there and you will see Betty White.
You also wouldn’t see her because she never moves.
Those are just some examples, I liked that about my paper.
No comments:
Post a Comment