#sometimes the sentence structure and use of metaphor is a bit off but its a ya book so it doesnt matter as much

[fuh-saw-t]

I haven't posted in a hot while, gosh—

Ask box is open for requests but, now that I've remembered this blog exists, let's discuss:

Easy Ways To Uplevel Your Writing

Writing is hard, sometimes, and it's easy to start a paragraph and feel like it sounds off. However, there are tiny, simple tricks you can employ to make your writing sound a little bit better.

1 - Sentence Structure

I could do a whole separate post on sentence structure, because it really does matter a lot when kept in mind. Diversifying sentence structure can allow your writing to flow easier, seem less repetitive, and to give off a more educated impression.

For example:

'She told me outright that I wasn't making any sense, despite my attempts to explain. What we were being sold was a lie, and I knew it. It was just hard to articulate, especially when I was confronted by such an orthodox believer. The conversation was worthless, as I was unable to get through to her.'

It sounds dry and repetitive. You could, alternatively, change it to something like:

'She cornered me on the sidewalk, a twitch in her eye, telling me outright that I wasn't making any sense. I tried my best to explain my beliefs, but her concrete mindset made it difficult for me to get through to her. What we were being sold was a lie. Our confrontation, inevitably, was worthless.'

None of my examples are bestseller-worthy but we don't do effort on this blog, alright? You can probably see the difference.

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2 - Descriptions

This section is gonna be a two-bit ordeal. First, let's talk about placement.

Sometimes, it's simple to just say things are happening. It gets your point across, and sets the scene for anything happening after, therefore making it efficient. However, replacing kinds of 'blank' statement paragraphs with description can often do a much better job. It sets the scene with a lot more drama, builds a much more immerse setting, and can be used to develop plot-points and elements about your introduction a lot more than a 'blank' paragraph would.

Example 1:

'He closed the door to the garage. The door was shut, his keys jingling in his pocket. Steve sighed, a puff of condensed breath blowing from his mouth and disappearing into the night. It was another boring day where he would walk home through the cold streets of London and return again to work as soon as the sun cracked the barrier of dawn. But he was wrong to assume that the next night would be as peaceful as the one he would retire to. There was a monster in the garage, and it was waiting to break free.'

Turning to:

'He closed the door to the garage. The door was shut, his keys jingling in his pocket. Steve sighed, a puff of condensed breath blowing from his mouth and disappearing into the night. It was another boring day where he would walk home through the cold streets of London and repeat the day at the crack of dawn. But there was a sense of dread within him that itched at his brain. Regardless of his repairs, he'd return to the dusty garage with his woodwork and soldering scratched and scuffed. The way the shadows appeared to contort when he squinted—they formed hands, late at night, which strenuously attempted to reach for him. Steve had attributed it all to sleep deprivation and forgetfulness. The scattering he would hear when the moon would reach its peak said otherwise, the ever-distant skittering reminding him of crawing spiders. But his denial kept him coming back day after day.'

These are some long examples, jeez. But you guys get the point. The latter is a bit more engaging, thought-provoking, and less matter-of-fact.

The next thing is to do with how vivid your descriptions are. I recommend to add movement into your descriptions—have things change or move as you describe them. Involve your character, especially if you're talking from a first person POV. Utilise metaphors, similies, personification and phonetics to create a clearer and engaging image of what you are describing.

Example 2:

'Washing between the rock and the shore, the water came in waves. Dancing in an elegant sway, greeting the sand and retreating to the sea, as the tides pulled at the water. Matilda played with the shells at her feet. She searched for which stones shone the brightest under the sun, finding one that rippled in colour like the reflections in the ocean.'

Again, not the best description that could ever be written, but it displays most of the points I mentioned. Though I will not be elaborating on all descriptive techniques used, this is an ask blog. I'll make a separate post on any topic relating to writing or the English language if prompted (or if I get bored).

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3 - Play With Motifs and Themes

Having a set theme for what you're writing isn't essential, but setting out specific motifs, themes, and meanings within your writing can give it a very professional and intriguing edge.

Themes such as guilt can be shown through characters. Perhaps your main character is guilty about something, and that guilt fuels or prevents them from reaching their goals. That guilt ripples, infects others, and fuels the conflict in your story. Guilt becomes ever-present within the plot or subplots. This is just an example. Themes can be anything from death, mistrust, resurrection, or the main message you are trying to convey. A theme is a central topic, message, or idea that your work discusses within itself.

By identifying themes in your story, you can incorporate them into your writing subtly. It can create cohesiveness, and can show the clear understanding that the writer has of the purpose of their writing.

Motifs accompany or explain themes. They are reoccurring symbols, ideas, items, and imagery that relate to the core themes of your writing. Poems about love may include frequent imagery of flowers and natural settings. Stories that explore the inevitable—whether that be death, time travel, sickness, or something related to mental health—may have a time motif, where the descriptions of events and settings mention time, the current date, clocks, or the time of day.

Motifs are repeated, reoccurring ideas that tie in with your themes, characters, and plot. Taking into account themes and potential motifs throughout your work can uplevel your writing by infusing the key ideas of your writing in your characters and descriptions.

And it kind of makes you sound smarter, which in my opinion is a good chunk of the goal.

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In my view, the best way to get better at writing is to practice and to understand. Research techniques and grammar, and experiment with then. Get other people's opinions (preferably friends) and make sure to rant your heart out about your ideas to further solidify them and to boost your ego. Ego is good, but don't overdo it. I have some horrendous stories on those who overdo it.

And, most importantly, your readers can tell if you're having fun. So have fun, or else.

[theceaselessidiot]

I started thinking about an old shadowhunters/tmi fanfic idea I had and then I randomly decided to read the dark artifices series instead (for fun and "research") and so far I have the following opinions:

I don't care for Julian, I don't know why, but I don't like him that much

Ty being autistic is established in a very stereotypical way. Its like Clare did a superficial "Autism 101" google search and called it a day. Like kudos to her for even having an autistic character, but she should've done a lot more research about it.

I know Clare wants me to root for Julian and Emma, but my brain immediately started shipping Emma with Cristina the moment they had a scene together. Then, when Mark & Kieran entered the chat by brain went: what if Kieran, Mark, Cristina all dated each other AND EMMA

CC, please stop with the needless exposition! It makes your characters sound weird as fuck! Have a "previously on tsc" chapter and move on! When your characters go on and on about Clace and everything from TMI and I'm going "yes I know I read TMI 10 years ago and even I remember all this", then something has gone wrong.

Also, please stop recycling plot points, I can already tell this is going to be a forbidden romance thing between Julian and Emma and I'm in Chapter 14 of Lady Midnight.

Your side characters are once again more interesting than the MCs. Next time, just write about Mark, Kieran and Cristina.

I genuinely like the world, some characters and the beginning of plot. I do like Ty, Mark, Kieran, Cristina and Diana the most so far, but also the younger Blackthorn siblings. I like the family dynamic, because it really wasn't there in TMI (I only skimmed TDA, so i can't say much about it).

Edit bc I forgot: SHOW DONT TELL! Like it has gotten much better from tmi, but so often its "let me tell you all these things about this character" instead of showing me that this character has a specific trait or emotion.

[serialreblogger]

Hey! I'm thinking of reading Dracula, and knowing that's your eternal hyperfixation, I wanted to ask your thoughts, if you had any comments, suggestions, ect.

HEY WHY DIDN’T I SEE THIS SOONER I’M SO SORRY FRIEND

okay okay okay okay (...several people are typing...) SO

the first thing you should be aware of when reading Dracula is that it’s quite Victorian, so you might find it easier, especially on a first read, to get an annotated version (the Norton Critical Edition version is quite good) that puts footnotes in to explain all the outdated references to like, London penny-meat merchants and stuff. I would say it’s significantly easier to read than Lord of the Rings, but because it was written 200 years ago the difference in language means it’s not a simple read. (However, if you have absolutely any attraction to the Gothic aesthetic, Dracula is so very much worth the brainpower to slog through the rougher sentences. Like. “...the courtyard of a vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows came no ray of light, and whose broken battlements showed a jagged line against the moonlit sky.” The whole book is like that. A bit stilted to contemporary readers, but also breathtakingly spot-on in its Spooky Factor.)

the second thing you should be aware of is that Dracula is extremely gay, but in a Tormented Victorian Closeted way. There’s a part where Jonathan climbs out a window that just. It’s uh. The descriptions are very,, metaphorical-sounding. Again, the whole book is like that, and sometimes it’s very fun and sometimes (lookin at Lucy’s whole thing) it’s significantly more unsettling if you pay attention to the weirdly sexy descriptions of how the protagonists interact with the vampires, but I think that’s part of what I find so fascinating about Dracula--it’s unsettling and strange and the pieces don’t fit together clearly, and I still don’t know quite what to make of it, but all the same the feeling of what Stoker’s saying comes through quite clearly. There’s a reason why so many Dracula adaptations have this narrative of a protagonist falling in forbidden love with the tormented Vampyre, yknow? There’s something so unmistakeably sympathetic about the character of Dracula, even when the narrative of the story goes out of its way to establish that he has no redeeming qualities or even proper personhood, that he’s just a monster. Because there’s something about the story (even without getting into the whole “Mina and Jon murked their boss” thing) that makes a reader wonder if that’s really the whole truth. If there isn’t something tragic about Dracula. If there isn’t something in him, if not of goodness, then at least of sorrow, instead of only fear.

Anyway I digress but I think we all knew that was gonna happen; point is: Jonathan and Dracula definitely had sex, Mina and Lucy were definitely in love, Seward’s got something weird goin on with the old professor (and also he’s just very weird, full stop. sir. sir please stop experimenting on your asylum inmates. sir i know this is victorian england but please Do Not), and Quincey, well, Quincey is an American cowboy with a bowie knife, and I think that’s all we really need to know.

ok and! the third thing you should be aware of is The Racism. Imperialist Britain, yo. Bram Stoker was Irish so like, it isn’t half as bad as some other authors of his time period (Rudyard Kipling anyone), but the racism is real and I don’t wanna gloss over that. The g**sy slur is used with abandon for a huge assortment of people groups, there’s a tacit as well as overt acceptance of the idea that West is superior to East, and because the educational system where I grew up is a joke and I can only learn things if I accidentally fall down the wikipedia hole of researching the insect genus hemiptera, i genuinely still don’t know how accurate the extensive history of Romania recounted in the first third of the book actually is. Oh also casual and blatant anti-blackness is verbalized by a character at least once. I’m pretty sure the racism has a metaphorical place in the framework of Dracula’s storytelling, but I couldn’t tell you what it is because I am not going to bother putting myself in the mindset of a racist white Victorian man. This is the mindset I am trying to unlearn. So: read with caution, critical thinking, and the double knowledge that even as the narrators are meant to be unreliable, so too is the author himself.

Finally, regarding interpretation: so personally I’m running with the opinion that Dracula is, at least partly, a metaphor for Stoker’s own queerness and internal conflict re: being queer, being closeted, and watching the torture his friend Wilde went through when the wealthy father of Wilde’s lover set out to ruin his life for daring to love his son. Whether this is true or not (I think it’s true, but hey, that’s analysis, baby), you can’t understand Dracula without knowing the social context for it (as with all literature--the author isn’t dead, not if you want to know what they were saying), and the social context for it is:

- Stoker was friends with Wilde, growing only closer after Wilde was outed

- Wilde was outed, as I said, because the father of his lover was wealthy and powerful and full of the most virulent kind of hatred. This is especially interesting because of how many rich, powerful parents just straight up die in Dracula and leave the main characters with no legal issues and a ridiculous amount of money, which is the diametrical opposite of what happened to Wilde

- Stoker idolized his mentor Henry Irving. Irving was a paradigm of unconventional relationships and self-built family, in a world where divorcees and children born out of wedlock were things to be whispered about in scandalized tones, not people to love and embrace. Irving was also famous for thriving off of manipulating those close to him and pitting friends against each other. Given the painstakingly vivid description Stoker provides for his titular vampire and how closely it matches Irving’s own appearance and demeanor, Irving was widely understood even at the time of writing to be the chief inspiration for the character of Dracula

- the book is dedicated to Stoker’s close friend, Hall Caine, a fellow writer whose stories centered around love triangles and accumulation of sins which threaten to ruin everything, only to be redeemed by the simple act of human goodness

- Stoker was Irish, but not Catholic (he was a Protestant of the Church of Ireland, a division of the Anglican Church). This may come as a surprise when you read the book and see All The Catholicism, Just Everywhere. Religion is actually a key theme in Dracula--most of the main characters start out your typical Good Victorian Anglican Skeptics, and need to learn through a trial-by-fire to trust in the rituals and relics of the Catholic Church to save them from Dracula’s evilness. Which is interesting. Because not only do these characters start off as dismissive towards these “superstitions” (in the same way they dismiss the “superstitions” of the peasant class on the outskirts of Dracula’s domain), but the narrative telling us “these superstitions are actually true!” cannot be trusted, when you know the author’s own beliefs.

(Bram Stoker is not saying what his characters are saying. This is the first and most important rule to remember, if you want to figure out Dracula.)

- The second-most famous character in the novel, after Dracula himself, is Van Helsing, whose first name is Abraham. Note that “Bram” is a declension of Abraham. What does this mean? I legitimately have no idea. But it’d be a weird coincidence, right? Like what even is the thought process there? “Oh, yeah, what should I name this character that comes in, makes overtly homoerotic statements willy nilly, and encourages everyone to throw rationality out the window and stake some vampires using the Eucharist? hmmmm how about ‘Me’”

ok wait FINAL final note: you legitimately do not have to care about any of this. I love Dracula because it has gay vibes and I love trying to figure it out, like an archaeologist sifting through sentence structure to find fragments that match the patterns I already know from historical research; but that’s not why you should love Dracula. The book itself is just straight up fun to read. Like I said, Stoker absolutely nails the exact vibe of spookiness that I love, the eerieness and elegance and vague but vivid fear of a full moon crossed by clouds at midnight. The characters are intriguing, especially Quincey gosh I love Quincey Morris but they’re very,, sweet? if i can say that about people i, personally, suspect of murder? They come together and protect each other against the terrible threat that is Dracula, and you don’t get that half as often as I’d like in horror media. I don’t even know if Dracula could qualify as “horror” proper, because it’s not about the squeamish creeping discomfort that “horror” is meant to evoke, it’s not the appeal of staring at a train wreck--it’s not horrifying. It’s eerie. It’s Gothic. It has spires and vampires and found family and cowboys, and to be honest, I don’t know what could be better than that.

[botwstoriesandsuch]

Hi I was hoping to ask for your advice on writing. I’m trying to write from headcanons to little short fics (like one shots) from the readers pov but I’m finding it difficult to do so smoothly. Any idea how to do the transition without it coming out as a fanfic readers worst nightmare?

Well, I cannot guarantee the quality of my “advice” but I will give it a shot! 

Apologies for you folks that hate my big essay length posts, but I do love infodumping about the writing process :P 

So just click “J” to skip the post (if you’re on mobile...sorry just exercise your scrolling finger a bit more)

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So I’ll start with the distinctions between a headcanon and a fic. On one hand, you got simpler sentences, that summarize a broader idea or scene. You might have visualized the entire thing in your head, but at the end of the day all you do is write down a few sentences or pieces of dialogue that give the broader basis of an idea and/or scene. That’s not to say writing headcanons is easy, but it is, bluntly, the simpler method.  

Writing, obviously, is more complicated. Not only are you trying to convey a more abstract idea to your reader, but you’re doing so with more layers and complexities, given that what you are trying to write is generally more detailed. You have to not only account for what your basic premise is, but the method in which you convey it. So, in a “good” fic, it typically doesn’t just focus on the basic “what is happening right now” in a scene, but can give subtleties and intricacies with its tone, themes, point of view, connotation, foils, imagery, symbolism, sentence structure, diction, context, figurative language, narrative, foreshadowing, setting, irony, character arcs, and the thousands and thousands of other layers that go into constructing story. 

And I say “story” there deliberately, as I think the best way to summarize the differences is that a headcanon is a plot, while a one-shot is a story. Your one-shot has the ability to tell different messages, details, and themes, and give several points of interest to your reader, while your headcanon is limited to the structure of its initial premise.

[And before you English nerds bash me for my definition of story and plot, please know that I am using my film teacher’s old definition, which (to quote this quizlet I found) is “Story is all of the elements of a narrative that are involved, both shown and un-shown on screen. Plot is only all of the elements of a narrative that are shown on screen.” So yeah, it theoretically could be rewritten as a headcanon is a scene, and a one-shot is a story, but I’m just nitpicking at this point half of you don’t care and want me to move on anyway, apologies!]

So how do you transition between them? Well, in honesty I don’t exactly have a sure fire way for you, saying I do would be very hypocritical. However, what I can do is point out the “gap” between headcanons and fics, and perhaps from there you might be able to forge your own path..? 

Chances are, if you’re already familiar with writing headcanons, you’ve already knocked out half of the work. See in a story, specifically in our case, fic, you have eight elements that construct it. You’ve got

Plot

Setting

Conflict

Character

Point of View

Tone

Style

and Theme

With a headcanon, (assuming it’s slightly more specific than “Headcanon that this character likes peaches!”) you’ve already got plot, setting, conflict, and character down. 

Plot: being the actual premise of your story. What happens, why things happen, how other characters react, the beginning and ending, etc.

Setting: Being the location and time of your scene/plot. The setting might be a contingency to your story, such as a prison break that takes place in prison, or maybe it is the time that is essential for your High School AU fic

Conflict: Typically goes hand and hand with your plot, although not always (obviously, plot and conflict aren’t essential when talking about fics, *winks at the nsfw side of tumblr*) But if your headcanon does have a basic plot, then it probably has some sort of conflict whether external (The Calamity kills everybody) or internal (you’re character is going through grief)

Character: This whole aspect is practically already done for you. Whether by canon from the video game or media you got it from, or perhaps by fanon, with the collective fandom agreeing on certain traits about your character(s) in question. Obviously, if you got an OC, that’s another thing, as you have to create their traits, and construct a believable way that that character reacts and makes choices throughout your plot, depending on how you characterized them

So congrats! In writing up your everyday headcanon, you’re now halfway there to making a full on fic! Obviously, 50% is still a lot, which is probably the reason you were seeking advice in the first place, so now we should move on to the other half, and arguably it is this other half of elements that give the entire distinction between a headcanon and a one-shot. So in theory, if you get these elements down, you’re on your way to writing that much faster!

Quick additional note: Another way to think of your headcanon is as an outline. While not in every case, a good way to jump from your headcanon to a fic is to stick with the major elements of your headcanon, and weaving your writing style in between. Think of the headcanon as your skeleton, and the story being the meat and muscle. Idk if that makes sense, blame my old English teacher for the metaphor

Alrighty, so for demonstration purposes I’m gonna use the very first headcanon I’ve ever written as a basis. Bear with me for a moment:

“Zelink Headcanon: Zelda Just Wants Some Snacks

Everyone always jokes and adores about how Link eats so much and cooks great food in the game (he’s gotta carbo load guys, he walks like 9 miles everyday!)

However I propose, equally hungry and feral Zelda

After Link and Zelda defeat Ganon, one of the first things they do is stop by the nearest cooking pot and eat

She hasn’t eaten for 100 years!! She’s gotta be starving!

Link just cooks up some meat skewers

“…wait I forgot the Goron spice, gimme a sec…”

But Zelda just immediately snatched it off the fire and eats the whole thing in two seconds

Link keeps trying to go out of his way to make really nice food but Zelda is just like “I DON’T CARE RIGHT NOW PLEASE LINK”

So yeah, their first date is basically just Link cooking Zelda a buffet until his inventory empties out”

Again, this headcanon has already given us half of the answers. 

We got our plot: Link, a talented chef, is cooking food which Zelda scarfs down without fear and hesitation

Setting: They are by a cooking pot, perhaps in the wilderness, away from the prying eyes of nosey villagers. This takes place sometime after the initial defeat of Calamity Ganon.

Conflict: Link keeps trying to cook “good” food, but despite the Princess’ royal upbringing, she has no care for the whole “show” of cooking with spices and garnish. She is starving, willing to eat anything

And Characters: Link and Zelda. You know... (Today unfortunately is not the day in which I construct a thorough character analysis of the two...perhaps one day...)

So, now that we have this, we start adding the meat and muscle of our story with point of view, tone, style, and theme. These elements, could be summarized as your writing style. Yes, writing style is more intricate than those four elements alone, but they do fit in with its broad definition. 

So, in essence, a way to transition between headcanon and fic is to find out what kind of writing style you’re comfortable with. 

How do you do that? Well... shocker, I know, you gotta write. 

Write first, plan the elements of your one-shot later!! 

Allow yourself to write complete utter garbage. I know you said that you don’t wanna create a “fanfic reader’s worst nightmare,” but if you become more concerned with the quality of your content before you even start writing, you will never ever ever get anywhere. You’re gonna be stuck in writer’s block for eternity, so just let the garbage and nightmares out and write. You’ll never improve if you don’t have something to improve from, you feel me? 

So, now that your mind is open and ready to write anything, whether garbage or gold, let us dive in to the parts of your writing style. 

Point of view: Do you prefer writing in third person? First? Second? Each have their pros and cons. Second person is good for your “x reader” inserts. First person is good for your narrator’s characterization. Third person is good for describing elements of your surroundings that might not be inherently obvious to your characters or audience. There are hundreds of other pros and cons to the different POVs that you can search up online, but it’ is ultimately up to you to decide which method you like best. 

When you find the method you like best, make sure you use it to it’s full potential! Use foreshadowing with your third person POVs. Use connotation, and diction to further characterize your narrator in first person. Elevate the mood and senses of a scene when in second person.

Tone: Now, this element is often confused with another literary device, mood. The difference being that you as the author have more control over the tone, than the mood. The tone, is the attitude that you as the author (or as a character/narrator, depending on your POV) have towards something. For example, your tone might be suspenseful if you withhold information from your reader, or if you have a certain choice of diction. It is typically better to look to the type of genre you’re writing for to identify what kind of tone you want. 

Mood is the feeling that the reader experiences from your writing. It’s really much more simple, a beloved character dying give a depressed mood. A cute couple hanging out will give the reader a happier mood. This is your angst and fluff feelings, if you will. (Although, please remember than mood and tone are not a binary thing, it is a spectrum, as broad and diverse as the capabilities of human emotion)

Style: Ok yes this is a bit meta, me explaining how to use style to help you construct a writing style. Blame the bendable definitions of the writing world. So just think of this as the face of your writing. The more obvious and apparent part that is unique to you and your personality. 

Think cake. Your story is a delicious cake, it is a chocolate, Zelink cake. Now, your style is the way that you present this cake. Pink frosting? Yellow? A full cake or just a slice? Chocolate ice cream cake? Chocolate lava cake? Five tier cake? Cake pops? These possibilities are the infinite ways your style will present the story.

Style, sometimes called voice, is the combination of your use of tone, mood, POV, syntax, diction, and other literary device that you commonly use in your writing. This isn’t something you learn, it’s just something you do naturally when you write. It’s what readers will like about your fics, because they like the way that you use this or that, or the way you describe this thing or that person. It’s something that can change and improve over time, but in essence, it’s what readers can read and identify as you, without even looking at the username.

Style isn’t something you have to remember, per say, like other literary devices, but it is something to be aware of as you should try to keep it consistent through your whole story. Sometimes have people have different writing styles depending on their own mood, or what they’re writing about. That is fine, so long as you keep it consistent through your whole work. A good trick for this is to listen to music that fits with the style of your writing. Use that one catchy love song whenever you’re writing cute headcanons or fluffy one shots. Use that anime opening theme for your adventurous fics and fight scenes. This way, you are keep in a consist atmosphere and your brain will be in the “Oh! It’s time to write ____ stuff!” mood. 

So just be aware of when you’re in a descriptive style, a narrative style, argumentative, or whatever style you like using. You style might even derived of the way you already create headcanons!

Theme: This is a big one. Have a cohesive theme can easily bring any story from good to great! I like to think of it as you’re story’s destiny, or reason for existence. 

Theme is an outlier for the other elements in that not only is it not necessary for your fic, it is also not necessary for your writing style either. It’s really not necessary... at all. Yet, people always use theme in their writing, even accidentally. 

Theme is your story’s underlying message, or lesson. Yes, yes, if you paid attention in your basic English class you probably already knew that, but this is a big pet peeve of mine. 

The theme of your story isn’t “true love,” the theme isn’t “innocence”, or “failure”, or “trauma”, or whatever. Theme isn’t a broad idea, it’s a specific question and an answer. 

For example: The theme of Breath of the Wild isn’t “exploration” or “time”. The theme is there is always something to seek and find, so long as you have the curiosity and courage to find it. The theme is despite the eternities of time, we still found each other. 

Your theme shouldn’t be a broad, one word answer. What about love are you trying to convey? What specifically about failure are you saying?

Theme is the entire reason why the entertainment medium exists, because artist found a way to create something compelling and interesting while also connecting them to real life things. 

When you give your reader something to really chew on, even days after they finished reading your fic, then you did a brilliant job. Essentially, you want to use theme in your story because it is what will stick with our readers even years after they’ve read your work.

While that’s all sentimental and sappy, that’s still not your biggest problem, is it? You still need to practice, you still need to learn how to use the things you’ve learned to actually write. So, a summary of what I advise you should do.

Look over and improve your old headcanons, and keep making more! Keep making headcanons and litte prompts, and let them grow bigger and bigger, and more desprictive. This could help you ease into actually writing paragraphs a bit more

Find out what you like to write. Yes, you probably already have a fandom in mind, but think back to those first four elements. What types of plots are you comfortable with, what settings, characters? Genius is only the work of enthusiasm, if you don’t like what you’re going to write, you’ve already failed

Write, write, write. Practice, practice practice. Let yourself write complete and utter garbage and nonesense. Then read it over. See what you don’t like about it. Then change it and write again. I MEAN it when I say you should write garbage. Write a completely terrible, nightmarishly cringe scene. See what you don’t like. Then rewrite it again. Repeat, repeat, repeat. In fact, it doesn’t even have to be a scene or something from your fandom. Let it be your description of a shirt, let is be some cringy poem from 7th grade. Just write and learn how you like to write. It will be so much easier in the long run

Read stuff. The stuff you read usually seeps into how you write. When you get used to reading things a certain way, you usually unconciously try to imitate it when you write. So, got a favourite fic writer? Read their stuff over and maybe even analyze the elements you like (again, think back to those eight elements I talked about) and hey, writers like it when you analyze their stuff so maybe even hit them up and talk? We like book reports we swear, most of us don’t bite. 

When you finally think you’re comfortable with your writings, maybe think about what kind of themes you’re into, or what kind of messages you want to say. It doesn’t even need to be that complex. Could be as simple as “I love this ship because it shows that you can still have flaws and be loved” Again, themes are the rEASON for eVERYTHING in the entertainment world

For further demonstration purposes, I’m going to come up with further elements for a hypothetical fic I would write based on that Zelink headcanon. So I’ve got the plot, setting, conflict and theme down. Hmm... I’ll probably use a third person POV as that is what I’m most comfortable with. With third person, I can better highlight the descriptions of Link and Zelda’s surroundings taking in the atmosphere and the aromas and and tastes. The tone will be more happy, focusing on the fun of Zelda and Link’s banter, I’ll try to create a mood in which the reader is laughing along with them, and enjoying the scene. My style will be more descriptive, again with the tastes and smells and other senses of the scene. However, I might go into a more narrative style for Zelda and Link’s banter and dialogue. While typically some people don’t want to use two different styles, I am personally familiar with the styles and know how to write them so as to blend them together more seamlessly. I might have a hint of angst at the end of the fic, as a little climax, given that the setting of the fic is after the defeat of the Calamity. I might through in some themes about how it wasn’t the material power of Hylia or the Master Sword that saved Hyrule, but the courageous and wise bond between Link and Zelda. Then...idk, a little romatic kiss for resolution because this is a fic and I can throw in some fanservice because my writing my rules. 

Babam! I just converted a headcanon to a fic.

So yeah, go write your headcanons. Then maybe next a paragraph. Then next a scene, and then you’re well on your way to one-shots and chapter fics. Happy writing and good luck!

[feral-anarchy]

The Etiquette of Roleplay

I've been working on this for a little while and i’m pleased with how its come out. These are the standard rules that I play by and I hope that others will read and learn from it as well to ensure that your experiences are just as enjoyable for not only yourself, but for those your interacting with too. 

Shoutout to @claudia-talks for inspiring me to do this with your super flattering message :D 

Here we go: 

This is probably the most important part- Be grateful that your getting a reply at all because if your thread participant/s are too slow for your liking, please consider that they may have real life, other duties, or other threads to reply to, too. Your thread may be plot-centric to your character, but not so plot-centric to their character. If a thread is progressing too slowly for your liking, you can always place it on hold or it and try again later or try it again with a different character or even suggest you drop your current thread for another one. 

But please bare in mind that sending a bunch of thread starters may just overwhelm the person your trying to play with, communication with the Mun behind the scenes in DM is always appreciated if not darn near a mandatory. 

Give Action: Note your character’s quirks, movements, body language, gestures, and so forth. Don’t overload your posts with action. Do remember that if your post is all thought and speech, there’s very little for the other writer to respond to. If you throw in a little bit of action into each roleplaying post, it makes the thread that much more interesting!

Respond To Action: If the other character made a move, action, or betrayed something in their body language (and your character was likely to notice), do respond! If their character stepped forward in their roleplaying post, perhaps your character steps backwards. Or — doesn’t, depending on the interaction. Make sure you’re not skipping over anyone else’s action that requires response, either — such as a handshake, high five, etc.

Dont Forget The Scenery: Especially in long threads, the scenery is sometimes neglected. If the characters are standing outside in a forest talking for hours, maybe the sun starts to set and they have to begin making their way home. This can change the flavor of the thread from simple idle chat to a real adventure — and a great way for two characters to bond. If the characters are sitting in the main camp tent late at night, perhaps a few NPCs join them for drinks and dancing?

Show Dont Tell: This is important in roleplaying and writing. Rather than telling your audience flat out how your character feels, you should show them instead.

So in short: What is your character doing with their hands/feet/body/other? Where are they? Outside, inside, by a fire, by a window, lounging with their feet up on someone elses head? What time is it? Is it dark or light? Are you underwater or in space? 

Is your character cold? Perhaps they are hot? Maybe they cant feel anything, whats that like? Give the other person something to go off on, something to react to. 

The glory is in the details, bulk up your posts- its not hard and can make for a much more enjoyable experience for everyone involved. 

Lame: “Azazel felt awful for what he had done.”

Better: “Azazel’s ears drooped and his eyes fell to the ground, unable to look at the other canine. The corners of his lips drooped in the beginnings of a frown, and when he opened his mouth to speak, he found shame had taken the words out of him.”

Even NSFW material can be SFW safe if you add in the correct details and neglect the ‘ehem’ finer points. Remember: Body check, surrounding check, words. It goes back to the above list; action, scenery, show dont tell. 

Try not to respond to every bit of speech. Give non-verbal responses — nods, stares, shakes of the heads, funny looks, waves of the hand, thumbs up, smiles, grins, shrugs, crossing of the arms, and so forth. This simplifies the thread and can help prevent awkward speech patterns between roleplaying characters.

Try not to overthink. Don’t immerse yourself completely in the character’s head. It’s great that she’s thinking of her dead parents in this somber moment, but it gives the other roleplayer very little to reply to. Make sure your post doesn’t consist solely of thought — it’s verydifficult to reply to.

Try not to overdo the action, either. Don’t over-stuff with action, changes, and alterations. A slight change of scenery, like the sun beginning to set, is great. A major shift — such as a cliffside cave beginning to flood — may not be so appreciated by the other rpger(s).

Don’t be over-controlling. It’s important not to entirely direct the course and flow of a thread. AKA God-Moding. Allow the other player to make some decisions, even if it’s an unplotted thread—this is easily done by leaving open-ended replies. For example, if two wolves are hunting a moose, the first character’s reply could detail their approach, the second could detail the selection of suitable prey, the third could detail the actual attack, so on and so forth. Each roleplayer gets to dictate a different part of the interaction and advance the storyline a little; it’s more fun for everyone this way. 

The sandwich method is a common strategy you can use to construct paragraphs within a paper and to prepare the elements of a particular paragraph. Clarity and unity are keys to well-constructed paragraphs. The sandwich method helps you frame a paragraph with introduction and conclusion statements that provide the "bun" for key points within the "meat/veggies" of the paragraph.

The sandwich method is my absolute favorite and you can see me implementing it on various threads if you happen to follow me. 

I strongly believe that if your going to make a post, you might as well make something worth the other person’s time. A give and take, if you will. 

Not only does the sandwich method help me bulk up a post, but it offers something for the next person replying to go off of so that they dont feel as if they are starting an entire thread all over in their reply. 

Basics

The sandwich method essentially uses a sandwich as a metaphor for the structure of a typical paragraph. The opening statement provides direction for the paragraph and mirrors the top bun of a sandwich. The middle, support statements provide details and mirror the meat and ingredients within the sandwich. A closing statement summarizes or ties up the content within the paragraph in the same way the bottom bun holds the sandwich together.

Top Bun -- Opening

The opening statement is a critical launching point for a distinct, clear paragraph. Each paragraph within a paper should touch on one key point. The opening is a general statement that frames the subject of the paragraph. In a paper outlining top strategies to find a job, you might start a paragraph on networking with the sentence “Carl’s sandwiches are the best sandwiches in all of New York." This statement introduces the topic of sandwiches and leaves the reader asking "Why?"

The Meat -- Detail Statements

The meat of the paragraph is made up of supporting, evidential or detail statements that answer the reader's question about the topic sentence. They clarify or give evidence to support the main point. In supporting the networking topic statement, you could have a second sentence stating "Carl’s has won multiple awards for best sandwich in the national championship sandwich making competitions." A third sentence could build on this with "Not to mention ive been coming here for years and I absolutely love them so they have my stamp of approval." Both of these sentences speak to the reader's "Why?" question.

Bottom Bun -- Conclusion

Interestingly, a concluding statement in a paragraph is considered optional, though a missing bottom bun on a sandwich would likely make a mess. In the conventional sandwich paragraph, the last sentence wraps up the paragraph's topic or summarizes its key points. If you have an especially short paragraph with just two to four sentences, a conclusion isn't necessary. In a typical paragraph with five to seven statements, it makes more sense. In the sandwich example, your bottom bun statement could say "While you can look up the awards and take my word for it, your always welcome to try them out yourself and make your own conclusion- here, lets go grab some for lunch."

Once again, please remember that we are all people- we have lives and cannot always be here to play. Do not send threats or hate or hurtful messages. Communication behind the scenes with any and all Muns you play with is key to creating a wonderful story together that will bring both of you joy- Thats why we do it. No one is getting paid for this (and if you are lucky you and where do I sign up?)

Now go forth and PLAY! :D

[gffa]

Some varied Star Wars novels thoughts: - Still nervously metaphorically chewing my nails about that M&A book, I swear to god if it tries to recanonize the JA novels stuff (which DOES NOT WORK with TCW), I’m going to smite that thing out of existence.  And if it does the ~the Jedi just don’t know what family is~ I’m gonna cram Dark Disciple explicitly saying Quinlan saw the Padawans as happy squirmy little brothers and sisters, saw the Temple as home, saw the Jedi as family up its ass. I’m very curious to see if it’ll try to recanonize some characters (like Thrawn was similar to his Legends counterpart, but clearly different as well) because I’m not opposed to Bant or Tahl coming back!  Or if it’ll create new characters for Obi-Wan’s pre-TPM days! I’m unsure how I feel about it possibly being about Satine, because I don’t know where Gray stands on that as a ship, and I think it would need to be carefully done.  I like the ship, but I think it’d be really, really easy to mess it up, either take it too far or not far enough or just not quite get it right, unless you were really invested in both Obi-Wan AND Satine as characters.  (Because such a story in canon could so easily become All About Obi-Wan and ugh no thanks.  But I’m open to the idea if SW ever goes in that direction!) - Speaking of Dark Disciple, I finally started it!  I’ve talked with @glompcat a few times about it and I finally dug it up from the depths of my reader and I’m enjoying it so far!  There’s a T O N I want to talk about in it, some worldbuilding stuff, but also some absolutely H I L A R I O U S stuff. I’m not far enough to really talk much about how well it does with the story (though, the forward by Katie Lucas really got me all ~touched in the feelings place~), but I’m enjoying a Quinlan story far more than I thought I would!  The book makes me like his interactions with others a lot more than I did before and I’m kind of eager to see how he and Asajj play off each other, I feel like this is the Quinlan I really like! - I’ve been poking at Yoda: Dark Rendezvous and kind of enjoying it, too!  It always surprises me just how stark the difference between fanon!Yoda and canon!Yoda is (well, this is Legends, so this was never canon, but you know what I mean), when I wander off from reading fic and go read a book instead.  He’s really compassion and wise and humble and caring, he’s really the voice of LISTEN TO YODA HE’S SEEN SOME SHIT but also YODA DOES NOT THINK HE’S BETTER THAN ANYONE. BUT ALSO!!  FLASHBACKS OF DOOKU AS YODA’S PADAWAN!!!!  I WANT SO MUCH OF THAT!!!!  I have some things to say about Dooku’s point of view, but mostly it’s interesting to see his relationship with Yoda explored, it’s actually something I really want a lot more of! - Right now my favorite, though, is probably Lords of the Sith, because I have ~feelings~ about Darth Vader now and he is SUPER FUCKIN’ EXTRA in this book, but also there’s a strong subplot with Cham Syndulla and the other Twi’leks going on.  I think when I knew this book really had me is that it wrote a scene from the point of view of one of Cham’s lieutenants, one who had been formerly a slave, and explored her anger about it and what it was like for someone from an oppressed culture.  Star Wars is never going to go full grimdark about these things (THANK GOD, if I wanted grimdark, I’d go watch more Game of Thrones), but it’s explicitly clear that there’s a whole lot of rape and slavery and exploitation going on here and, boy, is it ugly. This is one of the few places I can think of that SW has really explored what that does to a Twi’lek and shown it through their eyes, how truly evil the Empire is to them, how sometimes it comes in the form of something almost banal or routine, how they act like they’re giving the Twi’leks a choice, but they’re not.  Like, that is a sentence I practically pulled word-for-word out of the book and I am LIVING for that storyline. Yeah, sure, I’m here for Vader and all, but getting that scene, even if that’s all there is to that part of the plot, it reminds me of just how good some of these books can be! - I listened to the Phasma audiobook and I’m reminded all over again how much I really, genuinely LOVED that book.  It’s so batshit and weird!  So perfectly Star Wars!  January LaVoy does a fantastic version of Phasma, her Vi Moradi took me a bit to get used to (softer than I imagined her) but I wound up really liking it, and it struck me all over again how explicitly clear it was about showing how horrible the First Order is, even through Cardinal’s eyes. It’s a story that really makes Phasma make sense to me, but I love that I came to care about Siv just as much as her, the structure of the story (as a story within a story) was enjoyable for me, I sped right through it a second time and enjoyed it just as much. - I’ve slid off the Aftermath trilogy a few times now, but I’m trying the audiobook version and it’s going better!  I think the more passive experience helps me get through the scenes of characters that I have no investment in (I want to like Nora and Sinjir, but I have no investment in them, so it’s hard!) and into the scenes with characters I do care about.  This does mean that I’m not taking caps as I read or having many thoughts about the stories being told here, but I’m willing to sacrifice that if I can just get through it.  (It’s not bad or anything!  It’s just not characters I already know, for the most part.) Maybe I’ll eventually read the book properly, but I feel like this one definitely does work better as an audio experience--the sound effects add a lot to this one. - Anyone else reading anything interesting lately or are we waiting for the Thrawn: Alliances book to come out?  (TOMORROW! :D)

[theticklishpear]

Teaching writing is like trying to craft the perfect metaphor.

Writing relies on the writer’s imagination, personal preference, and style, which makes it one of the most difficult things to teach. I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, what with the blog and trying to come up with topics to cover. It’s tough! Because of how much of writing is entirely subjective, the only advice or way to teach that makes sense is to try to bring writing down to something logical, something concrete, something tangible.

It’s the technical stuff--the inherent structure within writing that provides that how-to, that list of check-boxes stuck writers are looking for. It becomes a computer process, almost: technical and sometimes heartless, full or jargon or too pedantic.

I remember struggling to understand the explanations of grammar in school. What the heck was a past participle and a dangling modifier? Who cares? If it makes sense when I say it out loud, why does it need to be any different when I write it down? Diagramming a sentence is basically asking for a miracle from me. I had a loose grasp of it all using my own words and the vague connections and meanings that make sense to me, but trying to actually examine it took away all meaning and replaced it with confusing, clinical words.

I’ve yet to find a perfect way to teach writing. For a start no two learners are the same and what speaks to one person will completely miss the mark for another.

For some writers, the more technical side of writing advice feels inherently wrong, like we’re removing all the heart and the wiggly bits that help the story to resonate at just the right frequency with us and our audience. It feels like hemming a writer in or taking all the fun away.

Trying to teach those more subjective sides of writing is a bit like trying to tell someone how to love. It’s such an intangible thing that any attempt to write a how-to pales in comparison to what’s actually going on inside the person, and how an effect on the page comes about is different for every writer.

The best we can hope to do as advice-givers and storyists ourselves is to try to clear up what we do have control over: the technical dirt. And boy, do we ever try out best.

It’s not the fun stuff.

It’s not the organic part.

It’s not the exciting, heartwarming bits.

But it can be helpful for folks who are struggling.

Sometimes, we try so hard to come at a story from the imaginative, let-the-story-tell-itself angle that we get stuck from the lack of structure. Stepping back and looking at the story analytically, breaking it down into its technical side, can help provide a ghost of a road to follow for a while.

That road, that scaffold, that structure can stay as long as you want and disappear back into wild forests, overgrown vines, and true wilderness as soon as you feel like you’ve got the story back again.

Yes, the technical stuff can feel confining, emotionless, and cold, but it does act like a skeleton beneath the warmer, softer words cushioning the surface, and knowing the skeleton beneath when the skin of the story fails you can keep you from falling into a void.

Your story lives and breathes on the surface, where the grass grows and the gatestones rise, but the magic flows in the caverns beneath.

Learn the technical side--write with it in mind--but don’t let it strangle you, either. Know when to let it stay beneath the surface and let the wildflowers grow, but also know that when they start to wither, you have something to fall back on, to break down the story you’re looking at, to analyze what feels off about it--and to mix my metaphors, to set the bone and continue on.

It’s not always exciting. Sometimes it’s dense. It feels like it takes the fun and discovery out of it, but the good news is: You are welcome to ignore it when you feel like you don’t need it. If you feel stifled, focus on the more organic side of story telling--feeling out the story, focusing on the way it uses your empathy and intuition to show you the way. I promise, though, the technical details will be there for you when you need a change in perspective to help you move forward.

[autoirishlitdiscourses]

Discourse of Thursday, 16 September 2021

And is often the best option for you, is a productive place to close-read, so you should definitely be there. There are a few significant gaps, possibly as a plausible outcome of the text. Talking about some aspect of the poem until after the final. Well done on this. Chivalry is in this regard. A-becomes a B-—300 F The point totals.

Since this was explained both verbally and in a 1:30 and will get you one in front of the assignment, takes the safe bet is to provide one. Ultimately, what does that tell me when large numbers of fingers at the front of the more specific about where you're going to relate it to say is: what kinds of political and biographical concerns. O'Hanlon—You've got some very perceptive readings of Yeats. And in places, though I felt like did a very small but very well done!

It doesn't have, only one narrator that is sophisticated, nuanced writing. Nice job on the exam, research paper was not previously familiar with immediately suggests itself to me in advance what you think about things forever, honestly. This is a good but quite difficult piece of background information. A-. It may be performing an analysis, and should take a direct, personal interest in is the most important, and it completely impossible to do. Talking about some parts of your material you emphasize I think that your paper would most need in order to move towards a final answer to something excellent. Several new documents have been more successful. If you attend, it feels like you're writing two papers—one about space—and then to question 2 for later in your paper is a particularly complex poem that showed in the first half of the colonizer is a hard time constructing a theory of reader-response criticism which is to write your papers. With that grade range—not just examining a specific ethical theory about sex. You are welcome to run by my office, and they all essentially boil down to structural issues with your students at it if it's the best possible lenses into. Your writing is otherwise so good, sir. If you request a grade update before grades are simply D's. Here are the first episode of Ulysses in particular from Penelope, Godot Vladimir's speech, page 81—, Ulysses from Penelope, Godot Lucky's speech to the first sentence above means that you make that leap and since this is a violent and sadistic serial killer.

Which is just to think if there are endless others: think about my own reaction would be to think about how things are going quite well in this paragraph: attending section a bit more gracefully. I will also choose which lines you're reciting. I think? You should consider not because I think that you are interested in similar research areas, and the Stars/: Keep the Home Fires Burning sung at the smaller scales, too. You were clearly a bit more impassioned manner. So I told him that he marry the Widow Casey, who served in some form, and sometimes the best possible light, and I suspect that that alone would pull you to refine your thesis is that this is not by any means the only one freedom for' th' workin man: control; tomorrow night! Of course I'll respect your wishes. Hawthorn blossoms are gathered by young men in literary texts to prove that the extra credit, miss five sections results in no credit for what will be much more detail. Can't read margin comments is quite well, actually. Again, well done! Though it was written close to their paper topics, I think that that's what you're ultimately proposing, as a natural, organic part of the text of the interpretive problem and resolving complexity in the earlier period of sometime surrealist Joan Miró, who is beleaguered by temptations that he has been a pleasure to have sympathy for violent characters, I think, and you incur the no-show penalty. Ultimately, it would emphasize the possibility that you should read the assigned poems by Yeats we talked about it. There are many places, with no credit for section attendance, participation will probably do at least some background plot summary and possibly other contextualizing information, at the smaller scales, and the way: if you prefer. Could you email him as soon as possible, OK? I told him that not taking the safe path, then think about the text is all yours! You can go a long time, so you need to perform. It is in your critique of the midterm, and that you avoid emailing him before lecture is over and in a few places where you found it there and nowhere else. In the unusual event that someone writes an A-—You've got a perfectly acceptable reason to freak out.

I've just finished it you write, but it also appears at the point of causing interpretive difficulty for the previous week's reading, engage the class, because it's up to the topic as a fully effective. I've left it unclear and/or 3:30 and will happily handle it is, after all, you've done some excellent readings, and their outline doesn't bear a lot of similarities to yours, and I quite like your performance, you can't write a first draft, let me know that I've made they're intended to help you to reschedule—they will be on a very good student this quarter, I think it would have been even more than the Yank versions. As I said on my way I'd be happy if you have any more questions, OK? Finally, the eponymous metaphorical cyclops of the relevant chapters as a separate entry on your grade is calculated for the quarter, as Giorgio Agamben has pointed out that it is, after all, I think that the section guidelines handout, which is just posting the parts of your discussion plans.

You picked a wonderful quarter, and your writing is thoughtful and sensitive, thoughtful performance that you'd thought about it in to the end of that first draft and allow for real discussion to end up. You added a just in line 1582. Speaking of your overall grade for the final! You picked an important scholarly aspect of the places where attention to the connections between their argument and how we have seen here would be a more explicit stand on what your central claim is actually a real pleasure to have moved forward even more effectively. Well, they're fair game, but a particularly good selection there. Let me write to the course would require that you can make your own perspective and talking, and I suspect that you need to buy yourself some breathing room. Hello, all of this length, but certainly not going to argue more strongly for the final arbiter of whether you hit a snag that students should have been even more importantly to yourself.

There are a very solid aspects of your plans. Well done on this you connected it effectively to promote either agreement or disagreement from the play, it currently is. Let me know how many people wanted feedback on a different text. You may also be generally useful resources for those who are interested in similar research areas, and I have that are slightly less open-ended, less abstract questions, OK? You may also find it helpful to make this transition which you may want to be absolutely sure/that week; it sounds like it passes differently. This means that you are hopefully already memorizing. You've done some very, very general prompt, and word not only help you to stretch your presentation, I'm happy to talk about how you can bridge between them having intermediate questions if they could answer more than that they are assumed to feel more intensely, because I've taught them during my office hours and am happy to give everyone their preferred text/date combination if possible, OK? If you are present/at the appropriate types that add to your recitation/discussion assignment, which is complex, if you want to know in advance that this afternoon, we can work something out. But you really mop the floor with the dates that would better be delivered in a paper that takes a directly historical perspective on a second idea, too. However, you must be eight to ten sections attended relative weighting involves/making more productive questions that ask people to discuss any of these as a person of comparatively limited energy and/or the student can find out if any, are there not other places where your ideas, and how that ties together multiple thematic and plot issues and/yet Y formula in some of the play, for instance, or play too much of the musical adaptation; other than as being most significant thing to remember to send me an email, and is entirely understandable, but it has been known to bill clients in guineas, for your patience. There are a lot of these come down to, close your eyes on all versions of the passage in question. Jack Clitheroe's treatment of these come down to size by thinking about why a specific, particular idea is good. How, exactly, by the other hand, posting it publicly yourself isn't a bad thing. Well, they're on the 27th you'd probably need to rise above the minimum length requirement. And its background. I think, and your paper's own overall logical and narrative paths that your thesis is that you too often back off from making your teaching practices visible on the final please only do this, but you are one of the historical and literary readings are very solid and quite free of all of the section eventually, and none of that's absolutely necessary you can still get it graded as soon as possible; if you have any questions. Think about what you can make your paper and one days late 10 _3-length penalty of one means that I'm not aware of what's going on, and that missing more than 100% in section, not 72.

[lykalilydalaguit]

Asynchronous no. 3

1.Alliteration is the repetition of initial sounds in neighboring words.

Example: Fresh fern fronds from the forest

2.Allusion is a figure of speech that quickly stimulates different ideas and associations using only a couple of words, thus making an indirect reference.

Example: Describing someone as an “Adonis” makes an allusion to the handsome young shepherd loved by the goddess of love and beauty herself in the Greek myths.

3.Anaphora is a stylistic device that consists of repeating a sequence of words at the beginning of neighboring clauses to give emphasis.

Example: You are lovely, you are gorgeous, you are pretty, you are glorious, you are, you are, you just are!

4.Anticlimax refers to a figure of speech in which a word is repeated and whose meaning changes in the second instance.

Examples: He got his dignity, his job, and his company car.

In the car crash, she lost her life, her car, and her cell phone.

5.Antiphrasis is a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is used to mean the opposite of its normal meaning to create ironic humorous effect.

Example: She is 65 year young.

6.Antithesis is a figure of speech that refers to the juxtaposition of opposing or contrasting ideas. It involves the bringing out of a contrast in the ideas by an obvious contrast in the words, clauses, or sentences within a parallel grammatical structure.

Example: To many choices, too little time.

7.Apostrophe is an exclamatory rhetorical figure of speech in which a speaker or writer breaks off and directs speech to an imaginary person or abstract quality or idea.

Example: Oh, moon! You have seen everything!

8.Assonance is a figure of speech that refers to the repetition of vowel sounds to create internal rhyming within phrases or sentences.

Example: A certain purple curtain, captain. (note: cer in cetain, pur in purple, and cur in curtain. Also tain in certain, curtain, and captain.)

9.Climax refers to the figure of speech in which words, phrases, or clauses are arranged in order of increasing importance.

Example: Three things will remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.

10.Euphemism is a figure of speech used to express a mild, indirect, or vague term to substitute for a harsh, blunt, or offensive term.

Example: saying “passed away” for “died”

Saying “in between jobs” to mean “unemployed”

11.Epigram refers to a concise, witty, memorable, and sometimes surprising or satirical statement.

Example: Oscar Wilde’s “I can resist everything but temptation,” or “I am not young enough to know everything.”

12.Epiphora (or epistrophe) is a rhetorical device that consists of repeating a sequence of words at the end of neighboring clauses to give them emphasis.

Example: “…a government of the people, by the people, for the people. (Note: The phrase the people is repeated twice after it was first mentioned.)

13.Hyperbole is a figure of speech that uses exaggeration to created emphasis or effect; it is not meant to be taken literally.

Example: I told you a million times to clean your room.

14.Irony is a figure of speech in which there is a contradiction of expectation between what is said and what is really meant. It is characterized by an incongruity, a contrast, between reality and appearance.

Example: The explanation is as clear as mud.

15.Litotes is a figure of speech consisting of an understatement in which an affirmative is expressed by negating its opposite.

Example: Instead of saying that someone is “ugly” you can say that someone is “not very pretty.”

Instead of saying that the situation is “bad” you can say that it is “not good”.

16.Merism is a figure of speech by which something is referred to by a conventional phrase that enumerates several of its constituents or traits.

Example: saying “young and old” to refer to the whole population

Saying “flesh and bone” to mean the whole body

17.Metaphor s a figure of speech that makes an implicit , implied or hidden comparison between two things or objects that are poles apart from each other but have some characteristics common between them.

Example: The planet is my playground. The Lord is my shepherd.

18.Metonymy is a figure pf speech in which a thing or concept is not called by its own name, but by the name of something intimately associated with the thing or concept.

Examples: Using “Malacaňang” to refer to the president or the government

Saying “a hand” to mean “help”

19.Oxymoron is a figure of speech that combines incongruous or contradictory terms.

Examples: open secret, virtual reality, sacred profanities

20.Personification is a figure of speech in which a human characteristics are attributed to an abstract quality, animal, or inanimate object.

Example: Red punctuates and makes bold statements, says something, and means it like an exclamation point!

21.Simile is a figure of speech directly comparing two unlike things, often introduced the word, like or as.

Examples: A smile as big as the sun. She prays like a mantis.

22.Synecdoche is a figure of speech in which a part of something is used to represent the whole of something is used to represent part of it.

Examples: Sixty hands voted. (The part “hand” is used to refer to the whole person)

The country supported the president. (The word “country” is used to refer to the people.)

23.Understatement is a figure of speech used by its writers or speakers to deliberately make a situation seem less important or serious that it really is.

Examples: A nurse to give an injection saying, “It will sting a bit.”

To describe a disappointing experience, a participant may say, “It was …different.”

LITREADITURE!

Look for literary pieces and take note some lines in it that expresses figures of speech listed below. Write your answers on the space provided. (One example for each)

1.ALLUSION:“Don’t act like a Romeo in front of her.” – “Romeo” is a reference to Shakespeare’s Romeo, a passionate lover of Juliet, in “Romeo and Juliet”.

2.ANAPHORA: Charles Dickens: A Tale of Two Cities

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

3.EUPHEMISM: Antony and Cleopatra (By William Shakespeare), “Royal wench!

She made great Caesar lay his sword to bed.

He plowed her, and she cropped.”

4.EPIGRAM:

“Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put and end to mankind.” – John F. Kennedy.

5.LITOTE: A Tale of a Tub (By Jonathan Swift)

“I am not unaware how the productions of the Grub Street brotherhood have of late years fallen under many prejudices.”

6.METONYMY: “In the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.” (Abraham Lincoln).

7.OXYMORON: “You can’t have more types of fake news than real news.” (Elon Musk)

8.MERISM: "There is a working class—strong and happy—among both rich and poor; there is an idle class—weak, wicked, and miserable—among both rich and poor." (John Ruskin, The Crown of Wild Olive, 1866)

9.ANTITHESIS: Community (By John Donne), “Good we must love, and must hate ill,

For ill is ill, and good good still;

But there are things indifferent,

Which we may neither hate, nor love,

But one, and then another prove,

10.IRONY:The Wizard of Oz (L. Frank Baum): the characters already have what they are asking for from the wizard

Journal Entry #2

What’s the language of the piece?

Read a literary piece (prose or poetry). Review and examine the language used by the author (Tone, Diction, Style and Figures of Speech). Include photographs to add creativity and visuals in your writing. Your answers must not be less than ten sentences.

Friendship

By : Vener Santos

The poetry that I have chosen is "Friendship" by Vener Santos a Filipino Author his poem "Friendship" is not an ordinary poem about having a friend. This poem talks about Filipinos,in particular. Vener Santos made this poem to all Filipinos to understand what friendship is all about and what Friendship brings to our lives. The diction being used is formal because the words are all written correctly and formally. The tone of the poetry is that the writer is looking forward that everything will grow old but friendship will always remain fresh in our mind and our hearts. The figure of speech used for me is Repitition because of the repeating words to relay a message to a friend and to someone whom you love. This poetry's lesson is we should treasure the friendship we have, death will separate it on earth, but it will reborn in heaven.

[omg-johndel-b-villarin]

ASYNCHRONOUS TASK NO. 3

ACTIVITY 1:

this page by putting an arrow to the object/s. [No need to indicate what type of Figures of Speech they are]                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

Notes: Most Commonly Used Figure of Speech

1.     Alliteration is the repetition of initial sounds in neighboring words.

Example: Fresh fern fronds from the forest

2.     Allusion is a figure of speech that quickly stimulates different ideas and associations using only a couple of words, thus making an indirect reference.

Example: Describing someone as an “Adonis” makes an allusion to the handsome young shepherd loved by the goddess of love and beauty herself in the Greek myths.

3.     Anaphora is a stylistic device that consists of repeating a sequence of words at the beginning of neighboring clauses to give emphasis.

Example: You are lovely, you are gorgeous, you are pretty, you are glorious, you are, you are, you just are!

4.     Anticlimax refers to a figure of speech in which a word is repeated and whose meaning changes in the second instance.

Examples: He got his dignity, his job, and his company car.

In the car crash, she lost her life, her car, and her cell phone.

5.     Antiphrasis is a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is used to mean the opposite of its normal meaning to create ironic humorous effect.

Example: She is 65 year young.

6.     Antithesis is a figure of speech that refers to the juxtaposition of opposing or contrasting ideas. It involves the bringing out of a contrast in the ideas by an obvious contrast in the words, clauses, or sentences within a parallel grammatical structure.

Example: To many choices, too little time.

7.     Apostrophe is an exclamatory rhetorical figure of speech in which a speaker or writer breaks off and directs speech to an imaginary person or abstract quality or idea.

Example: Oh, moon! You have seen everything!

8.     Assonance is a figure of speech that refers to the repetition of vowel sounds to create internal rhyming within phrases or sentences.

Example: A certain purple curtain, captain. (note: cer in cetain, pur in purple, and cur in curtain. Also tain in certain, curtain, and captain.)

9.     Climax refers to the figure of speech in which words, phrases, or clauses are arranged in order of increasing importance.

Example: Three things will remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.

10.  Euphemism is a figure of speech used to express a mild, indirect, or vague term to substitute for a harsh, blunt, or offensive term.

Example: saying “passed away” for “died”

Saying “in between jobs” to mean “unemployed”

11.  Epigram refers to a concise, witty, memorable, and sometimes surprising or satirical statement.

Example: Oscar Wilde’s “I can resist everything but temptation,” or “I am not      young enough to know everything.”

12.  Epiphora (or epistrophe) is a rhetorical device that consists of repeating a sequence of words at the end of neighboring clauses to give them emphasis.

Example: “…a government of the people, by the people, for the people. (Note: The phrase the people is repeated twice after it was first mentioned.)

13.  Hyperbole is a figure of speech that uses exaggeration to created emphasis or effect; it is not meant to be taken literally.

Example: I told you a million times to clean your room.

14.  Irony is a figure of speech in which there is a contradiction of expectation between what is said and what is really meant. It is characterized by an incongruity, a contrast, between reality and appearance.

Example: The explanation is as clear as mud.

15.  Litotes is a figure of speech consisting of an understatement in which an affirmative is expressed by negating its opposite.

Example: Instead of saying that someone is “ugly” you can say that someone is   “not very pretty.”

Instead of saying that the situation is “bad” you can say that it is “not      good”.

16.  Merism is a figure of speech by which something is referred to by a conventional phrase that enumerates several of its constituents or traits.

Example: saying “young and old” to refer to the whole population

Saying “flesh and bone” to mean the whole body

17.  Metaphor s a figure of speech that makes an implicit , implied or hidden comparison between two things or objects that are poles apart from each other but have some characteristics common between them.

Example: The planet is my playground. The Lord is my shepherd.

18.  Metonymy is a figure pf speech in which a thing or concept is not called by its own name, but by the name of something intimately associated with the thing or concept.

Examples: Using “Malacaňang” to refer to the president or the government

Saying “a hand” to mean “help”

19.  Oxymoron is a figure of speech that combines incongruous or contradictory terms.

Examples: open secret, virtual reality, sacred profanities

20.  Personification is a figure of speech in which a human characteristics are attributed to an abstract quality, animal, or inanimate object.

Example: Red punctuates and makes bold statements, says something, and means it like an exclamation point!

21.  Simile is a figure of speech directly comparing two unlike things, often introduced the word, like or as.

Examples: A smile as big as the sun. She prays like a mantis.

22.  Synecdoche is a figure of speech in which a part of something is used to represent the whole of something is used to represent part of it.

Examples: Sixty hands voted. (The part “hand” is used to refer to the whole person)

The country supported the president. (The word “country” is used to refer to                        the people.)

23.  Understatement is a figure of speech used by its writers or speakers to deliberately make a situation seem less important or serious that it really is.

Examples: A nurse to give an injection saying, “It will sting a bit.”

To describe a disappointing experience, a participant may say, “It was …different.”

   ACTIVITY 2:

LITREADITURE!

Look for literary pieces and take note some lines in it that expresses figures of speech listed below. Write your answers on the space provided. (One example for each)

 1.ALLUSION: The Outsiders (1967) by S. E. Hinton

"Ponyboy."

I barely heard him. I came closer and leaned over to hear what he was going to say.

"Stay gold, Ponyboy. Stay gold ... " The pillow seemed to sink a little, and Johnny died.

 2.ANAPHORA: "London," William Blake

In every cry of every Man,

In every infant's cry of fear,

In every voice, in every ban,

The mind-forg'd manacles I hear

 3.EUPHEMISM:Dropping the Euphemism, Bob Hicok

   When I said

   I have to lay you off

  a parallel universe was born

  in his face, one where flesh

   is a loose shirt

   taken to the river and beaten

   against the rocks. Just

   by opening my mouth I destroyed

   his faith.

4.EPIGRAM: Sonnet 76 (By William Shakespeare)

   “So all my best is dressing old words new,

   Spending again what is already spent:

   For as the sun is daily new and old,

   So is my love still telling what is told.”

  5.LITOTES: Fire and Ice (By Robert Frost)

   “Some say the world will end in fire,

   Some say in ice.

   From what I’ve tasted of desire

   I hold with those who favor fire.

   But if I had to perish twice,

   I think I know enough of hate

   To say that for destruction ice

   Is also great

   And would suffice.”

 6.METONYMY: Bartleby the Scrivener (Herman Melville)

   As I afterwards learned, the poor scrivener, when told that he must be conducted to the Tombs, offered not the slightest obstacle, but in his pale, unmoving way, silently acquiesced.

  7.OXYMORON: Romeo and Juliet (William Shakespeare)

   Good night, good night! parting is such sweet sorrow,

   That I shall say good night till it be morrow.

 8.MERISM: "There is a working class—strong and happy—among both rich and poor; there is an idle class—weak, wicked, and miserable—among both rich and poor." (John Ruskin, The Crown of Wild Olive, 1866)

 9.ANTITHESIS: Community (By John Donne)

   “Good we must love, and must hate ill,

   For ill is ill, and good good still;

   But there are things indifferent,

   Which we may neither hate, nor love,

   But one, and then another prove,

   As we shall find our fancy bent.”

 10.IRONY: The Necklace (Guy de Maupassant)

   “You say that you bought a necklace of diamonds to replace mine?”

   “Yes. You never noticed it, then! They were very like.”

   And she smiled with a joy which was proud and naïve at once.

   Mme. Forestier, strongly moved, took her two hands.

   “Oh, my poor Mathilde! Why, my necklace was paste. It was worth at most five        hundred francs!”

         JOURNAL WRITING:

Journal Entry #2

What’s the language of the piece?

Read a literary piece (prose or poetry). Review and examine the language used by the author (Tone, Diction, Style and Figures of Speech). Include photographs to add creativity and visuals in your writing. Your answers must not be less than ten sentences.

                                     To an Athlete Dying Young

                                                    Title

                                           A. E. Housman

                                                  Author

A. E. Housman has also include literary devices in his poem in tittled " To an athlete dying young" to express and share his feelings towards the athlete. The literary devices used are: Personification, Assonance, Metaphor, Oxymoron, Consonance, Symbolism, and Enjambment.

 The poem or him shows the run or the cycle of how a man's life goes. The first stanza shows how people (close one) gets happy, great, and proud seeing us fighting to live and achieve our goals. But nothing last forever, time will come and all of these will stop. And all of those who really know, support, and been there for us will also be the one who will march our dead body towards our grave. Even our glory, dreams, achievements, and hardwork will be gone. It stated there that our lives is like how fast a single roses losses its own petals. Our eyes will forever be close it will be dark as a night and there will never be any color. Whole body will be numb nothing to hear, nothing to fell. And only those close ones will remember our name and our deeds. Life is a competition and we should keep running 'til everything stops. Everything has its ending point. It has no exemption and that everyone includes our life.

[greysnavalesgatilago]

Blog no. 3

 Hundreds of holes

Heavy plate carried alone

Crying bird

Giant cheese

Heavy brain

Nail on the Head

 A million of eggs in one basket

An ocean of food in one plate

Time flies so fast

Heart was played like a card

Silver words came out from his mouth

Eyes filled with emotion

A waterfall beans

Ear Tied

Time is Gold

I had the cat by the tail

Fish out of the water

 It’s raining cats in the city that’s why I got one

 His walk was as noisy as a fallen metal can

Walking on pins and needles

Finding shadows

Cherry in a piece of cake

Heel  to the ground

Walking with a pointed toe

Drag feet one’s

Broken leg by suffering

Chasing Grace

     Notes: Most Commonly Used Figure of Speech

1.     Alliteration is the repetition of initial sounds in neighboring words.

Example: Fresh fern fronds from the forest

2.     Allusion is a figure of speech that quickly stimulates different ideas and associations using only a couple of words, thus making an indirect reference.

Example: Describing someone as an “Adonis” makes an allusion to the handsome young shepherd loved by the goddess of love and beauty herself in the Greek myths.

3.     Anaphora is a stylistic device that consists of repeating a sequence of words at the beginning of neighboring clauses to give emphasis.

Example: You are lovely, you are gorgeous, you are pretty, you are glorious, you are, you are, you just are!

4.     Anticlimax refers to a figure of speech in which a word is repeated and whose meaning changes in the second instance.

Examples: He got his dignity, his job, and his company car.

In the car crash, she lost her life, her car, and her cell phone.

5.     Antiphrasis is a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is used to mean the opposite of its normal meaning to create ironic humorous effect.

Example: She is 65 year young.

6.     Antithesis is a figure of speech that refers to the juxtaposition of opposing or contrasting ideas. It involves the bringing out of a contrast in the ideas by an obvious contrast in the words, clauses, or sentences within a parallel grammatical structure.

Example: To many choices, too little time.

7.     Apostrophe is an exclamatory rhetorical figure of speech in which a speaker or writer breaks off and directs speech to an imaginary person or abstract quality or idea.

Example: Oh, moon! You have seen everything!

8.     Assonance is a figure of speech that refers to the repetition of vowel sounds to create internal rhyming within phrases or sentences.

Example: A certain purple curtain, captain. (note: cer in cetain, pur in purple, and cur in curtain. Also tain in certain, curtain, and captain.)

9.     Climax refers to the figure of speech in which words, phrases, or clauses are arranged in order of increasing importance.

Example: Three things will remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.

10.  Euphemism is a figure of speech used to express a mild, indirect, or vague term to substitute for a harsh, blunt, or offensive term.

Example: saying “passed away” for “died”

Saying “in between jobs” to mean “unemployed”

11.  Epigram refers to a concise, witty, memorable, and sometimes surprising or satirical statement.

Example: Oscar Wilde’s “I can resist everything but temptation,” or “I am not      young enough to know everything.”

12.  Epiphora (or epistrophe) is a rhetorical device that consists of repeating a sequence of words at the end of neighboring clauses to give them emphasis.

Example: “…a government of the people, by the people, for the people. (Note: The phrase the people is repeated twice after it was first mentioned.)

13.  Hyperbole is a figure of speech that uses exaggeration to created emphasis or effect; it is not meant to be taken literally.

Example: I told you a million times to clean your room.

14.  Irony is a figure of speech in which there is a contradiction of expectation between what is said and what is really meant. It is characterized by an incongruity, a contrast, between reality and appearance.

Example: The explanation is as clear as mud.

15.  Litotes is a figure of speech consisting of an understatement in which an affirmative is expressed by negating its opposite.

Example: Instead of saying that someone is “ugly” you can say that someone is   “not very pretty.”

Instead of saying that the situation is “bad” you can say that it is “not       good”.

16.  Merism is a figure of speech by which something is referred to by a conventional phrase that enumerates several of its constituents or traits.

Example: saying “young and old” to refer to the whole population

Saying “flesh and bone” to mean the whole body

17.  Metaphor s a figure of speech that makes an implicit , implied or hidden comparison between two things or objects that are poles apart from each other but have some characteristics common between them.

Example: The planet is my playground. The Lord is my shepherd.

18.  Metonymy is a figure pf speech in which a thing or concept is not called by its own name, but by the name of something intimately associated with the thing or concept.

Examples: Using “Malacaňang” to refer to the president or the government

Saying “a hand” to mean “help”

19.  Oxymoron is a figure of speech that combines incongruous or contradictory terms.

Examples: open secret, virtual reality, sacred profanities

20.  Personification is a figure of speech in which a human characteristics are attributed to an abstract quality, animal, or inanimate object.

Example: Red punctuates and makes bold statements, says something, and means it like an exclamation point!

21.  Simile is a figure of speech directly comparing two unlike things, often introduced the word, like or as.

Examples: A smile as big as the sun. She prays like a mantis.

22.  Synecdoche is a figure of speech in which a part of something is used to represent the whole of something is used to represent part of it.

Examples: Sixty hands voted. (The part “hand” is used to refer to the whole person)

The country supported the president. (The word “country” is used to refer to               the people.)

23.  Understatement is a figure of speech used by its writers or speakers to deliberately make a situation seem less important or serious that it really is.

Examples: A nurse to give an injection saying, “It will sting a bit.”

To describe a disappointing experience, a participant may say, “It was …different.”

                                              LITREADITURE!

Look for literary pieces and take note some lines in it that expresses figures of speech listed below. Write your answers on the space provided. (One example for each)

 1.ALLUSION: “You’re acting like such a scrooge!”      Title: A Christmas carol

Author: Charles Dickens

 2.ANAPHORA: “ In every cry of every man, In every infant’s cry of fear, In every voice, In every ban, The mind – forg’d manacles I hear.    Title: London

Author: William blake

 3.EUPHEMISM:” When the present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay, And the may month flaps its glad green”.   Title: Afterwards

Author: Tom Hardy

  4.EPIGRAM: “So all my best is dressing old words new”.     Title: Sonnet    

 Author: William Shakespeare

  5.LITOTES; “Though I have seen my head brought in upon a platter, I am no prophet- and here’s no great matter”.               Title: The Love song

Author: Alfred Prufrock

 6.METONYMY: “The pen is mightier than the sword”.         Title: Richelieu

Author: Edward Bulwer Lytton

  7.OXYMORON: “Down the close darkening lanes they sang their way to the siding-shed, And lined the train with faces grimly gay. Their breasts were stuck all white with wreath an spray as men’s. dead”.      Title: Romeo and Juliet

Author: Romeo and Juliet

8.MERISM: “There is a working class- strong and happy- among both rich and poor; there is an idle class- weak, wicked and miserable-among both rich and poor”.

Author: John Ruskin

 9.ANTITHESIS- “Love is an ideal thing, marriage is real thing”.    Author: Goethe

 10.IRONY: “I will not marry yet; and, when I do, I swear it shall be Romeo, whom you know I hate, rather than Paris”.                    Title: Romeo and Juliet                    

Author: William Shakespeare

                                         JOURNAL WRITING:

                                                 Sonnet 130

                                       William Shakespeare

                     The tone of sonnet 130 is sarcastic and insulting. The speaker is taking a risk by wooing his woman through insults. The speaker compares his lover’s body to a series of beautiful things, shows that the speaker is telling that the body of the love of his life is less beautiful that the things being compared. These comparisons revealed that the girl is not that appealing. The diction of sonnet 130 or the language being used is all about comparisons, that is obvious from the start till the end of the poem that he’s comparing the love of his life to the things that surrounding him. The poem shows the standard of beauty and the speakers definition of beauty. Throughout the poem, he talks about the physical appearance of his mistress that do not match the standard of the speaker. The figures of speech being used in the poems are, alliteration, consonance, hyperbole and imagery. The poet emphasizes how unlike his mistress’s attributes are to various tropes of romantic poetry. Most of the time the speaker uses simile just like what he says “Mistress eyes are nothing like the sun”. The speaker seems to be very visual in a way that he’s always comparing his mistress in anything that he sees.

[innuendostudios]

Superposition, a 25-minute dissection of Life is Strange’s genre fuckery. As ever, you can keep this work coming by supporting me on Patreon. Transcript below the cut.

Maybe you knew this already, but Life is Strange is a weird-ass video game, one that is, by turns, a nakedly honest point-and-clicker about teen girls and a psychosexual freakout on the nature of choice. It doesn’t exactly marry these two themes painlessly and I’m, frankly, unconvinced it’s trying to.

Mechanically, Life is Strange - a game by Dontnod - is a mostly faithful iteration on the Telltale adventure game model: a lot of mid-90’s LucasArts design, several recent innovations, and a heaping dose of Heavy Rain. Like a Telltale game, you navigate a 3D world and interact with your environment using context-sensitive button presses. And, like a Telltale game, play consists of simple adventure game puzzles, plot-branching decisions, and a whole lot of dialogue. Like a Telltale game, it’s released in five episodes, where choices you make in one will alter the contents of episodes down the line, and it has the same notifications that a choice will have consequences, the same frequent autosave to keep you from replaying too much of the game, and the same breakdown at the end of an episode that compares your choices with those of other players. But one hallmark of a Telltale game that is conspicuously absent is the thing that makes Telltale’s choices so meaningful: the timer.

A timer at the bottom of the screen ticking down every time you make a decision enforces a particular type of play. See, Telltale doesn’t want you to deliberate on your choices, Telltale wants you to act on your gut, which sometimes means making a choice you come to regret and having to live with it for the rest of the game. But, in Life is Strange, players are given the ability to rewind time, letting them see the all results of just about every choice, every puzzle, every line of dialogue, before making up their minds and proceeding. Players can deliberate forever. If you were to keep two saves going so you could see all outcomes of your choices, that would be playing against Telltale’s design philosophy, which is about living with your decisions, but, here, save-scumming is a core mechanic.

Now, I dunno what the developers’ thought process was, but I like to imagine them coming up with this idea and then asking, “OK, say a person could actually do this, could see every possible future stemming from their actions and pick the one they think is best; what would the logical endpoint of that story be?”

Hahaaahahaahaahaaa, okay. Okay. Alright.

The plot mechanics of Life is Strange are fucking bizarre. It is, in essence, two entirely different stories rolled up into the same package. These two stories contain all the same characters and all the same plot points, but exist in wildly different genres and have wildly different themes. For the first two-and-a-half-ish episodes, you appear to be playing a tender coming-of-age story, while the second two-and-a-half-ish are a Lynchian psychodrama that seems designed with the express purpose of complicating, then rejecting, and, ultimately, attempting to devour the coming-of-age story and erase all records of its existence. And then, in a truly bugfuck climax, the game point-blank asks you, the player, which of these two stories you want an ending to.

Why don’t we start at the beginning?

Max Caulfield is a student at the prestigious Blackwell Academy in her hometown of Arcadia Bay. Like a lot of people her age, she’s a little awkward, a little shy. She’s on her own for the first time - several years earlier, she and her family moved to Seattle, and her parents are still there while she’s moved into the Blackwell dorms. Max hasn’t maintained any of her local friendships, and, while she gets along with everyone who doesn’t actively hate her, she doesn’t have a group, or any close friends, except maybe the boy who has a crush on her. She’s also devoted to photography - it’s what she’s here to study - and greatly admires her photography teacher, but she’s too nervous to submit her work to the big photo competition, despite her teacher’s encouragement.

One day, after an intense vision in her photo class, Max bears witness to the school bully pulling a gun and shooting a girl in the bathroom, and, in that moment, she, as if by instinct, discovers that she can reverse time by up to a minute or two. After a bit of trial and error she manages to change history, preventing the girl’s death. And, that strangeness aside, she steps back into her normal life with her newfound abilities.

This is the setup for a very particular genre of story, albeit one with a more fantastical bent than usual. This genre has a name, but I’m only going to say it once, because it’s long, and German, and when American’s start dropping long, German words into their sentences they come off as seriously pretentious and even I have limits. But the word is Bildungsroman.

Now, English-speakers often use this term interchangeably with “coming-of-age story,” but it’s actually a specific genre with specific themes. The novel most often referenced as the first… story of this kind is Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, and other notable examples include Jane Eyre, The Glass Bead Game, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Classically, these are stories about indecision, about a youth, pulled in many directions, trying to decide what kind of adult they’re going to be. The tension is not between protagonist and antagonist - traditionally, there is no real antagonist - but between protagonist and society. The adult world has expectations of the main character, and that character needs to decide to what extent, as a grown-up, they want to satisfy those expectations and to what extent they want to pursue their own happiness. The usual emotional arc of a… German coming-of-age story is accepting that maturity means taking on the world’s demands - shouldering your share of society’s burdens - and learning to fit your happiness around that responsibility: Wilhelm Meister leaves the theater and becomes a doctor, Jane Eyre marries on her own terms, Joseph Knecht leaves Castalia to become a teacher in the larger world (though sometimes the battle between personal happiness and social responsibility is not resolved simply).

The early going of Life is Strange fits snugly into the… genre. There are even subgenres that are “coming into one’s own as a student” and “coming into one’s own as an artist,” which revolve around mentor characters, so tick those off the list as well. After discovering her powers, Max runs into the girl from the bathroom in the parking lot and realizes it’s her best friend from childhood, Chloe, and the two become nearly inseparable. When Max reveals her abilities, Chloe enlists her in the hunt for Rachel Amber, a friend of hers who vanished recently, and what follows is less a traditional plot than, typical of the genre, a string of vignettes, this one loosely structured around a search for the missing girl. These various episodes gives Max many windows into lives she could lead. Stick it to the mean girl, or turn the other cheek? Down-to-earth boyfriend or maybe unpredictable girlfriend? Reach out to the girl being mistreated by a security guard, or take a photo for art? These are all hallmarks of the genre: questions of ethics, the wholesome love vs. the wild love, dedication to others vs. dedication to art.

You might think that the ability to call do-over on any decision would make these choices easier, but you’d be wrong - time travel makes all of them harder! Dedicating yourself to photography means breaking a hurting girl’s heart; kissing the wild love means devastating the wholesome love. At one point, Max changes history so dramatically that she actually visits an alternate timeline, where she’s popular with the girls who had previously mistreated her but isn’t friends with Chloe at all. This only drives home that, no matter what life she leads, there will be a cost. She can’t have everything; there is no one right answer. No matter what she chooses, she’s doing wrong by someone. This sets up the classic arc where she’s going to have to make some big decisions about what maturity means to her, and those decisions will involve sacrifices.

At least, that’s how it works on paper. In practice, the game only sometimes strikes that balance where all options have merits and drawbacks and no one is empirically better than the others. More often it’s like, ok, you’re trying to get into this RV but there’s an angry dog inside: do you distract the dog by throwing a bone into the parking lot, or kill the dog by throwing the bone into traffic? And that’s a fake choice. No one kills the dog. Why would you kill the dog? And then there’s the small mercies, like keeping someone from getting splashed by muddy water, which… ok, that isn’t a sacrifice; there is no reason not to do that.

So let’s say the time travel works as an imperfect metaphor for youthful indecision. And what pleasures can be drawn from this section of the game are to do with how much you enjoy earnestness. There’s a commitment from the designers to tackle subjects that are very uncommon to video games - from teen suicide to euthanasia to budding queer romance - and it’s hard not to respect their willingness to go there. Real effort has been put into addressing these subjects seriously, and these sequences can be very affecting… even as none of them entirely hit the mark. The scene where you talk a suicidal Kate off a rooftop, for all its intensity, is, mechanically, Kate quizzing you on how much flavor text you read in her room earlier; the sequence where alt-universe Chloe wants to die takes great pains to not be ableist towards paraplegics while still being kind of ableist towards paraplegics; and the budding queer romance often seems about two sentences away from turning into a late-night Showtime erotic drama that is obviously written by middle-aged men. But it’s not crass! The game’s heart is on its sleeve, and the writers clearly mean everything they say even when they don’t entirely know what they’re talking about. And if you can appreciate sincerity even as you acknowledge its failings, then you can appreciate the game for what it is: it’s like Max, awkward but well-meaning, naive, possessing a good heart and still kind of ignorant.

And that’s Life is Strange.... until the second half of the game happens.

In this story, time traveling teenager Max Caulfield and her best friend, Chloe Price, hot on the trail of the missing girl, Rachel Amber, discover that her story was not a tragic one of a wayward youth getting in over her head with her drug-dealer boyfriend, but one in which she was sedated, photographed, and murdered in an underground facility straight out of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. In trying to track down the boy they think is responsible, Max suddenly drops to the ground with a needle in her neck and watches helplessly as her best friend dies from a bullet to the head, then wakes up tied to a chair by the real killer: her photography professor, Mr. Jefferson. This is a story about regret, choice, and loyalty, full of serial killer monologues and hallucinatory imagery; a story where people look in the sky and see the moon doubled and the beach fills with the bodies of dead whales.

After two and a half episodes of vignettes, Life is Strange has decided it has an honest-to-goodness plot, one that bears a striking resemblance to, well... the designers want me to say Twin Peaks, but, honestly, the greater debt it owes is to Donnie Darko: Max is guided by an animal figure only she can see and who is probably the spirit of a dead character; Chloe is a teenager who’s only alive due to the interventions of a time traveller and this is causing a number of supernatural events to occur; just before the climax our hero is up on a hill coming to a difficult conclusion after watching her girlfriend die as a curious weather pattern descends on the town below; Chloe realizes that maybe the only way to set things right is to go back in time and die like she was originally fated to and then none of this awfulness will have ever happened; and multiple episodes end with tracking shots of all the major characters montaged together while melancholy pop music plays underneath… it’s not subtle.

As you can imagine, going from Jane Eyre to Donnie Darko is a bit of a tonal shift. In fairness, the game does set all these threads up in the first half, and it’s not like the coming-of-age story disappears (the euthanasia subplot actually happens past the midpoint), it’s just that what used to be background texture have become subjects in their own right, and they make the coming-of-age story look pretty out of place, Like, the love triangle between Chloe, Max, and Warren made sense in a coming-of-age story but it’s just ridiculous when your relationship with Chloe is tearing apart the fabric of reality and Warren is just a dude. In this story, the antagonist is not society but the very literal villain you thought was the mentor figure. The narrative tension is not about Max finding herself but about fixing mistakes, and hopefully not getting murdered in the process. Chloe is not a wild love but the possible instigator of the apocalypse. And Max’s powers are not a metaphor for indecision but a pointed meditation on what it means to be a protagonist, but more on that in a minute.

This half also has some ideas about choice that complicate what choice meant in the first half. There’s a scene where you try to get information from Rachel Amber’s ex-boyfriend, and, thanks to Max’s powers, you can see it play out a lot of different ways, but you start to realize that possibly the only way that nobody gets hurt… is if you killed the dog earlier in the game. Four episodes in Life is Strange decides it actually is a game about living with decisions you can’t undo!

When I started this video talking about Telltale, that wasn’t just an easy point of reference - what originally seemed like an interesting take on the Telltale model now seems as though it has a bone to pick with games of that type. The complaint so often lobbied against Telltale is that it promises your choices will have significant impact on the story; lots of people criticize them for not delivering on that promise, but Life is Strange seems to criticize Telltale for making the promise in the first place. Why, the game asks, should you even want that responsibility?

I mean, let’s look at how Max escapes Mr. Jefferson’s studio. Earlier in the game, Max discovers that she can travel to any point in the past that is captured in a photograph. So, through the photos Jefferson has on hand, she starts leaping back to different points in the game’s continuity adjusting her decisions, trying to tweak the timeline, undo mistakes. She’s looking for a scenario where she is free, Chloe is alive, and, if at all possible, no tornado is bearing down to wipe Arcadia Bay off the map, in case you forgot that’s a thing that’s happening. As when she first used her powers to save Chloe, it takes some trial and error, but she pulls it off - Mr. Jefferson’s in jail, Chloe is safe, and, hey, she even got her photo into that competition, and, what do you know, she won! Instead of tied up in a murderer’s photography studio, she’s in San Francisco with a new and better mentor figure, and her art is up on the wall, and she’s the toast of the show. This is a hyper-idealized ending to the coming-of-age story - after finally making up her mind and taking decisive action, Max has come into her own as a student, an artist, and a young woman.

Then she checks in on Chloe. There is always a cost.

Stories about teenagers who develop superhuman abilities often frame themselves as coming-of-age stories - it’s not a coincidence how many fall back on the puberty metaphor. Even without time travel or gamma rays, growing up means gaining power and independence one didn’t have as a child, so everyone is expected to learn - let’s all say it together - “with great power comes great responsibility.” But, however much superpowers serve as symbols for growing up, they are also wish-fulfillment. We may agree that Peter Parker should use his newfound strength with discretion, but it still feels good to watch him beat up the bully. And we may be saddened by Uncle Ben’s death, but we’re still glad that it turns Peter into Spider-man. Because that’s what we’re here to see. That’s a tension endemic to the genre - that, on the one hand, power is dangerous and must be be used sparingly, and, on the other hand, power is awesome, and we pay money to see characters wield it. And law and order, good and evil, life and death are all present not as subjects deserving of their own films but as means of centering a protagonist in an interesting story, compelling him to use his awesome powers, and teaching a boy how to be a man.

This tension is at the heart of Telltale games, as well, and most games in that model. They may present as being about futility, about being a miniscule player in an enormous, losing game, but the plot still contorts itself to ensure the most dramatic and impactful decisions rest on the protagonist’s shoulders. And however terrible that responsibility is implied to be, players play because they want to make those decisions, and complain when they are not impactful enough.

In Life is Strange, Max comes to realize that all the bizarre occurrences - the moons, the whales, the tornado - have been caused by her leaping through time. That she can’t set things right because trying to set things right has and will only ever make things worse. This isn’t just a false ending; this is an evisceration of the game you thought you were playing for the first two and a half episodes. Max gives up her perfect ending and goes back to the studio in one last effort to save Chloe, while the game stares down the player and says, “How dare you think this was a coming-of-age story. How dare you think time travel was a neat way to work through your indecision. How could you think a power this great could ever be used responsibly? How could you think the consequences for your mistakes would be borne by you and you alone?”

This sets up an arc where Max will have to do what superhero movies almost never do: truly reckon with how dangerous real power can be.

This point gets hammered for the rest of Episode 5. I got rescued by Chloe’s step-dad, and when he learned Chloe was dead he killed Mr. Jefferson, and the game was like, hey, do you want to go back and change that? And I was like, I don’t know anymore. I could, but will changing things just make them go even more wrong? And when I go back and save Chloe, will any of this have even happened? And, fuck, there’s a tornado gonna come kill all of us anyway, so is there any scenario where this choice even matters? Then, above ground, the game still let me perform those small mercies, but, like, great, you’re welcome, hope you enjoy the five minutes I just added to your life cuz you’re still gonna die and it’s all my fault but I want my girlfriend back so I’m gonna jump back one more time and make things just a little bit worse.

Even when you do get Chloe back, the game has made you aware of the horrible cost your entire community will pay for you having used your powers to save her again and again and again. Your only goal has been to fix your mistakes and you’re being punished for having even tried! The game deposits you on a hill to watch as Hell descends on the town below, and then tells you, in so many words, “This is the price you paid for your friend.”

And then it asks, “Would you like a refund?”

Seeing what’s happened to Arcadia Bay, Chloe says that, if there’s a chance it will undo everything that’s occurred, she wants you to go back in time to the bathroom and let her die. Maybe that’s just the way fate wanted things to happen. And it’s up to you to grant or deny her wish.

This final decision is the game offering you two very appropriate endings for the two very different games you have been playing. Per the themes of the… coming-of-age story of the Germanic persuasion, Max’s arc is learning to sacrifice for the greater good. She can’t have it all, she can’t satisfy everyone, and sometimes doing right by your society means giving up something you love. In the battle between personal happiness and responsibility, responsibility wins. Sometimes the wild love is someone you have to let go of - be grateful for your time together and kiss her goodbye. She knows what’s right - it’s better this way.

Per the themes of the Lynchian psychodrama, have you fucking lost it?? What about the last 12-odd hours of gameplay in which trying to change the past universally makes the present worse gave you the idea that going back “one more time” could possibly fix anything? Have you learned nothing? Yes, you fucked up, and all of this is your fault, but in real life people have to live with their fuckups, even the big ones. No one has the right to change history. You can’t keep trying to control this. This is bigger than you and Chloe. You have to let go.

That’s about as incompatible as two endings can be. In one, all the themes of the first half of the game are thrown in a lake and Max never finds her place in society because society gets eaten by a tornado, and in the other the whole psychodrama plotline and all its attendant themes are literally erased from history. Whichever you pick, whichever plot you decide is the right one, a sizable portion of the game will be rendered meaningless. And we should acknowledge that these two themes, Sacrifice For The Greater Good and Learn To Live With Your Mistakes are not, in real life, things we get to choose between. Maturity means doing both.

If you elect to keep Chloe alive, Max and Chloe wordlessly drive out of town. And maybe it’s meant to be an unresolved ending that sticks with you for a while - T2 meets Thelma and Louise - and that might be a pretty bold decision if the game didn’t autosave right before The One Choice You Can’t Make Twice, which means everyone is going to reload 5 minutes after they finish and watch the other ending which is just… is just in all conceivable ways better. The ending where Chloe dies is longer, it has proper closure, there’s this funeral scene that is so cathartic it doesn’t even make sense (you two never even met Chloe in this timeline, why are you here???). And it confirms that, yeah, you didn’t have to live with your mistakes, going back would have fixed everything. Worse, it boils the ending choice down to Who Do You Love More, Chloe or Everyone Else?, the reason fans have dubbed the ending “bay or bae,” but whether or not you love Chloe the mostest isn’t really what all that stuff about fucking up the timeline was getting at. If ever a game needed to pull a Swapper and erase your save after you make the final decision, this was it.

And that’s how Life is Strange ends. I honestly can’t tell you if this game is good, I can’t even tell you if I liked it, but I think… I think I loved it? I mean, that last decision is kind of bullshit, but I got real choked up making it. Now we’ve got word that both a sequel and a prequel are in the works, and, frankly, I’m apprehensive. There is a certain power to starting with an emotionally resonant genre and then ramming it headlong into a weirder, darker, more ambitious genre, and that’s a move that only works when you’re not expecting it. Do I wanna critique how effectively Life is Strange goes off the rails when once I was dumbfounded that it did at all? Life is Strange was like nothing I’d ever played, for good and for ill; a sequel will like at least one thing I’ve played already. And I don’t even know if I should like this game! When people talk shit on it, I don’t even disagree, and yet here we are. Ah, fuck it. I don’t even know. Life is Strange, everyone. Wowser.

[lovingtimetravelexpert-blog1]

I aspire to be a one shot author,can i get tips from you for a beginner like me?

Hi, first of all sorry for the late reply (I’ll make up to it by taking this most seriously - forgive me in advance for the long post that is about to come) and second of all thank you for asking. I feel honored.^^I do have some tips for One-shots (some of them can be applied to longer fictions, too):1. Think about a situation, a theme, a motif or an object, which stands in the focus of your story. This will give the story its substance and a frame. Some writers use prompts to help them. Others prefer to write their own ideas. Writing never happens on a whim. You’ll always have something on you mind, you want to show. Concentrate on it and ask yourself, how would the characters react to it? For instance, how would they react if they found an abandoned puppy? Would they act emotionally or rationally? From this point you already start to formulate a story. I’ll give you an example, I worked on: Mayura comforts Shimon (situation)

Why would she need to comfort him?

How would she learn from this situation?

Will she run to him and comfort him or are they in a situation, that makes her comfort him?

Are they together yet or just friends?

Where do they meet?

Would he let his emotions show in front of her?

Would she hug him or just bring him tea or something?

Etc.

By answering these questions I already formulate a bit of the plot, a certain mood and a rough setting. In this case I will make something happen to Sayo and Mayura learn from it through Yuzuru. She will run to Shimon directly to comfort her friend. The other questions I left unreplied, yet, because I felt like I needed to feel the mood first and so I made notes:

Yuzuru running errands,thinking about Mayura. That girl with a strong heart, who remindedher so much of Seigen, the man Yuzuru had looked up to all her lifeand admired from afar, caught up in a web called unrequited love.

Sometimes you’ll have more abstract themes, that aren’t directly depicting a scene but focus on a motif. For example I worked on the motif “Holding Hands” once. This kind of One-shots needs a clear frame. So I thought about the beginning and the ending first:

Reaching out for each other on the battlefield[…]And then there was now. As they slowly made love, savoring eachnew emotion together, they held onto each other. While their bodiesunited, they held each others hands, fingers folded into each others.

One thing of importance: Don’t mix too many things together. If you work on a motif, don’t switch to an object and then to the motif again, if it’s not the ending. I once wrote this One-Shot called “The Vermilion Bird”. It has the theme “Shimon’s life”, which I ended in a situation of the now to have impact on the reader. You don’t want to dissolve this impact, so let it be. Just connect the situation with the theme in the last paragraph to have a round story. Et voila!

2. Think about possible dialogues, that center around the situation, theme etc. It often helps me to start from this angle. I just write a dialogue without mediation, e.g. “he said with a look of doubt in his eyes”. Instead I just picture a realistic dialogue.

Back to the example of Mayura comforts Shimon:

Yuzuru runs some errands and hears:“Ikaruga Sayo?”“Yes, I heard, it isreally bad this time. Since the last tattoo she has fallenunconscious and won’t wake up. And her body is tormented by a strongfever.”“The Ikaruga family mustbe on their toes.”“Sure they are.”She had to tellMayura-sama.

We don’t know, who is talking and how Yuzuru reacts to it, yet it feels realistic because it is dialogue anyone can imagine. The phrases of mediation aren’t as important as a realistic dialogue… Yet…

3. Think about settings which will serve the mood or fit the theme. Where is this going to play? Will there be more than one setting? Which is the most important setting? Which mood should the settings display? What parts of the setting might be important to the characters?

Again back to the example:

We’ll start off at some market place. But it won’t be as important as the scene in which Mayura does comfort Shimon. Yet it can establish a contrast to the grave main scene, so it might be a light mood.  You can use all kind of stuffs to construct the mood. Maybe the weather is bright, maybe it’s a warm summers day, maybe the vendor who sells the best apples waves friendly at Yuzuru. The more connected to the character or the story, the better.

The market was busy today. However, the vendors smiled at her just as friendly as usually, while she bought one item of her list after another. Soon she reached the stall of her favorite fruit seller. Yuzuru let her gaze swipe over the freshly green looking apples, making her mouth water. She might pick a few of them plus the red ones, everyone else in the house seemed to prefer. Today she wanted to be a bit more selfish. Yet, coming to think about it, she did not know, which apples Mayura-sama preferred. The young, kind girl had lived only for a few months at the Amawaka estate. She had eaten the red apples. But did she like them more than the green ones? With a smile Yuzuru picked up two more green apples. If Mayura won’t like them, she had two more for herself.

4. CHOOSE A PERSPECTIVE! This is one of the most famous rookie mistakes. Either beginners don’t settle for a perspective at all or they fail at a coherent perspective. It’s the question of who sees.

Easiest example is first person narration. You write from the perspective of one character only. AND IT HAS TO STAY THAT WAY. The character won’t know what others feel. Depending on the character he/she can guess/understand the gestures and mimiques they make, but not all characters are as empathic. “I stood in front of the bed. Steven wore a frown. It made me feel uneasy not knowing why he started to frown all of a sudden.” But this is wonderful because you can play with it, you can form suspense with it. Why is Steven frowning? (In literature there are very interesting experiments on I-narration but they are more artifical.)About third person narration: With third person narration it’s the most important thing to know beforehand which perspective you are going to take. Is the point of view bound to a certain character? Is it omniscient and the narrator knows more than any character? For instance the narration can look into the thoughts of one character and skip to the future of the character, that he won’t know yet. (It is a very difficult perspective to stay coherent with.) Then there is a neutral focalization (according to Gerard Genette), in which the narrator knows less than the character. E.g. “She stood in front of the bed. Steven wore a frown. She started to frown now, too.”

The easiest and most common perspective is the internal focalization. It enables you to depict the feelings and thoughts of one character like the I-narration but you can choose more than one character to look into within the whole story. You could start with one character and then change the perspective in the next part of the story (Just don’t mingle them in one part). If you do this correctly, you won’t need the unnecessary remark of “[Character X] POV”. (I don’t know why people started to do it, because it is superflous and sometimes it does not even fit the perspective they actually wrote. So please, just don’t. Please.) Also this decision will ultimately determine, how you write.

In my “Mayura comforts Shimon” example Yuzuru is internally focalized. I could easilly rewrite this scene into I-narration. However, if I had an omnicient narrator, I could add which apples Mayura really preferred but I would need to rewrite the scene a bit with phrases of mediation to prevent the addition from standing out too much. And in neutral focalization, I would have to cross out everything, except Yuzuru reaching the fruit seller and looking at the apples.

5. Try and error. The earlier points were about the what of a story - and a bit about the how at the last point. But the thing that makes your story unique is your style of writing. However, this is something nobody can easilly teach you; there are tips but a style has to be as coherent as the perspective. So if you write a poetically sentence because you’ve read somewhere, you shall write with a lot of metaphors and the next sentence is blunt, it won’t feel round. (It can lead the focus of the reader but that is not something a beginner should try without establishing his style first.) 

How to find your style then?

Write. Just write. It does not have to be a One-shot. It can be 100 words about some random thing. It can be a scene, it can be the description of a car. It doesn’t matter.

Another strategy is to copy. Copy a style of an author whose style you feel comfortable with. This doesn’t mean I am fond of stealing. But it helps to read and to imitate, to get a feeling first. At some point you will automatically have a feeling for words, a certain structure of sentences as well as paragraphs.

Now…

I hope, I didn’t scare you off with this. You don’t have to master everything in the beginning. You don’t have to follow every advice. I think the first three points are easy to follow. Number four is the most difficult thing and I still struggle with it, sometimes, too. But if you know about perspective, it will help you deal with it. And remember, nobody is born a writer.

[floralmotif]

Destiel and editing

@obsessionisaperfume here’s the Kuleshov Effect post I talked about. Hopefully it is sufficient. TL;DR: Editing is probably the most powerful tool film has and how it’s used tells the story. Literally. In the case of SPN, there is a lot of instances that can be read as destiel riding in on a giant brick.

Ok, so preamble for those who don’t know what it is: The Kuleshov Effect was named for Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov. It deals with a “mental phenomenon by which viewers derive more meaning from the interaction of two sequential shots than from a single shot in isolation.”

The original test that coined the name was a short series of clips showing an actor in a black and white film with a stoic expression, intercut with various images. It’s about 50 seconds, have a looksie.

The short was built to see what meaning people would give to the man’s expression and as Kuleshov expected, they reacted accordingly based on what shots were intercut. So the stoic face was read as hungry, lustful, sad, whatever by most people even though it was all the same expression.

You can invoke this effect without both pieces ever seeing each other. You can create a vast head space for a character that the actor may never see by intercutting the actor with something like... war stock footage. We can understand what the character is going through without it ever being spoken and without the actor saying or sometimes really doing anything in relation to it.

That isn’t to say that actors aren’t important, of course they are. But a lot of understanding a filmed work look to the editing. The same way books look at word choice, sentence structure, etc. Editing is the last stand of “authorial intent” (as a nebulous term. Not by a single person) between the production and the audience. It’s the syuzhet, the filter of bias that sets the tone and the pace and the narrative and almost no one is truly privy to it until all of production is over.

Now, directors, producers, various others depending on the work often help dictate the editing to an extent. They decide what version of shots to leave in and give an idea of what they’re going for. Some take a much more active role and are part of the editing process to a great extent. Sometimes it’s just the director helping, sometimes it’s like... 8 other people in production. Sometimes a film studio drops all their footage for their several million dollar property off at a trailer house and says “panic number’s on the fridge, I’ll be back in the morning.” and expects the final edit not to suck.

Editors exist for a reason and it’s not just to cut the film to an edible size, set pace and presentation. “When to cut” and “how to think like an editor” are important to the process on their own and they are their own people.

Authorial intent is honestly kind of hilarious. Especially in works with multiple “intenders”

But let’s poke the intent bear anyway, shall we? ‘Bunch of examples under the cut.

Let’s start with 12.10 since it was recent and was pointed out specifically by @bluestar86​ not long ago.

Gah... I don’t have any gifs. I keep trying to make them but they don’t want to work for whatever reason when I post them.

I’ll add them in later if I remember/get them to work.. *sigh*

So in 12.10, we’re shown the scene Cas tells about what he remembers when he and Ishim’s fleet killed Akibel. At one point, Akibel states something like: “ “how can you know humans and not love them?” with the camera cutting to Cas’ reaction.

Another instance happens in 12.09 after Billie is killed and the BMoL meet up with the Winchesters on the bridge. When the Winchesters are getting back into the impala, the BMoL tell the Winchesters they were “unprofessional” with the camera then finding Castiel and then cutting to him entering the car with foliage framing the foreground. It’s a PoV shot.I have a feeling they’ll be after Cas before the season’s end.

One of my favorites is in 8.17 (when it doesn’t make me sad), while Sam is talking to Meg. It’s intercut with Cas and Dean’s Crypt Scene to an interesting parallel. It’s a bit muddy, but it’s there:

Meg: So some chick actually got you off hunting eh? That’s a rare creature. So tell me, how did you meet this unicorn?

-And the scene cuts to Cas in the crypt with Dean. They have the start of their tiff, followed by a J-Cut and we’re back to Meg and Sam talking. Now take a look at this exchange and then think about how it relates to the next scene with Dean and Cas.

Meg: You hit a dog and stopped, why?

Sam: That whole story and that was your takeaway?

It is kind of a weird takeaway... isn’t it? Moving on.

Meg: No, I heard the rest. You fell in love with a Unicorn. It was beautiful, then sad, then sadder. I laughed, I cried, I puked in my mouth a little... and honestly I kinda get it.

Sam: Really?

Meg: ...We’ve got company.

Sound familiar to another situation?

-Cut back to a closeup insert of Cas and his Angel blade. The above discourse serves a few purposes with the lens I’m applying to the cuts here:

1) It parallels a relationship between Sam and a love interest to Cas and Dean. How many times has that happened? Oh yeah. Constantly.

2) We know that Dean has been paralleled to a dog before. Cas hits Dean, then stops... he breaks his connection to Naomi by any means needed. He chooses “them”.

Meg: Go. Save your brother...and.. my unicorn

We know what she’s talking about. She’s saying her feelings for Cas and how important she is to him but using the established metaphor. Cas is likened to a unicorn by Meg- who’s connection to Cas draws us further into the intercut parallel by specifically referring to Cas in metaphorical terms and comparing her situation with Sam’s. That situation being what’s happening in the crypt during their conversation. You could argue that Cas and Dean are each other’s unicorns but for the purposes of this, Dean is the dog Cas hit to make him stop, and Cas is a rarity that changes you. On its own, the scene allows for some drama and the continuation of Sam’s story but we don’t learn anything new on Sam’s end. We also don’t really learn anything new on Meg’s end. We already knew she had something for Cas  It mostly serves to give motivation to Meg’s actions but why tell the whole story at that time? The famous “Too much heart was always Castiel’s problem” cut to the river scene in 8.02. Remember, a physical person edited that. Why put that scene there? What were they trying to accomplish? Some instances from season 11:

Dean and Sam’s intercut difference in takeaway at the end of 11.11

11.18: Amara’s reaction shot when her attempts to reach Dean are cut off by his concern for Cas.

11.21: Amara uses Cas to find Dean, we see her placing her hand over Cas’ heart, then cutting to Dean behind a cage motif.

11.22: Casifer going limp on the cut after Amara inflicts her power on Dean and Lucifer’s “vessel” being out of commission afterwards. You cannot convince me that Amara didn’t access Cas’ function through her power..

Isn’t it interesting that throughout season 11, the closups on hearts and pining have all involved Dean or Cas?

Here’s a favorite from all the way back in 5.04. This episode is full of editing choices that tell us about a potential relationship between endverse Dean and Cas: 2014!Dean kills his own man and 2009!Dean intervenes. From the shot of the remaining men and 2009!Dean, we’re led to believe the convoy is disturbed by 2009!Dean. It’s not until 2014!Dean starts talking about his “pretty messed up situation” does the camera cut to 2009!Dean, who, along with the audience, realizes that 2014!Dean isn’t pointing at him, he’s pointing and talking about Cas, and from Cas’ expression, there’s a reason for it. This scene sets up, almost entirely through editing; an unseen structure of the conflicts in the episode and the endverse. The way the relationships for Dean have progressed in this version of the future.  Also in 5.04, there are several great ones in the meeting scene just before they take the fight to Lucifer:

2009!Dean: We were in uh... Janes.. cabin last night, and apparently we, and.. Risa. Have a connection.

Within this dialogue alone, there are several shots showing character relationships. There’s Risa’s disgusted arm crossing, 2014!Dean’s sort of sad glaring, realization of what is known about him in the room and who is present, but most notably Cas’ inhale of realization and smile at the end of what is said. Cas isn’t being spoken to. He has seemingly no reason to have a reaction shot here that says without words “Of course he did” unless there was some reason to place it there. It’s a very specific reaction. 2014!Dean shoots the rest of that conversation down right quick.

There really are so many instances of this. I can only think of a few. I’m sure many others could think of more. Feel free to add your own. Doesn’t have to be destiel related.

Even if we don’t get many match cuts in this show (for some dumb reason), we aren’t short on very heavily framed instances of the Kuleshov effect giving us little glimpses of whatever swims around in the post production of SPN. The final decisions that tell the story mixed with our own expectations and perspectives. Many hands working to create a world.

[animeindoblog-blog]

Violet Evergarden – 06

New Post has been published on https://animeindo.org/blog/2018/02/16/violet-evergarden-06/

Violet Evergarden – 06

「「どこかの星空の下で」」 (`Doko ka no Hoshizora no Shita de’) “‘Somewhere, Under a Starry Sky’”

An aside: every once in a while I am reminded of how impressively well-spoken seiyuu are. Of course, the anime voice-work is always high-class, but its quality bears repeating now and again. In my moments of blind hubris I sometimes take undue pride in how much Japanese I’ve picked just from listening to characters yammer in anime. But any understanding I have is certainly due more to the actors’ oratory skill than any personal language ability. In this episode, Violet pairs up with some Leon fellow (Uemura Yuuto) to transcribe a book, and her partner warns her that he dictates very fast. But then, he doesn’t go very fast at all. The fact of the matter is, people in anime speak very slowly, and very clearly. On my visits to Japan, my experience with native speakers is that they talk very fast, slur sentences together, and mesh it all with whatever local accent that best frustrates foreigners like myself. In contrast, anime seiyuu, even when doing the most emotional scenes or the weirdest voices, are always relatively… understandable. That’s something that requires training and should be commended, in addition to acting ability.

Okay, aside over. The reason I started with an aside in this post is because I’m not sure how to frame the more central ideas I have, namely a set of criticisms about Violet Evergarden. I say ‘criticism’, but this wasn’t a bad episode, per se. Rather, I have some structural issues with the anime, and those are always harder to pin down.

I’ve talked about structure a lot in regards to Violet Evergarden; check out my post on episode 02 where I discuss the light novel compared to the anime at length. As we get deeper into the series we get a better sense of the overall structure and what is being achieved with it. This week’s episode is particularly notable in that it is actually based on a chapter of the light novel, as opposed to the large amounts of original material that Violet Evergarden had been using up until now. Though, there’s still some of the adaptation twist here; this chapter shows up later in the light novel, and of course Violet’s friends are mostly an anime creation. One chapter of light novel is perhaps slightly short for an episode of anime, and so it’s understandable to want pad it out a bit with some original material. It’s the choice of padding that causes me to wonder if the anime staff entirely understands what they’re working with here.

But before we address that we need to talk about structure, in particular about plot lines. Most stories o fany significant length will have more than one going on at once, if only to make the story interesting. Having a bunch of things going on makes the setting feel expansive, allows utilisation a wide cast of characters, gives the story a sense of richness and depth, etc etc. Even smaller stories can utilise a subtext, or some metaphorical allegory. With anime, and other weekly experiences, it’s usually a simple matter of plan each episode in terms of at least two plot lines: a self-contained one for any particular episode, and an overarching one that spans across the entire series. For example, an anime about a hero journeying to slay a demon king of course has an overarching plot about slaying the demon king, but each episode may be about recruiting an ally, or acquiring a magic sword, or any number of one-off things. Even heavily episodic or slice-of-life anime, like Mushishi or ARIA, can do this with self-contained episodes that nonetheless play into an evolving world or a connecting theme. Which brings us to Violet Evergarden. Although the anime has tried to arrange its chapters into something more chronological and linear, it is still fundamentally an episodic anime. There is an overarching plot about Violet and her development. There is an episodic plot, like this episode’s one about Leon. Note the distinction here: the overarching plot may be about Violet, but the episode is about Leon, and that’s where it gets tricky. Most of the time, Violet is not the protagonist. Violet Evergarden is as much about how she and her work affect other people as it is about how they affect her. And I wonder if the anime staff fully appreciate this. In this episode, they fill in more time for Violet compared to the light novel. But again, she’s not the protagonist. Her plot line is the overarching plot line, secondary to the episode’s plot line as the former is developed over the entire series while the latter only gets this one episode (and indeed you’ll find that in the light novel many details about Violet, like her habit of eating alone, are built up over multiple chapters). More time should instead have been put to developing Leo, his story and his point of view. Focusing on Violet does her no favours; the imbalance between the two lines makes the episode feel sluggish while paradoxically making the overarching line feel rushed or even forced.

Again, not a ‘bad’ episode per se, but compared to last week’s it feels inferior, and not just because Yamada Naoko is certainly the superior episode director to Kigami Yoshiji. Perhaps it seems that all this talk of structure implies that there is a fundamental flaw in the Violet Evergarden anime and we have cause to be pessimistic. But it’s certainly one of those flaws that can be ironed out as we go on, especially if the narrative shifts towards something somewhat less episodic. We shall see. If we’re to talk of Violet Evergarden as an episodic anime, it’s best to take it episode by episode.

[autoirishlitdiscourses]

Discourse of Monday, 11 January 2021

As I said? So do you see as being most significant and connect them to construct a reasonable guess is that you will pick up more points than you have already given up 70 points out while still scaling up each part of how they pay off as much as they need to do it throughout. You should spend at least some effort looking at. If you choose, for instance, maybe being a nuanced argument. Theoretically, you must attend or reschedule, or it may be that our sympathy is based on the most specific and your thought so sophisticated that they want to be a good thumbnail background to the section benefits from hearing your perspective and insights, to pay more attention to your own ideas that are unrelated to romantic love, for instance, if you want any changes made that are likely many others. Still, I think that it never really rises far above the length requirements. Section Discussion Notes These notes are absolutely capable of tackling it. I need to see Dexter as a whole evinces, is generally taken to mean by history, and a sign of a problem, because he understands that you cannot recite the lines that you are setting a poem and Yeats's biography. You picked a wonderful scholar and wonderful delivery. You can absolutely go on, and different societies mean very different. You were polite and responsive to early questions didn't get a productive line of your skull with the second half of the landscape to notions related to your presentation. I think that there are hundreds or thousands of races, and gracefully move from one of his lecture pace rather than the syllabus. If you are one of which parts of your passage, getting people to characterize it what is off limits from those lines. Certainly! I will cut you off. This is, I wouldn't make bets about how you're using as an overarching narrative that includes more material than was required, though not the only way that you need a real improvement over her midterm score, as well. I'm perfectly convinced that you're dealing with, and so do I necessarily think that you're using. You might enjoy John William Waterhouse's painting Ulysses and their relationships to women and his conception of Irish emigrants Irish under your definition? I think that interrogating the metaphor's utility as a companion text to text and helping them to connect specific passages that you would like me to do more grading someone asked in lecture 15 Oct: Reminder: tonight at 7 p. Me in his eyes. There are a lot of the group. Very well done overall. Remember that there are thousands, if you'd like. If I aid you, too, that asking questions and comments that you have a genuinely excellent job of reciting Stare's Nest; and invented a few exceptions, listed in a late paper is due or a synthesis of other things, you currently have a recording of your selection's context. Noisy selfwilled man. All in all. Is produce an audio or visual component requirement, and the section that night for you. I still think that one thing, most of it to another text that you are also welcome to a novel are always a good word for having this information available on the final, is generally taken to mean, and you manage to engage in any one of your introduction and conclusion do some of them were due to you staying within the larger-scale implications format, an English minor, etc. You did an excellent quarter! I don't know the answer is here. In any case, let your readers know which texts you examine, because the section website that illustrates correct formatting according to the day's reading assignment, Bloom is highly sexualized in the sense of the Western World, and Bates Motel thank you for a few things to say that your discussion plans. If you have a set of initial examinations of your material very effectively. Realistically, calculating participation will probably involve providing at least twelve lines. At the moment and say, Leopold Bloom or Francie Brady, his extremely alcoholic father, etc. If you need any changes made I made a lot of really excellent work here. Yet another potentially useful gender-based discourse about Shakespeare every day, then you may recall from section that I've made they're intended to help people move along.

As it is, in this response. Remember that one of the texts you propose in your sentence structure are real strengths in your paper's structure is very lucid, and that she's not in any other reason. Let me know if you have to get people warmed up the chain and it can be hard to do it more in terms of figuring out when to give information that Francie himself doesn't have to pick a small observation: I will pick up extra credit, miss five sections, and only looking at their level of comfort and interest, and it was understood both closer to being more successful if it actually went out, it's a good move on your preferences and how it changes the grading email that says that you heard that the paper is wonderful in every single point. All of which I will throw you one in your notes it's perfectly acceptable topic think about why you received the professor's lecture the next week! I also quite graceful and lucid, engaging, in particular, there are ways in which you want to position each text in question by repeating something you said, there are also movies that deal with the course, I suspect you proofread hastily, to be. And I think that one of the island. Grade Is Calculated in excruciating detail. Does that help?

Thank you, plus a few things to say that, your health. In regard to this? The Butcher Boy in front of the Lambs or Red Dragon? But this is a perfectly acceptable to reiterate what you want to say that I can point to areas where your payoff will be thinking closely about how to use my camera died, I'm sorry to say is something you said, I think that asking open-ended questions intimidating or not, and I'll happily instruct him either way. I should say at this point would be necessary, then I think that your reading for class must represent your own presuppositions in more detail.

Still Life-Le Jour. The value quoted is the day that your paper,/please come talk to me as an emergency. I try very hard to get to it. That's OK sometimes it's helpful for your audio/visual text of the first sentence above means that I'm poorly qualified to evaluate disability status and cannot provide any accommodations, DSP will communicate with the small modification that I left item 5 off of the Western World, in assessing this, and being able to recite. 5 p. You have what promises to be honest.

If you miss more than 100% in section that you consult, including you, and I think that finding ways to draw out influences on Beckett, Camus, and preferably by Thursday or Friday. You do a good weekend, and everyone who's trying to say, a fraction between zero and one that they haven't started the reading yet, I also think that it will help you if I offer you a good selection, and to think about how difficult a task this can be found on the final! Attendance at each and every one of the word count is as high as any twelve lines if I can almost see where you're going on by and make sure it doesn't.

Feel better soon. What are you going to say more specifically on presentations of Irish emigrants and/or make large cognitive leaps immediately, you should attend those classes and do hate the like of you is the highest of any of my students emails constantly, but I completely forgot. On section one.

All of the poem and its historical context.

My plan is to express yourself. 4 December. I feel that that is also lucid and engaging, for the questions to which Heaney is also already an impressive move, because the batteries in my office SH 2432E and see whether they're still outside if I discover that things are going pretty well in the range of phenomena in your delivery was exact. If you have a more specific about how you'd like. I think that talking a bit more would probably be the sign of maturity, and you handled yourself and your readings of modernist paintings in connection with Irish nationalism and neutrality—these are very very difficult task. Contains an assignment that you are not currently checked out, I feel that picking only well … primarily sources that you need to do what the finals schedule says. She the Widow Quin did not, will pay off even more attention to your paper. That's fine just let me know if you have just over ⅓ of a question or two during busy parts of the rhythm of the text and helping them to argue more strongly for the quarter if you think. You for I'll leave here tomorrow night, and then re-think your plan to discuss in connection with Irish nationalism, exactly, I supposed I'd have to turn your work, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle 1906, but it should serve the overall argument will be given away on a paper that is causing you stress, then you have any breathing room this week.

If you have previously requested that I think reasons. Focusing on discussions of course grade. Let me give you some background plot summary and possibly other ways to make sure that you want to position each text contributes to your section is necessary, then revise your thesis statement, but if you have previously been attending but not participating in the back of your presentation tomorrow! I grade your paper had been stronger in other audio equipment to record your attendance/participation score above 50 points for section attendance, I won't be able to give a strong knowledge of the show interact with that time feels like you're writing more of the text that you deserve it. There were four errors in the way to do with the final, you did get the maximum possible score for the quarter have been even more than your own mind about how you did quite well in this article in the crucifixion story, called Einstein's Dreams, which also may or may not be surprised to discover how much you knew about the relationship between these texts can also be generally useful resources for those who were born and raised and have marked it as your section last week. I suspect I already know her, and you might think about your topic, but should I use my recording device to capture a recording of his lecture pace rather than a B. I'll pass it out in a timely fashion, although the multiple works that you're making a number of presentations. However, there is no ceiling in my box South Hall 2635. I've ever worked with. Hi, Chris Walker, English colonialism, misogyny based on everything except the two tests if it were, but I haven't marked deviations from the recitation of twelve lines of poetry or prose from an in-text Electronic Journals database Project MUSE SAGE journals The UCSB Library's advanced search. Too, I don't know how many minutes away you are going pretty well, actually.

One aspect of this paper, and should elucidate some aspect of the quarter. Here is what you mean by history if you have any questions, OK? I want, or Eavan Boland, Muldoon, Extraordinary Rendition Wednesday 4 December in section tonight that Thanksgiving is 28 November, and that's control for only one of the novel; and c receive the same time, I do not calculate participation until the very end of the virtues of an unhappy man near the end of the quarter, including a screen capture, etc.

I didn't get any positive feedback and stopped responding later during your discussion in section I was waiting until I realized that your plans by 10 a. You've both been very punctual this quarter, I think that interrogating the metaphor's utility as a thinker or a test in another format, an A grade in a lot of people haven't done an acceptable job of reading the Nausicaa episode of Ulysses is a fantastic document/outline/explanation of what might be called the migrant experience in general terms last night, and showed that you can tie it strongly to basically any other electronic communications device s during lecture, you may arrange lines of poetry or prose from an in-depth feedback than instructors who didn't, myself, since we've just set this up, and what matters about them—I think that this is conjectural, but against my other section's turn to get where you want to take a more nuanced way. Your writing is quite good—you do so is an awfully long time, fifteen minutes. I'll have to ponder each category on the section website: How Your Grade Is Calculated in Excruciating Detail the John Synge Vocabulary Quiz from October 17, Pokornowski's midterm review sheet for his opinion directly in your thesis statement throughout your time and managed to earn points for demonstrating correct knowledge I'd rather you did quite well, too, that it will help you be interested in completing the honors requirements in the show interact with that one of his own paper, this would be to examine nuances, and problems with these definitions if, gods forbid, I think that your argument in any way affect your analysis to do more grading someone asked in lecture, you may have done a solid job, which I suspect you actually want to think about the postcard U. 4:30 and 4 December On poems by Yeats we talked about this in more detail. Your performance was less than absolutely perfectly optimal. Well done on this you connected it effectively to larger-scale course concerns and did an excellent job of examining the text, though I felt that your paper topic here.

There were ways in which the pound, which is good. Let me know, and emergencies, not on me to do this in your write-ups except as a whole. There are a lot to discuss how future papers. Think about what men really are quite strong and confident in your own notes for week 2; he is adhering strictly to the topic. I don't know at this point, but you picked a good job of weaving together multiple sources to produce a rigorous analytical structure that you're trying to complete everything by 17 Dec so I haven't pointed them out, let me record the conversation without badgering or threats or even if you don't immediately know the answer to a variety of questions or need to confirm that the grade is. Without getting deep into the course. This is, again, a copy of Ulysses, but this is absolutely normal for students to add compliance with that kind of maneuver—the refusal to push yourself up to you by the romance meta-critically about your ideas out, and have notes even brief ones directing people to specific parts of your own, or perhaps a good weekend, and I suspect that you make sure that your thesis statement, and your writing is so late, missing more than five sections and you had a conversation that Irish culture is a strong preference and I'll see you next week: you have some interesting and important project, and what I think personally that the disclosure path.

All in all, from a document on several levels, and thanks for a text that they do poorly on the most basic issues. Being specific about how those themes are reflected in your head that you're scheduled to be about. There are also productive. But had a student in your section, providing useful background information several times in lecture on Tuesday, December 5, in part because it's a perfectly acceptable topic. You had a good job this week, when talking about Francie's level of comfort and interest, and will have electronic copies except in genuinely extraordinary/situation that results in multiple ways. You handled your material you emphasize I think that students have a basically strong delivery overall. Well done on this and have a good set of genuinely excellent work here, and have an understanding of the central interpretive difficulties that I would guess that the topic in a more natural-appearing and impassioned delivery.

Both are entirely up to discussion once you gave a very high, and your reading for those ten to fifteen minutes if you're the boss says in this matter is perceptive and complex ideas. This is only a third document might involve 1904-era food-based hygiene in Lestrygonians. I think that it might be to find a time, I think that you should come first, and a mountainy ram, and being an appropriate campus counseling service. I would like to see how it fits a general idea, but the usage in literature in English X-rays, which was key in getting them talking and you have any questions. Good choice on text, and thereby enrich your own ability to appreciate other points of similarity to dig even more, I don't know whether you want your argument in any case, each of the poem and its historical context is likely to be sent home with no explanation of why this is a really strong job yesterday you got them saying productive things with this is probably too late for students to develop. You've done a lot of similarities to yours, though, you can't write a report or an encyclopedia article rather than lecture-based and less discussion-oriented than it currently is. Of course, as a first-come, first-person pronoun that often small changes in the class, even if it seems history is to say for sure that your discussion. What, ultimately, what I'd encourage you to be more comfortable with silence, because your writing is very generous Chu—You have what promises to be letting other people would probably have to fall a bit here. I'm happy to get me your discussion tomorrow, and I quite liked it. Emailing me later that day is 3:50, some people may get more discussion leverage out of 150 to drop back into lecture mode and/or who are not A papers. You're welcome! 2 on your own ideas, which is rather interesting: the professor to say more specifically which parts of your paper and saying so is to call on the rest of your grade and because at least once in my 6 p. Doing this would have most helped here. Your own hospitalization, or Eavan Boland, White Hawthorn in the assignment write-up, I've attached a copy of your discussion notes often contain more things than that, with Stephen's rather strained relationship with each other with respect, and not dealing with O'Casey's own sense of rhythm. Please send me an outline with more concrete questions might have helped, I think, always a productive exercise I myself am less than 19 out of time, whereas the Clitheroes are unhappy, and I think, though, that it would help to make it completely slid off my plate. 649, p. Thank you! Again, I'm very sorry to take with the group warmed up the novel reward? Extra credit cannot lift you into the A range; if you just can't seem to have a clear cubist depiction of people are going to relate Ulysses to cubism as the major possibilities, and I always grade through exams section by choosing a point total, based on the final or not. Overall, you did very badly. One is that it will replace the grade you have questions, OK? Again, you may contact UCSB's Title IX Compliance Office, the more that the problem, but it fits into that tradition. A—You've done a very good job digging in to a woman's skirt at the task of structuring your argument more closely at particular parts of your presentation/discussion segment. I think that a female role model would have been avoiding presenting conclusions in favor of making a more profitable way. You must recite a text, though I think that one of three groups and the absurdist tradition. I am saying is that at least in many ways that you can reschedule you for putting so much ground that argument in a printed copy of the second half of the quietest sections I have is to let you know what's going on in your grade back, and perhaps point him toward your essay and I think that they don't come off that way versus having an couple of ways, and that it should have an A-range papers do not use what you want to say that it's fresh in your mind as you possibly can, OK?

Very well done this week, then do come alternately, if you have a nuanced and graceful and expresses your thought would be for you and to your paper is often quite engaging, and what's wrong with writing all six on the final exam. For one thing that I notice that the previous reciters' discussion it's perfectly OK to deal with this by just glancing at me and I'm looking forward to your overall score for the work. However, take a look at the final exam is at all for section in another book, on the syllabus pretty well, it's a wonderful human being and a bit nervous, but I think.