Blogging vs Academic Writing

             I have maintained a blog on Tumblr for about three years now - it is generally for personal matters and issues that are important to me, specifically human and animal rights and anything under the umbrella of social justice. I find it to be a good release for me as I find support and like minded people through my interactions. When I make the occasional personal post about my struggles, I receive condolences or concerns that I might not be comfortable receiving from people I'm close to in real life.
Tumblr has been a great outlet for me to discover new people, art, music, and form opinions on issues important to me. However, that is the purpose that blogging serves for me: Leisure and learning outside of academia. In contrast to the New York Times article, I staunchly believe that blogging has no place in academia.
           Academic writing, that which is thesis-driven, makes an argument, and convinces audiences (even if that audience is just one professor) of our claim is an art form in and of itself that is entirely separate from the introspective world of blogging. It allows us to evaluate our own positions and bring them into conversation with other pieces of work in order to make a convincing argument that hopefully no one else in the world has made. I find that incredibly liberating and powerful and although many of my peers would most likely disagree with my fondness for the academic paper, I find it to be the most valuable form of writing. Granted, I have no talent for creative writing and therefore find much more freedom in structure, and I understand that I differ in this way from many of my classmates. I believe that a blog can be helpful in hashing out thoughts and if the academic world believes it is beneficial to use in conjunction with academic writing, so be it. I, however, do not want to be a part of an education system that uses a blog as a basis for actual grading. I don't believe that it's a fair representation of true writing ability, as blogging is a form of social media, a platform through which I personally feel comfortable using lazy sentence structure and omitting a few punctuation marks.
If blogging is the future of neo-liberal hippie dippie academia, I believe that the quality of writing in students will go down significantly. It already shocks me that 80% of high school students never had to write a 15 page paper. All of a sudden I am very grateful for my high school forcing me to practice these strict writing regiments.

Thanks, Winchester. 

            I really don't mean to sound like a pretentious student against any kind of progressivism in the realm of academic writing. I am simply a firm defender of the academic paper, as I believe it teaches a kind of writing that is different and more easily and fairly grade-able than a blog. Blogs are too subjective, to open ended, too right brained, and I don't think that grades based on blogging will be accurate reflections of a students writing ability, nor that they will encourage or challenge students to improve their caliber of writing. If blogs are to be employed in tandem with academic writing, fine, although I'm still against it as I already maintain a blog and find posting blogs on specific academic topics at will kind of grating. In fact, I would actually argue that blogging for school doesn't make academic writing more fun, it just makes blogging less fun. I mean, I would hated it if I was expected to tweet on demand about a certain topic, so required blogging just sort of makes me less interested in blogging, which I previously just thought of as a therapeutic and somewhat frivolous hobby.

24 - open topic

I have always had a special connection with Northwestern University. My mom's best friend lives 5 minutes from the campus, so we would go there often as kids, as my mom lived in Chicago for 10 years. It was the first college campus (besides Pitt and CMU which are in my neighborhood and don't count) that I ever really looked at, even though I was way too young to be thinking about college. It was kind of always my dream. Then junior year happened and I started thinking about colleges and I was still afraid of planes and didn't have time to drive to Evanston, and I didn't have the grades anyway, and I just never really planned on applying. In retrospect, I think this was a really great thing. Even if I had gotten in it would have been too far from home and it would have been too hard for me, but most likely I would have gotten rejected and it would break that spiritual bond I have with NU. It's my school-away-from-school, and being there this weekend really made me feel connected and grounded in Evanston. Two of my best friends from high school are sophomores there and my ex boyfriend with whom I'm really close goes as well, so hopefully there will be many more visits in my future, and even though it sucks that I don't go there, my decision to not apply shields me from any bitterness or remorse I might have toward them. It's a beautiful, special place and even though it's very different from Michigan and I definitely don't think of it as better than Michigan in any way, I'll always kind of think of NU as a welcoming and peaceful place.

Go Wildcats.

Blogs we like

The best blog posts tend to be the ones that are short enough to keep you into the blog and want to read another - really long posts tend to exhaust you so that you just want to go back to mindless activity (not that they aren't valuable once in a while, but not all the time), but long enough to engage you and get you to think about something. I tend to gravitate toward those in our class that use humor or personal narratives in order to reach broader messages. Cory makes good use of triviality as a means to a broader statement, such as his "static" post, or one that stuck with me from the beginning of the year about how Michigan is not yet home despite doing all the things that one does at home here. As far as making the personal inviting to the public, this is something that sort of has to be well-written and nuanced in order for it to work. If you want people to read your blog, self-pity and too much information is probably not a great idea. To be honest, most people probably don't care about your personal life to any degree, let alone enough to read a long wallowing blog post. However, personal stories and feelings can be really interesting if well written and attempting to get at a broader point or theme. A great example of this is Cellik's blog, which uses a mix of formal and colloquial syntax in order to convey a broader theme, such as pride in one's roots, or attitudes about the monotony of going to college where you're from. These perspectives are not just "this thing happened to be today and I feel blank," which are very tedious and individualistic events happening to someone you don't really know, but rather these personal blog posts allow for introspection and get at broader implications that we all can relate to, which make them much more profound and interesting to read.
The only preference I have for the styles of the blog is something clean and preferably reflective of the blogger's personality, but really the only thing that matters is little clutter that makes for easy scrolling and post finding. I can't think of an image to put with this blog post.... Todaloo.

I wrote a thing about a pretty stranger

            The girl sitting across from me at Starbucks has nothing but her laptop and her iphone on the table in front of her. The lighted apple on the back of her computer appears lavender through the gray laptop case, almost the same color as her faded cardigan. She has dark eyes and several gold bracelets around her right wrist. Her perfectly threaded brow is furrowed intently whether she’s looking at her phone or her computer – she alternates between the two. She has shiny dark hair parted to the right and often looks away from her computer or phone with a calculating or even confused look, as though working on a very hard problem. She has gorgeous skin, and appears to have some sort of south asian background. As I’m typing, a dark boy with a rust colored beanie comes to meet her and sits across from her at the small table. He hands her a drink and her lips purse as she takes a sip as though it is not her ideal drink. She then explains that she is trying to memorize a story. The two begin to engage in very sporadic small talk as they work on their individual assignments. He has never heard of Jane Eyre. This kind of grosses her out.

             

            Lena’s right leg absent mindedly vibrated as she waited, checking her phone every few seconds between attempting to memorize her lines. Her French partner was already fifteen minutes late and if they didn’t rehearse she knew she would not get out of the C range in this French class that she probably shouldn’t have tested into in the first place. Lena recalled the only time previously she had rehearsed with Jake, and was not looking forward to today’s sequel to the encounter.

            After another five minutes of anxiously preparing for the “date,” as Jake had grossly called it, she saw him descending the stairs, carrying a two beverages. She eagerly took the one he extended to her, grateful despite herself for free caffeine, but her brows immediately joined in disgust as she tasted grainy chocolate.

            “What is it?” She asked.

            “Peppermint  mocha,” Jake replied with that half smile that followed the curve of his chin strap facial hair. “What, you don’t like it?”

            “No it’s fine. It’s just… strong. It’s a lot. I usually get something more coffee based.”

            Silence. Lena turned back to her computer, indicating to Jake that she needed another minute to go over her lines. Feeling the silence weighing on her, she said, not looking away from her computer, “So do you come here often?”

            Jake replied to unhearing ears, as Lena had no interest in Jake’s spare time activities.

            More silence. Jake had not so much as touched his drink. “So do you wanna get started?” suggested Jake.

            “Yeah, fine, sure.”

            Lena cleared her throat and took one last glance over the format, knowing that Jake was unlikely to have prepared thoroughly enough, and she might have to cover for him. “Go ahead.”

            “La semaine dermiere, je suis allée au Chicago pour –“

            “Á Chicago,” Lena interrupted.

            “What?”
            “It should be á Chicago because it’s a city. That’s the preposition.”

            “Oh.”

            “Go on.”

            “Je suis allée Á Chicago pour la match de football americain contre Northwestern et Michigan.”

            Prepared, Lena replied, “Oh, qui a gagné?”

            “Shouldn’t it be ‘ce qui?’”

            “What?”
            “It should be ‘ce qui’ because there’s no noun preceding the relative pronoun.”

            Lena exhaled sharply, frustrated at his correctness. He was so lazy yet somehow he did better on the exams. Tense, Lena glowered over at Jake, who merely shrugged his shoulders. For some inexplicable reason, Lena’s face was getting hot and she felt a lump in her throat.
            “Everything okay?” Asked Jake.

            “I just don’t get why I can’t fucking GET this relative pronoun thing. I’m in calc three for engineering and I can’t fucking figure out the difference between ‘qui’ and ‘ce qui?’ What the fuck is wrong with me?”

            “Whoa whoa, baby, calm down, it’s okay, it’s all cool,” cooed Jake, rubbing her arm.

            Lena jumped violently and knocked over her drink.

            “Don’t touch me, don’t call me that, please don’t touch me.”

            “Can you calm down? You’re making a scene,” replied Jake, not removing his hand from her shoulder.

            “Can you not touch me? Can you please not touch me?”

            “I’m trying to help you, I’m afraid you’re gonna go crazy,” explained Jake, still not raising his voice even a decibel.

            Lena was frustrated by his calmness. Why did she hate him? Why was she getting so upset over a French grammatical error? Why did she feel so threatened by him?

            “You spilled your drink. Let me get you another one.”

            “I don’t want another drink! I don’t want your gross chocolate abomination!”

            “Then drink mine.”

While I was initially attracted to the "Bookslut" blog, for obvious reasons, I found that one dense and unimaginative, and had little to do with actual sluts (a term, by the way, which I only approve of when used in the context of a deep understanding of intersectionality and exclusionary implications of that term toward women of color). At any rate, I struggled to find a blog that I felt like I would actually visit because I don't really care about people's reviews of books or articles. That's what twitter is for. The reason review blogs are so boring is because you can literally get a review from people you care about in 140 characters or less so why would you trust a stranger's 500 word discussion of the "themes" that you don't care about? I just want to know how much nudity I'm going to have to white knuckle through if I watch it with my mom. Isn't that what's really helpful in a review?
Anyway, the blog I settled on is GalleyCat. This blog is interesting because it doesn't seem to be focused specifically on literature. For example, they have a post that's just the trailer to Angelina Jolie's upcoming movie, "Maleficent" which looks incredibly dope. The blog links frequently to sources that are appealing to me, such as the Huffington Post, and makes use of multimedia to tie its literary agenda in with pop culture that is relevant and interesting to me, a vapid blonde teenage white girl. Apart from its connections to pop culture, it also brings many issues outside of the writing world into conversation with writing and issues that affect writers. It writes about music, politics (its most recent post being on the NSA), social media, and hotspots for writers and make them all relevant to its reading base, which is presumably comprised of writers or writing enthusiasts. One thing that also drew me to this blog was the format - it is clean, aesthetic, and easy to navigate, making clear concise posts which titles that let me know whether or not I want to read the post. I'm into the micro-post format because I'm a teenager and technology has melted my brain and my attention span and I have nails to paint and boys to lure into my underwater lair.
All in all, one of the better literary blogs in all of the literary blogs I've perused in my lifetime, which now officially consists of, like, nine. All of which I clicked on for this assignment.

This is my blogging face. Do I look like I'm ready to read a fucking essay on the

 use of the color green in Mrs. Dalloway? It's a blog for Pete's sake.

Pittsburgh is the protagonist in the story of my life.

The most immediate change I noticed about myself was the increase in hometown pride I acquired since I left Pittsburgh - which is actually shocking considering the amount of hometown pride I had before. The combination of actually being away from home, the Pirates going to the playoffs for the first time in 21 years, the Steelers not being broadcast on television, and not being surrounded by anyone that knew Pittsburgh is the best city in the entire world (it's true, I could prove that shit in a lab), made subtle changes in me, like suddenly getting upset when I had to miss a hockey game, as well as large scale ones in the form of homesickness. I never went to camp as a kid, and had never spent more than two weeks away from home. I hate traveling and generally opted to spend most of my breaks in Pittsburgh. I've never moved houses - when my parents got divorced I stayed with my mom in the house in which I grew up, and I've never changed schools - I went to Winchester Thurston from kindergarten until graduation. Therefore, I've known little change in my life and had no conception of what the homesickness would be like. It often manifests itself into a physical illness where I feel exhausted and unable to get out of bed. There are crying spells, headaches, and severe anxiety that accompany being away from home for the first time in my life, and it's difficult to explain to teachers that I can't go to class or do my assignment because I saw a picture of the Fort Pitt tunnel and needed to take a couple of hours to myself. All of my anxiety about college was focused on making friends and keeping up with classes, and I had no emotional preparation for missing Pittsburgh. I think what people don't understand is that I don't miss my parents, or my friends, or even my cat, to the extent that I miss the city itself. 

Although my cat is a close second

That place is my rock, my home. And I think one of the biggest changes I've made in college that has been a product of all this is that now I know once I finish school (I plan to go to grad school, wherever that may be), I'll be returning to Pittsburgh to settle down for good. Going into college even just a couple months ago I had this sense of "My life is starting now. I could end up anywhere," and that was terrifying and not a feeling I loved, but now all of that is gone. Of course there are variables - I might fall in love with someone not from Pittsburgh (if I could ever get over that major character flaw), I might not be able to find sufficient work in Pittsburgh or be offered a job somewhere else, but for now it's nice to imagine that after 8 years of doing whatever I need to do to reach my goal, I'm going back to the city. My brother graduates college this year and he's moving back to Pittsburgh immediately after for his job. I know that this doesn't sound like a huge character change, but every part of me has been influenced by my love of home, and I genuinely believe that my feelings about Pittsburgh and its role in my life and future is the biggest change that I have discovered in myself since coming to college.

Do yourself a favor and google this skyline

Duck Season

In the last few years, a photographic phenomenon enacted predominantly by young females has emerged: the duckface.

Before I get to anything too political here, let me explain to you the psychology behind the duckface. Girls like to look pretty in pictures - after all, presumably if a photo is being taken it is likely to be viewed by others, and with the number of social media sites to which a photo is likely to be posted, it could be seen by potentially hundreds of people. People whose opinions we care about. So understandably, we want to look attractive. Nothing wrong there. Generally candids are not the best way to go with this goal in mind, so a pose must be chosen (a smile being the go to). However, what if the subject or subjects of the photo are at a party or very casual setting, at which it would look odd or uncomfortable to pose a smile? For example, if I’m laying in bed with my glasses on just after a shower and want to send the message “Just chilling at home,” it might look a little odd for me to slap on a big cheesy grin. But if this snapchat is being sent someone with whom I’m not necessarily comfortable seeing me at my worst, I don’t want to pull a big face either. So I purse my lips for a casual silly face, that doesn’t contort any other part of my face, so I can still look cute and somewhat candid.

So was born the duckface.

Now if it seems odd to you that I just wrote a paragraph explaining why many girls put on a specific face in photos, it is. And herein lies the purpose of this piece.

So why is the duckface such a big deal? How on earth could the face that girls choose to make in a photo that is neither obscene nor offensive, disgusting nor demeaning, have any possible effect on other people? This can’t possibly cause any real controversy, right?

oh

oh dear

oh my. Well we wouldn’t want to look “retatrded” would we?

No, the duckface has risen to fame as an instant pass to ridicule and demean any girl who should dare participate in the degrading and idiotic act of…. Making a face in a photo????

Let’s examine the duckface backlash for a minute. What do these images in particular have in common? Well first of all, they’re all hideously cruel, and are using a face that a girl is making as an excuse to very personally attack them. Secondly, they all assume that the duckface is made exclusively for male consumption, and that how a woman appears in any given photo is for male pleasure.

On top of these clearly over-the-top images, duckface hate is everywhere. One of my favorite pastimes when I am winding down before bed is browsing Imgur, an image sharing website. A constant presence is the imposition that if a girl in an image is making a duckface, she is instantly ridiculed. A not uncommon comment is “The only acceptable duckface,” in reference to any image that actually has a duck in it, stating that duckfaces are not only unattractive, they are unacceptable. 

So are these people leading the crusade against duckfaces just Internet randoms - the same ones perhaps that frequent sadistic sub reddits and leave those incoherent and nasty youtube comments for no reason that we all hate? 

Unfortunately no. I recently saw this post from an ex boyfriend, a self proclaimed feminist:

And upon tweeting about my dismay over the war on duckface and how absurd I find the whole thing, I received this reply, from a progressive, liberal, intelligent, friend of mine:

The duckface is one of the few issues that no one talks about in the context of a feminist issue, it’s exempt from even self proclaimed feminists like these friends of mine to see as something worth concern. The truth is, the act of restricting duckfacing itself is not the issue, as duckfacing itself is not an essential part of female life, but it is a glaring example of a bigger problem. 

The duckfacing fiasco illuminates a huge part of female oppression perfectly:

Men have taken something that have nothing to do with them, and forbidden women to do it because they don’t like it.

I can speak from personal experience in saying that every time I make a duckface in a photo it is not to look hot for men, and even if it were, couldn’t they just ignore it? Why do they have to forbid me to do it all together, lest I be inviting people to call me a an idiot, a whore, or some misspelled version of an offensive term like “retarded?” 

The answer is simple: Because they can. Because they don’t enjoy looking at photos that they don’t personally find attractive, and so those photos shouldn’t exist. Because they as a group in society have the power to make women believe that they are actually doing something wrong by making a certain face in a photo. 

Think about how powerful the patriarchy is: They can take something as non-offensive and ordinary as making a face in a photo, and actually cause men and women alike to believe that his face is an indication of stupidity, promiscuity, low self esteem, or any number of negative qualities that have nothing to do with the face you make in a photo.

Let me repeat that. Men have decided that the face that women make in a picture is an indication of their intelligence.

And that if you make this face, you are opening yourself up to be a target of public ridicule.

Well I’m not buying it.

The face you make in a photograph doesn’t have to be for the benefit of anyone but you. If someone doesn’t like how you look in a photo, guess what? It’s their job to move on from it, because it’s really not a huge inconvenience for someone to not like the way someone looks in a facebook photo. 

It is not your job to look good for everyone in every photo on the internet. 

And just like how if someone doesn’t like your hair, your makeup, your boobs, your clothes, or anything else you choose to put on or do with your body, it’s their issue, and not yours. 

And let me let you in on a little secret: The face a girl makes in a photograph (hold on to your hats folks) has nothing to do with (and i know this is a difficult concept) her intelligence, (wow amazing) her decision making abilities (shocking), her self esteem (what how could that be), or literally anything about her besides what she looks like in that photo. Yep, it’s true. 

And the fact that I have to explain that to anyone is downright tragic. 

So I leave you with my very own strong, independent duckface.

Quack quack ladies, and happy duckfacing!

Moviez

To me, the only qualification for a great movie is that it entertains me and that it's probably about girls. I find that movies about white boys have gotten really unoriginal because they're always the same types of conflicts. Good movies about women are so much more subversive because every type of woman has not been played out. Men in movies are so flawed and well written and diverse in personality. Women always fit specific archetypes that don't reflect real women at all, so when a good movie (one written by a woman generally) is about a woman it's so refreshing to see women that actually resemble women in real life. To me, a great movie, much like a great book, is one that introduces a premise or conflict that causes or allows you to think about something that you've never thought about before and leaves an impression on you that shapes your future worldview.
Examples of these types of great movies are Legally Blonde and the Bling Ring, which show feminine, flawed women who have all kinds of complicated relationships with other women, that really taught me things about what it means to be female facing conflicts such as the criminal justice system - a central theme in both movies that is generally not associated with "chick flicks" (a term I personally resent). Other films that beautifully represent complicated and diverse women learning from and influencing each other are Girl, Interrupted and Disney's Atlantis.

Badass/Role model/Personal hero

I also find that extremely bizarre movies that still manage to connect with accomplish best what movies are supposed to do; take you to another world in order to teach you about the one you're in. Examples of this include Moulin Rouge!, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Donnie Darko, and Being John Malkovich. All are highly unrealistic, dramatic, and exaggerated, yet I always walk away from them having gleaned a new message or something to think about that I can apply to reflection on my own life.

More like "Eternal Heartbreak of the Emotionally Unstable 15-year-old Who Was Not Ready for this Movie"

(P.S. Shout out to Slumdog Millionaire and Anchorman for being two of my favorite movies that don't fit into any of these categories).

Bob Dylan

When I was a kid and my parents were married my whole family would go on road trips up to our house in Charlevoix, Michigan. I’m from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and including rest stops for two kids and a dog, it took about 10 hours to get up there. Though my brother and I have been best friends since we were little, we did fight like siblings obviously on occasion, and when you’re in a Subaru sadan for 10 hours with a big smelly dog between you, things can get a little restless. Whenever we would start to act out, whine, or prove unable to entertain ourselves, instead of the classic “I will turn this car around” or “don’t make me come back there!” that I’ve seen on sitcoms, my father would just start singing Bob Dylan in his best impression. Not only do all Bob Dylan impressions sound like little more than a low whine when anyone does them, but my father is certifiably tone deaf. Like, he cannot distinguish between two tones.

            Through operational conditioning, I learned to associate Bob Dylan with punishment, as soon as my father would start to sing “Memphis Blues” whatever actions my brother and I were doing would immediately cease before he even finished saying “Oh, Mama.” Last summer, however, I was on the megabus and my ipod had died, so I resorted to using spotify on my phone, and this was before I had premium, so all that was available to me were the radio stations. I settled on the Counting Crows station as I thought that best encompassed my music taste (what can I say? 90s alternative folk rock is my passion), and after flipping through a couple Matchbox Twenty and R.E.M. tracks, “Like a Rolling Stone” by Bob Dylan came on. This is Bob Dylan?! I thought, in absolute disbelief. This is great! The artist I had so actively avoided was blowing my mind on that dingy megabus. I added the song to a playlist and listened to it regularly, and a few weeks later I ventured cautiously into more of Bob Dylan’s repetoire, but it wasn’t until I found “Hurricane” that I realized what I had been missing my whole life. “Hurricane” is one of those songs that you check how much time is left and pray that it’s at least 6 more minutes (which is great because the song is 8 minutes long), that you wish you’d lost your virginity to, that you can’t listen to enough. I know consider myself an avid fan of Bob Dylan and now have even learned to associate the memories of my dad singing “Memphis Blues” with happy times with my full family.

What a babe