You have twenty seconds to comply.

This was my first online class. I must say I was surprised with the amount of interaction with other students. I have never made a blog before this class. I found myself checking to see if any of my fellow students had commented on my post frequently. I am always curious what other folk think of my assorted ramblings.

I have commented before on how I miss the classroom setting in certain aspects of the essay revision process. With the blog system setup it could easily be implemented into the class. Everyone could submit a rough draft and another student could be assigned to post their assessment of the essay. In the classroom setting I always dreaded looking over another person’s paper because I am a fan of being super critical. Even though I didn’t like doing it I feel it was something that improved my own writing. When I was judging someone else’s work it made my own mistakes more noticeable.

One of the biggest perks of the online setting is time; you have so much time to complete each assignment. As long as you are capable of self-motivating you shouldn’t have any problem completing each assignment. In the classroom setting I was always finding myself twiddling my thumbs when we were given class time to work on certain essays; I much prefer writing alone with music playing than in a classroom surrounded by murmurs, shuffling and assorted noises of humanoids.

Easily my favorite thing about this class was the blog. I found it fun and interesting and I could see myself actually creating one as a hobby.  It made this class seem less about English and more about internet communication. I am taking one other all online course this semester and it was far more removed and more of a list of things to do and date they need to be finished type of course. Needless to say it was boring and seemed like a chore, there was zero interaction with other students. I believe I learned a thing or two from it but I could just as easily learn that way by going to the library. The interactivity of this class opened my eyes to the possibility of what online courses can be. I very much enjoyed it and hope any online only course I take in the future can compare.

Exciting video about interacting with technology!

Literary Daredevil!

Revision? What is that? I turned my essay into the online tutor on Thursday but alas I haven’t got it back yet.  Looks like I will have to stare this bad boy down and hope I didn’t screw up any of the simple little things. I feel pretty good about the essay as it stands. When I turn things in for revision I mostly just want to make sure I haven’t screwed up the MLA formatting or citations.

The best part of revision is I don’t need to check the source materiel anymore. I didn’t have to sift through the pretentious writing of DeLillo because I am busy sifting through the pretentious writing of Cason. I like to go with my original thoughts and opinions while writing. I can go back and check after I am finished and wonder how exactly I thought of something that either didn’t exist or was such a small and nearly unnoticeable part that left a big impact on my thoughts while trying to make sense of a specific theme in a book or essay.

Reading over my essay multiple times causes me to pull paragraphs out and shuffle them around like a carnival shell game. This causes my connecting sentences to not work so I usually have to change those around or create an entirely new one. One thing that I do that I believe helps quite a bit is I skip the outline entirely and when I think I have finished the essay I go back and create an outline while looking at the current lay of the essay. If anything doesn’t fit or is out of place it practically glows on my reverse outline. 

Moloch the terrifying owl god, tells all about reverse outlines! 

#11 It's all in the title.

The book White Noise by Don DeLillo is filled with noise. Background noise is the most important character throughout each chapter. The book begins with humming engines and distant chatter of returning students and ends with blaring horns, the sound of hard plastic wheels on concrete and panicked women from a distant balcony.  All of these sounds are only possibly where there is life. The characters make several mentions to death being an endless stream of noise. The noise throughout is an important reminder to the characters that they are still alive and the world will continue to live without them. If the dialog was removed and only the background noises described in this book remained it would still be easily recognizable by anyone who had read it. The noises are described with more detail and care than any of the environments or physical appearances. Noise is the meaning and the purpose of this writing.

Do you know the definition of "Noise"?