Blog #14: The End

As I sit at my dinner table, laptop illuminated by a single overhead light, the silence broken by the low hum of the refrigerator nearby, and the "Peaceful Piano" playlist on Spotify - and I think about everything I have read and experienced thus far this semester. My whisky on the rocks keeps me company, the cold liquid contrasting with the warmth it brings me. I become pensive, introspective, even melancholy - as only the night can make me. Maybe my late-night drinking and blogging is something not unlike Wyche's "mindless activities that alter brainwaves into a more relaxed, creative state". Maybe you're asking yourself as Hodges does, "Why should I care as a reader?" Because we read to learn, and write to make sense of what we've read. As Fulwiler says, "When we write about anything, we learn it better" - this is me, writing about what I've read, and giving you, the reader, a chance to share in this knowledge. I think on the St. Martins reading and how I highlighted the life out of the idea of "Topic Sentences: Simple Coordinate and Simple Subordinate, and Mixed" in an effort to remind myself to share this idea with my fledgling writers I call students. The ice cubes clink together in the glass as I take another sip, swallow, whatever. While we have learned (through a metric fuckton of drilling) that writing is a process, I am pleased (snarky? possibly) to say that this was a complete free-write with my journal beside me. As Peter Elbow succinctly puts it (and I bastardize) "revision is not present in speech, only in writing". I am a firm believer in revision - and I have learned through the years (especially in college) that the major key in revision is simply the second half of the word: VISION. See it again, in a new way. Take a different stance. Read with the paper. Read against it. Play the "doubting game". Read parallel to some random notion and tie some personal experience to it to make sense of it. If I asked for a peer review of this (I won't), I would ask what you (my Peer) would change. What would you do differently? How can you further organize another person's stream of consciousness writing? As Jeffery notes, "the writers diction helps reveal their voice", so what voice is this? Is this my head leaking through my fingertips? This (also Jeffery) is "natural", not "forced".  This is where it ends, not because I have any less to say or other notes to reference, but because I am at the bottom of the text box, and I hate not having space beneath my typing. I bid thee adieu.