Weeks 1 & 2
The first two weeks of Writing 39B have been very fun, and full of information. I am excited about our theme this quarter I usually don't go out of my way to see horror films or read horror stories but I am excited to widen my horizons and be spooked. So far we have done a few exercises, and discussed what Rhetoric is and how we will be wielding it to analyze the works of others and write on our own. Before these two weeks I never knew what rhetoric even was, I was always afraid of it when I heard the word, it sounds like something terrible to me, but so far it's not so bad. I am scared about overthrowing the format of the "five paragraph essay" that I have spent my entire educational career learning; but overall I am happy that there will be less strictness when it comes to how many ideas we are able to conquer within one essay. Instead of only using three main points to prove a larger point we can now write as many paragraphs as we feel necessary.
When Professor Greg McClure said that anyone who told us to not write "I" in our essays was wrong and deserved a slap across the face, I thought to myself, "well I guess I have a lot of slapping to do." I thoroughly enjoyed looking over the two sentence horror stories that was my favorite part of the two weeks. I enjoyed working with my group "Gruesome Girls" , I think we really work together well and I hope that we don't change groups every week or something like that. I really liked the story written by Mary Gaitskill The Other Place I thought it was a good introduction into horror because it seems like a story that could actually happen in real life. I think the scariest and worst monsters in horror are people. The more believable the story is, the more likely I am to not be able to sleep the night that I hear the story. When there is an art-horror monster like Carroll writes about in The Nature of Horror I don't feel so intimidated by it because I know that art-horror monsters don't exist in real life, but in Gaitskill's story, the monster is a human; it is very eerie to think about how, at any time someone can be plotting your death or something evil against you in their own mind and you would never know. Overall, the first two weeks of class so far have been a success.