I sometimes wondered to myself while reading Berhnadt's article if he was defeating his own purpose by writing in the style that he was critiquing. He enjoyed analyzing a sample from The Great Lake Notebook, detatching how the writing style was constructed in a way to please both the members of the community invested in these issues and those who are not. Yet he writes in a way that appears very detatched from what seems to be realistic writing in order to appease a certain audience. I wonder if there was a certain article he wrote that analyzed and critiqued his own writing for aritcles such as this. Although if he did write critiquing his own writing, would he write in the same style? Maybe someone else, someone who didn't care about audience and had no alteriror motives of gaining an audience to read his work and simply try to understand how and why he wrote the way he did while critiquing that style of writing.
The Wysoki article is more of what the Berhnadt article should have been. He is critical of his own writing and his own attempts to discern the composition around an article in the New Yorker feels much more realisitic than Berhandt's article. There just appeared to be too much hipocrasy and uneasiness around the Berhandt article, who was simply writing about writing without giving us a full understanding about how he feels about his own writing.
(Dr. Downs, maybe for our next blog entires you should have us write a blog about our assigned aritcles and then have us write about how we write them.
Just a thought. =). )
I felt exactly the same way. The whole time i was reading bernhardt, i was just like...why aren't you trying to write in the stylized form you are talking about. I kinda felt like he was defeating his purpose in writing. I thought Wysocki, on the other hand, did a great job with her article in using different style and design formats. I think it would have been a lot better if Bernhardt had written his in this way instead of just pasting an example of a good stylized piece in his essay.
ReplyDeleteI am glad others in the class felt the same way about the articles. It was almost difficult to read Bernhardt and get anything out of it because the whole time i was annoyed by his hypocrisy. Wysocki did impeccably better, he utilized the aspects he talked about made his points clear and understandable...well for the most part.
ReplyDeleteI, too, wondered why his writing wasn't more exempary of his point. But Doug answered that in class today, written ages ago, before bullet buttons. I, too, presumed that Wysocki was a man,because of the focus on that body part, but I got a hint later on in the article because of her tone. So, regarding what we write about, in relation to how we write about it, is it possible that sometimes it's in the realm of thought, and we haven't yet figured out how to integrate it into form?
ReplyDeleteSpencer, I like your suggestion about writing about our writings--but then, ya know, I would. And I'm starting to wonder if Berhardt wrote like he did just to get his point across--if so, it worked well! ;-)
ReplyDelete