Weekly Blogpost 2

The Web 2.0 video presents the idea that in this day and age digital text and writing are the most advanced ways for an author to express themselves. Digital authorship is able to employ so many different strategies and mediums in order to get the author's point across whether it's visually in the advertisements you see on the sidebar or audibly with the music that your blog, website, or video has playing in the background. In these modern times, authors must be able to utilize multiple strategies within their media in order to grab the reader's attention and to make their information known.

One of the more difficult things an author in the digital age must concern themselves with is their audience. With modern technology and a personal computer (or Mac, woot) in nearly every home across America, anyone can stumble upon your post from a search engine or by chance. For this reason, digital authors must be aware of this fact and therefore aim to impress a wider variety as their audience.

Yet, literature has not only been affected from the author's point of view now that machines are the way to go as far as a vessel for getting your voice heard. As readers, we must be careful for what we take as fact and what we recognize as bias or slander from an uninformed author. For example, there's much of a debate as to whether Wikipedia is a credible source of information and whether or not articles found on the website can be deemed valid. To this point, one could argue that this almost presents a test to author's and reader's alike. A challenge, from the instant-gratification generation, to communicate information, stories, and tales alike, online, without detracting from the base and core values from what classic literature gave all of us.

Weekly Blogpost 1

"Arguments over grammar and style are often as fierce as those over IBM versus Mac, and as fruitless as Coke versus Pepsi and boxers versus briefs." -- Jack Lynch

Writing is an art form, and as such is an expression of one’s self whose style and flow are to be critiqued only in your own mind. There will always be others that don’t agree with how or what you write about, but the key is not to let that discourage you from continuing to create. Authors, intellectuals, and commoners alike can debate for ages over what style is best and best suited per scenario but ultimately it comes down to personal preferences. This quote resonated for me because I in fact despised English courses in high school because of my teacher my sophomore year in which I composed a narrative that because my teacher didn’t enjoy how I used dialogue and I received a C+ for a piece that I felt was some of my best writing. Ever since then I’ve felt like all English teachers have far too much control over grading due to the fact that it’s so subjective.

This quote also speaks to me about peer editing and revising one's pieces of literature. All too often, a peer edit results in a brief skim through that lives the author with little to address than a few punctuation errors and an improper use of first person viewpoint. While many grammatical errors can take away from the author's purpose and the points he or she is making, a piece of writing doesn't really grow or develop into something great unless an editor digs deeper than the ascetics of a work. Disputes over grammar are, in all actuality, pointless and an utter waste of time for an author to concern themselves over especially if they are dealing with a time constraint. Jack Lynch speaks to all authors, aspiring or well-established, when in this quote that resonates that the message of the words on the page are vastly more important than the form they were written in or whether a misspelling or two occurred along the way.