Here is a very rough draft of the essay part of my midterm project. Please critque it as much as possible. There are still a few part that I want to incorporate into the essay but I'm going to need the whole chain letter before I completely finish the essay.
Thanks guys!
http://www.sendspace.com/file/ddmerq
3 comments:
Here's the document with my comments
I really like the idea of a chain story for this project. I would like to know however more about what you expected from this project compared to what you got, as far as content goes. For example, did you expect the topic to stay the same or was the focus completely turned around with certain sentances added. Also, if you could include how this story ends it would be interesting. Do people know when the ending is coming? How many different endings did you get? Other than that, the way you summarized your findings was good, that was fun to read, but the first four paragraphs or so seem to be the same to me. They are all explaining what chain stories are. If you took out some of that and replaced it with the questions I asked I think that would help out alot. And by the way, I wouldn't mind seeing the original version of the story and then seeing a revision by you to see how much of a difference there is.
I was really glad to read your second paragraph after having to contribute to the story itself. One thing that really sticks out is that I tried to contribute to the story without understanding some parts of it (more specifically, their motivation). So obviously there is a discontinuity.
Also, one thing I noticed is that having multiple people contribute allows a cumulation of knowledge. For example one writer had some knowledge about Bombay Mart, and I wouldn't have written what he/she did given that I lack experience with that store. So our interpretation of life experiences, not just our interpretation of the story create that different angle of attack.
Some other interesting observations by myself. I notice, like you did, that people write differently online, but I actually think it effects the entire narrative. Like for example I actually think the system of e-mail facilitates the ninja and dinosaur section, whereas snail-mail might feel more serious or dignified.
I think being online, too, causes people to try to stand out more among the walls of text, so we try to have radical/funny ideas. Like for example, if a sentence was mundane, nobody would pay attention to it and online there is already a mass of information, so creativity is necessary to stand out.
And just as well, we learn that funny content stands out since that's the same stuff that gets really popular online. Those are pretty much "memes".
And it's maybe notable that I once even saw a flash video that included pirates that rode on sharks that shot missiles or something like that... Very similar.
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