(My scary diary (don’t read alone) (also many boys use diaries it’s normal!!1!))

By Alex Missen

(10/20)

Dear Diary,

I thought Mikey had just wet the top bunk again since there was a big stain I saw from underneath, but no, that was just his blood because he got decapitated. Sleepaway camp is rough, man. I went out to show camp counselor Jackie, who’s really cute for a girl I guess, but when I came back the body and the bloodstains were gone and she looked at me like I was seven (I’m 8 and 3 quarters now) and said it was just a nightmare. I think her boyfriend told her to say that because he’s scared of me stealing her love because I told him one time I smoked one of dad’s cigarettes for a bet and I didn’t even cough once. (I saw him smoke once too but it didn’t smell like tobacco smoke — very strange. Also his eyes were red so he must have been crying like a little clown baby boy lol.) 

(10/28)

Dear Diary,

The old man who runs the fishing lodge is being weird again. He looked right at me and said “the moon is in alignment with the land of the dead; now the seal is released and ‘IT’ is left to wander in search for souls” but seals live in the water so I don’t know what he’s talking about. Also Grant, the kid with the 3DS (I think his parents are poor because I have a Switch hahaha) went canoeing in the lake and some hands came out of the water and pulled him in. If he doesn’t come out of the water soon he’ll probably drown; it’s been 2 hours already. 

(10/31)

Dear Diary,

I took a big fat Juul rip while the counselors took us hiking. Just as I was building up the cloud, the wind suddenly picked up and engulfed everyone for a sold 20 seconds in a blueberry-blast smelling mist. Definitely the proudest moment of my life. Anyways when the cloud lifted, three of the other campers were found impaled across several tree branches several few feet off the ground. I guess “I told you so” would’ve be a good thing to say then since I’ve known some people have been dying here for a while now, but come to think of it I haven’t actually told anyone. Oops. Regardless, the hiking trip ended because a 10% casualty rate before even leaving the parking lot is pretty high. Jackie’s loser bf was crying the whole walk back to the lodges cus I think one of them was his little sister; Jackie hugged him so she probably won’t be leaving him for some time out of pity — a shame. 

Dear Diary,

Same day, and they made us take down the Halloween decorations because “it’s in bad taste” due to the murders. I guess all the spooky skeletons and ghosts lose their appeal in the context of several actual murders having happened in the immediate vicinity. The cops are meant to arrive here by midnight, and until then, we’ve been given orders to corral ourselves in the main dining hall lodge, but the counselors there probably won’t let me bring my Switch (again, “in bad taste”: I suppose they want us to look all sad when the reporters inevitably arrive) so I’m gonna go to the lakefront tonight alone and focus my attention exclusively on my gaming, making sure to ignore any outside sounds or noises that may distract me. See you then. 

Dear Diary,

Ok so the craziest thing just happened to me! I found a plaque on site explaining how this camp was built on the site of a mass burial of ancient shamans, AND an ancient battlefield AND the preferred killing site of a serial killer AND an old Blockbusters that got demolished in 2010 — I guess the land must’ve been cheap. And as I was reading this, a man emerged from the water and told me that he was the dread-spirit of revenge incarnated in corporeal form and that he was here to kill all who treaded on his place of rest. He smelled like the kitchen at Red Lobster, probably because he’d been living underwater for so long, but I didn’t tell him that. I calmly explained that I was just here because my parents caught me dressing our cat in my sister’s skirt and they thought this camp would “straighten me out,” and that I really didn’t want to be here, and the entity nodded understandably. See, people tend to think I’m stupid but I’m probably the first person in history to be on friendly terms with an angered spirit. It asked where all my friends were hiding, and I told it that they weren’t my friends, and so it rephrased the question as where those “foolish mortal children who have not yet known true horror till this night of terror which shall fall upon them — their lives are mine, their souls sundered, their lives brought to ashen ruin” so I said the main dining hall lodge so it could practice it’s stupid poetry somewhere else. (Typical liberals, trying to flex their literature degrees on anyone who will listen.) Anyways, I think my Switch is charged up fully now (it summoned a portable charger and cable out of thin air, so that’s nice) so I’ll see you when it’s bright enough to write again.

(11/1)

Dear Diary,

As it turns out, that entity I spoke to last night must have been the specific evil dark force which caused all those murders after all. I was just willing to give it the benefit of the doubt and assume it was a different one, but I guess no good deed goes unpunished. I say this because everyone died. When people started showing up to the camp they were acting all crazy and emotional and sad, but I grew up in the rough part of DC (Georgetown), where you see dead bodies every single day, so it really didn’t faze me. I suppose the police have no choice now — I’m going home!!! 

Until next time,

Alex Missen

P.S. if anyone finds this, hmu on insta and tell me my diary was good. 

Ethnography Reflection

The Ethnography Note assignments were, I believe, the most interesting out of all of the projects in this class, because they allowed for a semester-long log of all the writing I had done as well as my thoughts and writing habits. I realized that the majority of my writing is either due to my obligations as a writer for The Caravel newspaper or various academic essays or summaries. These assignments are written in largely the same way, in the standard academic format of medium-sized paragraphs and formal language. The other, much smaller portion of writing I do is creative, meant either just for myself or for my Creative Writing class. As the semester went on, I noticed that this writing became increasingly erratic and non-structured; I think of that as a good thing, though I did not make any conscious effort to make it so. As for my writing habits, these remained relatively unchanged; I still like to do such assignments late at night or early in the morning. If one thing has changed, I would say that I now usually take more time to structure the outlines of essays before I actually start writing them. I believe the Ethnography Notes are certainly a “reflective method of exploring, inquiring, and learning,” since their purpose was to provoke thoughts about why I write the way I do.

RWD Reflection

The RWD assignments covered a wide range of articles from a variety of authors, covering themes such as the viability of arguments, the nuances of the English language, and philosophical analyses on the meaning of reality. I had no prior experience or exposure to any of these arguments before taking this class, meaning that I was essentially going in blind. For this reason, I believe that the RWD summary assignments were of great help, as they focused on giving a short 1-2 sentence summary of the article in a predesignated format. In some cases, like as in RWD 2, the format also required examples to back the one-sentence summary, which created a more thorough examination of the entire text. As for their rhetorical purpose, the RWDs are structured to communicate another person’s argument in shortened language; additionally, they allow for self-reflection based on how the reader interprets said argument. This is demonstrated by how students will independently choose to empahsize or omit certain passages of the text depending on how relevant they believe it to be to the overall thesis. The RWDs also allow for readers to question the validity of the evidence the author of the original text used to support their argument.

Reading Summary Reflection

These Reading Summaries, in my opinion, served mainly as an auxiliary to the RWDs, in that, whereas the RWDs focused mainly on extracting the key point from the assigned reading, the Reading Summaries were meant to rephrase the main argument and the evidence the author used to support it. In this way, after analyzing a text with both an RWD and a Reading Summary, the reader can have a detailed understanding of what the author meant to say just at a glance. What I found to be most interesting about the Reading Summaries is that they were meant to serve as practice for the essay assignment, so that we could have practice in locating the true intent of the author. Since I wrote my essay on a paper on which I had already written a Reading Summary, this made the process much easier. As for how this project related to the “What Writing Is” graphic, I would say that it most closely relates to the category of the rhetorical strategy of analyzing, designing, and communicating, since the work in question is not my own, but I have to take apart the key components and rearrange them into a comprehensible summary.

Commonplace Reflection

My Commonplace Book entries came from a variety of sources, ranging from philosophical quotes, to songs, photos, paintings, poems, and passages from some of my favorite books. Of course, having chosen them as the topics of my entries, I already had an appreciation for these things from when I first ran into them, but I never did any thinking past the point of believing them to be “deep” or “powerful” — words that ultimately don’t mean anything of substance. In the end, I am not entirely sure why these particular miscellaneous entries triggered a profound neurological reaction that made me remember them, but having to write down the reason why I appreciate them in the first place gave me a few good ideas. These assignments were my favorite, since there is no right or wrong answer; whatever I am thinking at the moment of writing is exactly what I mean to say. Often, I am not entirely sure of what I am going to write until it is already written. As for its connection to the “What Writing Is” graphic, the Commonplace Books certainly fall under the category of reflective exploring, inquiring, and learning, as I had to self-reflect on why particular passages stood out to me. Much of writing is about introspection, particularly on why some things provoke the writer to certain thoughts, and the potential reasons for why that is the case. Even if the writer cannot establish a certain connection, at the very least they can write something new or entertaining.

Ethnography 6

Since I am writing this in the final week of classes, I have quite a few writing assignments to do. This, on top of my usual obligations for The Caravel, means that I have been doing substantially more writing in these past two weeks than what I would normally do. As for feedback, I generally do well on papers in which I take the instructors prompt and view it in relation to a competing argument, which is a tactic I found out in high school that still works. I would say overall that my biggest weakness is still trying to find ways to reach a word or page limit, since I feel I have always been able to describe precisely what I mean to say in nothing more than a medium-sized paragraph.My usual academic writing habits have not changed, since I usually start late at night and finish about an hour past midnight, when I can then move on to tinkering on my creative projects. Despite it being very late, I often feel more focused in my writing than I would at any other time, since I have had time to rest after classes end. It is also much more quiet at night than during the day, and it gives less of a temptation for me to look out the window or otherwise be distracted by what is happening outside. I cannot see any reason why this would change in the future, though in a post-college world I probably will not have any reason to stay up so late.

Ethnography 5

Since my last entry in the Ethnography Notes, I have written a few more Reading Summaries, as well as more articles for The Caravel. Now that I think about it, these two types of assignments are essentially the same thing; I have to condense an outside source into both a summary and interpretation, which a third party can understand. The end result is the same, too, with both being posted online. This, of course, influences the way that I write. Starting off with the Reading Summaries, I am covering material with which I assume the reader is already familiar, so I have to make sure my summary is accurate. With articles for The Caravel, I have to make the same assumption that the reader may be aware of the event I am writing about, but also present my writing in an unbiased manner. As a side note, I also have to make the calculation that anything I may write as part of a news article could resurface much later and perhaps be used against me — an unfortunate truth of the internet age, but I don’t believe I have ever taken any drastic editorial actions because of it. What’s interesting, however, is that I have a tendency to over summarize these writings to the point where, if I had my way, I could probably happily send in a work that is less than 200 words. This goes for most things I write; unless it is on a topic I am very interested in, I often struggle to find enough things to write about to pass the expected word count.

Reading Summary 6

Author Stanley Fish concludes his book Winning Arguments with a chapter titled “Why We Can’t Get Along,” which serves as an overall summary of his main thesis on why human beings so often find themselves in argument. 

Fish begins by interpreting human culture through an argumentative lens. Some of the greatest surviving art of the ancient world was made, as least partially, to serve as propaganda: which is, in other words, an argument in favor of the local king or kingdom. As an example, Fish uses the example of the Egyptian hieroglyphs to show how visual language was used to make an argument — in this case for the divinity of the Pharaoh — even in an age of mass illiteracy. As a secondary, more modern, example, Fish refers to a political cartoon which makes the case for ending the British policy of appeasing the Nazis; that would be a difficult argument to make in the political climate of the age, but the artist did so by comparing supporters of appeasement as incompentent fools that would bring the country to ruin. Fish goes on to state that it is not just everything we see that has some sort of connection to an argument: everything we do is also reflective of our own personal beliefs. Even something so simple as the clothes one chooses to wear reveals what the wearer believes to be socially acceptable to be shown in public. 

Efforts to end arguments, the supporters of which Fish categorizes proponents of enlightenment liberalism, who wish to create a society in which all can consent to the same truths, and adherents of religion, who wish to create a world where all follow the same rules, as mandated by the same deity. What both groups fail to consider, then, is that argument is more than two or more camps debating each other; arguing is a deeply personal connection that is a consequence of human individuality, which no larger organization can stifle.

Reading Summary 5

In chapter two of Winning Arguments, titled “Political Arguments,” author Stanley Fish goes in depth on the state of modern politics, namely, why political discourse is often extremely polarizing. 

The first reason Fish accredits for our divisive politics is the ever presence of spin agents: that is to say, orators who attempt to make their arguments stick by presenting the world in such a way that their agenda makes sense. He clarifies that, although the term may hold negative connotations, there is no alternative: “the discourses that are available are all spun, and, what is worse, there is no neutral space from the vantage point of which the varieties of spin can be inventoried and assessed” (“Political Arguments”). Whether this information comes from a friend or a newscaster, the opinions and agenda of the speaker will always influence the information they reveal and how they reveal it. This has the result of leading listeners to form their political identity based on from whom they receive their information. 

A second reason is that political arguments have been condensed into flashy talking points to grab and hold the reader’s attention. Talking points are short phrases which lack any substantive merit in their ability to convince an opponent, but sound objectively good. In Fish’s words, they exist to “score points; you wield them like weapons; you say, “Take that,” to which the other guy says, “No, you take that” (Political Arguments). The problem with talking points is that they can only convince people who are already supporters of the argument that they are in the right; in effect, this leads to people who become adamant in the support of a spin agent’s argument, and less likely to consider alternate opinions. 

Fish warns of growing intolerance in the political world, as these tactics, which have been around as long as the public has been involved in politics, will only become more useful as social media and instant news becomes increasingly widespread. 

Ethnography 4

Since my last entry in the Ethnography Notes, I have jotted down a few more notes in my log; I’ve started to make it a daily process. The notes I have now are far different from the ones I had previously in that, instead of just writing down the things I did on any given day and events in the wider world, I have also begun creating prompts for creative writing in them. Surprisingly, I have not had any new essays in the time since the last entry; those assignments have been replaced with shorter paragraph-writing work and the like. This means that, proportionally speaking, I have been doing more creative writing than writing for academic purposes. As I mentioned before, I tend to write very early in the morning, around 1 or 2AM, since at that point I am too tired to self-censor my ideas. I worry quite a bit about self-censorship, not just for myself but for others, too. The nature of writing for a class means that there are automatically some themes I cannot write about, whether due to being socially taboo or due to a lack of knowledge on my part to put anything new and interesting out there. Of course, there are also time constraints which put pressure on all the writing I do, regardless of context. Generally speaking, there’s only a limited amount of time on any day in which I feel comfortable doing work, so I have to maintain a steady balance or reap the consequences.

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