Stephanie Rhiannon Freel

English 10800
December 10, 2010

Project #3 Reflection

For Project #3, we were required to do a commentary on a current issue or debate to be posted
somewhere on the internet. Though many of the other students chose to create their own blogs for their
commentaries, I decided to do something a little different. Instead of making my own website for my
commentary or trying to join a pre-existing debate/commentary website, I decided to do my project in a
series of posts on Facebook using the “Notes” feature available to all profiles. I made this choice
because, though a blog has more potential to reach more readers than a private Facebook profile does,
in actuality the commentary was more likely to be read on Facebook than its own web page. Not only
did I feel I'd be able to reach more people through Facebook, but posting on a social website as
opposed to my own blog or a more focused group site presented a more unique situation which would
require a different approach than the other two options would.
Deciding to post my commentary to Facebook presented some interesting challenges. First and
foremost is the fact that my only possible audience would be friends and family, since I have a private
Facebook as I mentioned earlier. Because of this, I had to modify my tone to sound less scholastic and
more conversational—more like how I actually type and speak—while still posing an educated and
effective argument. Trying to balance casual and academic was slightly difficult, especially when trying
to use outside evidence in my arguments. I didn't want to bog the posts down with links, but at the same
time, in-text parenthetical citations would have been rather inappropriate in the context and Facebook
is unfortunately not capable of super-text, so footnotes would have been very difficult if not impossible.
I feel as though my low number of outside support may have weakened my argument, but I couldn't
figure out how to include more. I actually found and looked at several more sources than what I used,
but the ideas presented within those articles really had no place in my commentary as written, and so
their inclusion would have been superfluous. Despite my acknowledgment of this weakness, I am still
uncertain how I would remedy this problem without re-configuring my arguments entirely, which I am
hesitant to do as I feel I had fairly strong arguments. Some celebrity endorsement of my views would
have likely been very effective, but I was unable to find any in the time I had to complete the
commentary. Still, despite these shortcomings, I did include the most important sources: the specific
laws and policies concerned and examples of the effects of these laws on fanworks (AMVs
specifically), including one of my own AMVs that fell prey to these regulations.
Aside from citations, tailoring my writing to my friends on Facebook was odd in several other
ways. Word choice was especially puzzling at times—I naturally speak in an odd mixture of higher-end
vocabulary, common slang, swearing and words made up right on the spot. I knew the made-up words
would almost certainly have to go. However, deciding whether to use curse words or not (and which
ones, if so) was actually more difficult than one might expect simply because in reality, I do tend to
curse a lot, and my friends expect that from me. It ended up a bit easier once I considered the full
situation—I have several family members as friends on Facebook as well, and I avoid cussing around
family. It seems somewhat ironic that Facebook solved one of the writing problems it caused in the first
place. Overall, it felt very strange having to pretend to write like myself, which was exactly what I had
to do to reach my goal of making this assignment sound so natural no one realized it was an assignment
at all. A helpful tactic I discovered in making things sound natural is re-reading what you've written
aloud. Most teachers suggest doing this to catch grammar mistakes and awkward sentence structure,
but it's also a good way to see if you actually sound like yourself. This is also a helpful method to use
when writing dialogue in stories and such (except, of course, you want to sound like your character and
not yourself). I am actually quite pleased with the way the tone and phrasing of the commentary came
out; I would even go so far as to say it is one of the strongest factors in my commentary. I managed to
make my commentary so authentically me that most of the friends I asked were surprised to learn it
was an assignment.
One of the most difficult parts about writing this commentary, however, was trying to achieve
an effective balance of brevity and detail. This is key in any work, of course, but even more so in web-
writing; on the internet, readers are looking to find everything they want to know as quickly as
possible, meaning you have to say as much as you can in as few words as you can. Though I've rarely
had a problem with detail, brevity has never been a strength of mine. I feel as though, in trying to keep
this commentary more short and to-the-point, I left out a lot of points I could have made. However,
even the word count of the trimmed-down final version of my commentary far exceeded the
recommended word limit. I personally believe I have managed to improve upon my ability to state
things explicitly and concisely, but I do know I have a lot of improvement to make in that area still.
Perhaps one reason I have difficulties with stating things more briefly like that is because I tend
towards more creative writing as opposed to scholarly/academic pieces. It is in my nature to be
descriptive, use metaphors, and focus on details because I aim to get across to my reader exactly what I
am thinking. However, a mind is capable of holding far more information at a given time than a single
page on the internet is—I am slowly realizing this, but I doubt I still have fully accepted the message
already.
Despite the challenges involved in writing this commentary for Facebook, I don't think I would
have posted it elsewhere first if given the choice. It was a difficult piece to write properly, but it was
actually quite fun to compose. There was something that just felt wonderfully capricious about
pretending to be myself in a different situation than what it actually was—taking an angle on what I
was talking about that was completely authentic and completely bogus at the same time. It reminds me
of Tim O'Brien's “The Things They Carried” and O'Brien's mindset when writing that story: that truth
is not necessarily the facts or what actually happened. It's not as if my entire commentary was a lie. All
of the arguments I forwarded really were my own—all of my opinion in the piece is genuine. However,
the context and some of the details were constructed instead of simply stated (a.k.a. I made them up).
This project helped show me another fun thing about writing: there may be genres and guidelines as to
what you're expected to write, but those are by no means concrete. You can be creative with genres that
aren't meant to be creative. The rules of writing are extremely breakable, and if you need to break them
to make your point, do it. Sort of reminds me of the quote, “Well behaved women rarely make history.”
Different context, different details, I'll admit, but the point is the same: you don't make you work
memorable by writing with a cookie-cutter.