Braggin’
Some very strong projects this year in both the Style course and Computers & Writing:
- Nascent standup comedian Ryan Budds created a site to promote himself, nicely integrating Flickr, Google Calendar, YouTube, and traditional web pages.
- Lora Carmichael wrote a conference presentation which provides methods for teaching writing style to high school students, asserting that it can help them perform better on standardized tests;
- Though they worked separately, Annette Glotfelty and Kay Hamada tackled style and translation. Annette critiqued translators who understand style solely as stylistic devices–or fail to address it at all. For Kay, translations of the work of Japanese writer Haruki Murakami show that ethnocentric perspectives are often reinscribed through stylistic decisions. (That summary doesn’t do Kay’s essay justice; it’s superb.)
- Katie MacLennan created a style manual which was also an argument for school uniforms (not the traditional Catholic school model, but a much more sensible contemporary implementation);
- Nan Norcross documented the visual and imagistic elements of Eudora Welty’s style, showing the strong connections between her photographic work and her writing;
- Another take on photography: Katherine Schutte documented her photographic style, deftly including how-to content;
- Using brief self-help books (think supermarket check-out stand) as a relay, Erin Ann Sullivan wrote an very interesting lifestyle manual focusing on contentment;
- Joe Weinberg adapted Jakob Nielsen’s discount usability testing to improve peer response by simplifying methodology, increasing frequency, and introducing other elements of usability testing into writing.
This isn’t all, by any means. How nice to be in the position to have to pick and choose from the best of the best–for me, this shows that the open end works and is worth it.
