Ally's Final Reflection

 First, I want to highlight how helpful Harris’ book was in providing me with specific writing strategies to use. I particularly like countering and forwarding the most, and I often found myself using them in the composition of my final project. I never knew that I could layout for readers my thought process like that until I read Harris’ book, then saw it utilized in McCulloch’s book. It has honestly made me a better writer. I can not only practice these new strategies but I can also recognize where and how I am utilizing them; a concept I was always a little fuzzy on in the past. 

I also want to take a moment to highlight how helpful the blogs were. It was nice to be able to present cool things I thought about each week in fairly informal media, where others can give their input on it. It was also really cool to be able to use my creative juices in inserting pictures and links that connect to my post for the unit. Though I liked answering the questions on the forums, it did not feel as satisfying as writing a blog post and asking for feedback on a cool idea that you came up with while reading Harris or McCulloch. 

I also want to talk about how cool it was to be examining the internet in the way that we did this semester. Reading McCulloch’s research was eye-opening, and it even made me think about how internet speech has changed even from the time she had written the book in 2019 to recently in 2021. It was fun and fascinating to apply the observations we talked about in class to my own feeds on Twitter and Instagram. 

Remixing Attempt 2

 For those of you who are not already aware, my major project was a multimodal project that took screenshots of tweets from three different artists in the music industry and analyzed the rhetorical moves they used to create personal bonds, or parasocial relationships, with their followers. My project was inspired by McCulloch’s mention of the study that stated Twitter users who tagged people were talking to the individual, meanwhile, those who used hashtags were addressing the entire group. I make the connection in my project that this proposal is a bit different for celebrities; especially in the music industry where their income depends entirely on the interactions of their fans. The three artists I chose to look at were Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, and BTS.

For this version of “remixing,” I will attempt to write small tweets that sum up the overall styles of each of the three artists I analyze in my major project (I also type the tweet in the same format that each artist is fond of using):

Taylor Swift likes formality and organization over intertwining tags and hashtags #BuisnessWoman @taylorswift13

@ladygaga likes to write based on her #mood. Sometimes her message contains either @tags or #hashtags or even both. No matter the message it is more than often long and her fans are mentioned by name: Little Monsters <3<3<3 (red heart emojis)

@BTS_twt write their messages in Korean and share their acc between the 7 members <3<3<3 they almost always use the #Purple heart emojis and call their fandom by name. Some variation of we <3 you ARMY!!!

Ally's Writing Process

 Up until this point, I think my writing process has been pretty consistent and very repetitive. I knew theoretically that the writing process should be flexible and can look different depending on the project that you are working on. However, realistically, I don’t think that theory took place in my actual practices, that is until I took back-to-back writing classes the past two semesters. Before taking writing classes, I would sit down and write the whole project in one go, then turn it in. Sometimes this meant I would sit in front of my computer screen and write for hours with no breaks, and sometimes that meant I would sit there are write for one project, then switch to another one, then switch back and forth until the projects were finished. I would make sure that even though my actual writing was mediocre, I banked on the creativity of the ideas behind my writing. I focused majorly on content rather than how I was presenting that content.

After taking a class focused on tutoring strategies, then followed up with a writing class focused on informal writing and social media, I was asked multiple times to change my writing process. I was asked to create multiple drafts, pay attention to specific strategies I used in presenting my ideas, and to even recognize those rhetorical strategies in the work of my peers. It was definitely a huge adjustment, but I think reading Harris’ book that provided extensive strategies and clear examples of those strategies have really shown me what my options are. Now, I have completely changed the way I view my own writing. I have always taken pride in the pieces I produce, but now I make strategic moves with actual thought behind them. There is not one moment in my work that I haven’t deliberately contemplated on the way I say it or write it down. 

Now I can actually recognize what I am doing with my writing, as well as taking more time to plan it out. I can even see myself deliberating more efficient ways of writing my thoughts on social media as well. It is almost like the fog has cleared from my mind, and I am able to see various texts more clearly. There is actual intent behind the words people publish or post, and it is now more evident to me than ever.

My process explained in meme form:

Final Blog 3: Reflection

 Honestly, for the first week of this class, I was terrified. I'd never churned out writing nearly as fast as the summer semester requires (this was my first summer writing course, and it was a real shock to the system!). I was convinced there was NO way I could keep up on top of work and was honestly considering dropping it (but I didn't want to screw with Dr. H's wages any more than they were already screwed with). But I've found that with a lot of my 400 level classes, I start out feeling like there's no way I can do it (you want me to write 125 word AnBibs??? how, Dr. Nixon, HOW), and by the end, I feel like it's totally normal. 

I say this a lot, but I'm really glad I entered a "proofreading death pact" with Ally, because it kept me in the class and it kept me on time. Having gotten through it, I feel like this class really helped streamline the essay process for me a bit. I feel a lot more confident about my ability to perform under pressure, although my grades would be a lot lower without Ally helping me out all semester. I mentioned this a little elsewhere, but I was certainly less persnickity about my topics (I basically ran with the first idea I had for every paper but the final one), and the fact that I still got decent grades has more a bit more confident in my ideas (and my ability to make a paper out of something I came up with three minutes ago). 

I'm not sure if "GOTTA GO FAST" is the takeaway a professor would hope I'd get from their class, but honestly I think it was probably the most helpful part for me, along with a few specific sections of Harris's book (which I'll be using while reworking my Greek Mythology paper for potential publication, believe me!). Sometimes you gotta just have an external force holding a metaphorical gun to your head in the form of deadlines to really learn what you're capable of. 

Final Blog 2: Meta-Tumblring

 [Note: I absolutely did post this to Tumblr, as you can tell by my, uh, language usage. Please don't stalk me lol. This is just a crosspost of the exact same thing I typed, because screenshots were being a pain.]

Hey everyone! My final project for my English class requires me to ~remix~ and ~reformat~ my final paper, and since my final paper was on Tumblr, I’m fuckin’ making it a Tumblr post. You can tell it’s a Tumblr post bc I swore in the introduction. 

So, the gist of my paper was that Tumblr has a comparatively large disabled and chronically ill/chronic pain community, and because of that, it’s changed a lot of the ways people talk about these things both online and off. I used examples like spoonie culture, pain scales, image descriptions and subtitles, and trigger/content warnings. You guys already know all of this, because you’re on Tumblr, so I thought you’d maybe be more interested in something I found while researching FOR the paper. 

Did you know there’s a massive collection of academic papers about Tumblr? It’s called a tumblr book and it came out last year and it’s a massive 400-page collection of academic studies and papers about Tumblr. It’s really the ONLY sort of thing of its type and it’s a game changer IMO. You can read it online for free here. 

[Image ID: a picture of the front page of a tumblr book: platform and cultures by Allison McCracken, Alexander Cho, Louisa Stein, and Indira Neill Hoch. End ID]

This thing is crazy, I can’t emphasize enough how great it is to see stuff I’ve personally seen happen over the last 12 years (yes I’ve been on Tumblr that long don’t @ me) discussed in academic journals. Published essays! Things I can cite in my papers and research!!! It’s hard to emphasize how great this. And check out some of the articles! 

[Image ID: a page from a tumblr book’s table of contents. It reads:  Section 2. #Privacy and Ethics Chapter 9. Screaming into the Void: Reconceptualizing Privacy, the Personal, and the Public through the Perspectives of Young Tumblr Users by Julian Burton Chapter 10. The Challenges of Doing Qualitative Research on Tumblr: Experience and Advice from Three Scholars of Young People’s Tumblr Use by Akane Kanai, Crystal Abidin, and Matthew Hart Chapter 11. We Are More Than Footnotes: Black Women and Intellectual Theft by Aisha Mahmud Section 3. #NSFW Chapter 12. Walled Gardens, NSFW Niches, and Horizontality: A Conversation about Tumblr Porn with Susanna Paasonen and Noah Tsika Chapter 13. NSFW as an Intervention: The Case of Sexy Selfies on Tumblr by Katrin Tiidenberg Chapter 14. Fandom Surgery by Morgan Fisher Chapter 15. TumPorn Is Dead, Long Live TumPorn! by Shaka McGlotten Section 4. #Fandom Chapter 16. A Roundtable Discussion about the Cultures of Fandom on Tumblr with Flourish Klink, Rukmini Pande, Zina Hutton, and Lori Morimoto Chapter 17. Kitten Thinks of Nothing but Murder All Day: Tumblr Text Post Memes as Fandom Détournement by J. S. A. Lowe Chapter 18. Lesbian One Direction Fans Take Over Tumblr by Jessica Pruett Chapter 19. Ships, Fans, and #beatingthedistance: Queer Intimacy and the New Genre of Interactive Memoir on Tumblr by Annie Galvin. End ID] 

Seriously! Just LOOK at those titles. Given that it can be obtained for free (or bought if you’re feeling spicy), I think it’s definitely worth a romp, even if you only read a few papers that interest you. 

Final Blog 1: Writing About Writing

 As time goes on, I think less and less of my writing process is the actual writing. That goes by pretty quickly these days; it's everything leading up to it and following it that takes all the time. Until I was required to come up with a fresh couple of ideas every few days, I didn't realize exactly how much time I normally took coming up with ideas. If I have a week between learning about a project and it being due, I probably spend five of them thinking up a good idea. Outlining, if I'm lucky. While I enjoyed the challenge of coming up with them fast, I think the quality of my ideas probably suffered from it; by the end I was sort of just rolling with the first semi-good idea I got. 

After so many classes thinking so intensely about and hyperexamining my writing process, I'm glad I haven't gotten self-conscious about it, and I'm glad that so much of what I was already doing... works? I've definitely improved and streamlined my process a lot, and a handful of classes with truly random writing prompts got me pretty good about writing about anything I needed to, but at the end of the day my pattern of "brainstorm a lot, have idea, outline briefly if it's longer than five pages, FLY THROUGH WRITING IT ALL IN TWO HOURS, spend two days revising" seems to be working out for me. While it's good to be aware of our writing process, honestly, if we find something that works for us, we should probably just stick with it. If it ain't broke, and all that. 

In particular, this class and its focus on internet language made me a bit less self-conscious about the state of my outlines which is... well. I tend to use emojis and speak very casually and in shorthand. It's a lot nicer to think of it as an "informal dialect" outline, haha. I'm surprised by how many other people seem to do something similar, and it helped me sort of come to terms with the fact that an outline doesn't have to be a super formal thing, which I always thought it did because teachers made you turn them in. I think I'm more likely to write extremely brief outlines because of that, often even jotting them down on sticky notes or something similar, just to keep my thoughts going in order while I write. 

Pictured: an actual screenshot of my actual outline for my greek mythology final paper last semester. I'm just like this, full time.

The Nature of Abstraction

I found myself really drawn to Chayka’s description of the necessity and value of the images and video found on TikTok, and how many of them are abstracts of our lives. They’re snippets of parts of our day or night, our travels and even mirrors of our thoughts, but through the images, we can imagine a life. Or even better, we can imagine living that life. 

I thought about the many photos I've taken over the years and how some of my favorite images are the abstract ones, the ones that seem to be, as Chayka mentioned, missing context. But it's that abstract nature that tells a piece of story within a story, not because it's unfinished, but because through their "incompleteness," they seem full of meaning. And in turn, fully complete. Each in their own way, and separately.  

 Okay, that last one's just for fun. But you get what I'm saying 😉

Work Cited: Chayka, Kyle. "TikTok and the Vibes Revival." The New Yorker, 26 Apr. 2021, pp. 1-5.