The Return of the Blog

Well as a new school year starts at Coe College I return to this blog. I found this to be a very rewarding and interesting method for sharing writing news and interesting stories about various publications. I intend to begin being more diligent about bringing out more postings about more topics so that more people want to come and see this blog! I will also try and keep an eye out for events here in Cedar Rapids and the surrounding areas with regards to writing and remember to remind you whenever a notable author is visiting the college! I must also pay a great deal of thanks to the Coe College Rhetoric Department, located on campus in the Struve Communications Center, for giving me this opportunity and hopefully I will be able to convince some of you to take up a rhetoric minor or maybe even major! Either way this is only the beginning and there will be more to come!
Sincerely,
The Blog Master

Outlining in Reverse By AARON HAMBURGER

I found this to be an extremely interesting article posted to the New York Times. Aaron Hamburger is a professional who writes stories for a living and in this article he discusses how he believes writing works best for him. When he writes a story he just writes it. No outline. However, once he has finished the writing he goes back and outlines the piece afterwards. In this way he avoids human nature assuming that his writing is perfect in the moment. Hamburger is really just reviewing his own work and is attempting to create a credible outline to describe his story. In this way the parts that are too over dramatic or left undeveloped become more obvious because he already knows where the story will go from there. While I cannot and will not claim to find the "best" way to write, I will say that this seems like a very good idea to me. By using this train of thought the writer assumes that there will be corrections before they finish the piece and can then develop the story better since they know what they want to develop. If you would care to read the article yourself I've embedded the link in the title.

I'm writing a book. I've got the page numbers done.
Steven Wright

I thought that this quote would be appropriate. Whenever a writer endeavors to write a larger work like a book or a magazine/newspaper article they have to start somewhere. Think about that the next time you begin to write an epic poem in four parts. The only part that is even close to the same in all literature is that they start on page 1. If you want to be even more rebellious you could start your book on roman numerals. Why not? The only thing that you can be sure of when you write a book is that it will start. Even then who is to say what it will contain but you. So Write down the first page number and start writing that epic poem. Who knows? If people are still around 200 year from now they may hold your works in the same reverence that we hold Homer's.

Practice Makes Perfect

It sometimes comes as a shock to people in this generation that things that are worth attainign take some effort. Therefore, this post is to encourage you to continue working on your writing and to make the extra effort so that if you do not get the product you want this time maybe you will next time. I remember watching Chitty Chitty Bang Bang as a child and thinking that the scientist roses of success song to be hilarious. These days it makes a lot more sense. "From the ashes of Disaster grow the roses of success." I think that this really applies to our modern writing techniques and is a large part of the ideas of the writing center. The First draft should never be the final draft, any paper can be improved unless you are perfect, which I seriously doubt. So the next time that you write a paper and immediately plan on turning it in, reconsider. Your paper could be better if you put another rewrite or two into the paper.

Theories on Note Taking.

This is an interesting article published in the NY Times about a recent conference that took place at Harvard. The conference, called "Take Note," is all about the origins and theories of note taking. One of the more interesting comments, in my opinion, was “But I distrusted the students who took lots of notes as much as the students who didn’t take any.” Peter Burke added, “If you take down everything, it becomes a disease." As compared to how most people say that more is always better when it comes to notes. However Professor Burke professes to believe that the more time you spend taking notes the less time you spend paying attention to the lecture or lesson. This is a very interesting article and provided me with plenty of Food for Thought.

EXTRA! EXTRA! Read all about it! Penguin Book group finalizes Merger with Random House.

Apparently a couple of the Titans in publishing companies are joining up and will be sharing expenses and splitting the profits 47% -53% in favor of Random House owners. The new publishing company will be called Penguin Random House. Personally, I think Random Penguin House is more catchy and could have a macaroni penguin wearing a silly hat as the logo but whatever their PR thinks will work. Oh well. You can read more about it in the Guardian Newspaper here. By the way, according to the Guardian the combined income of the two last year was approximately 2.5 billion Euros, or the equivalent of $4,068,475,600.00 us dollars according to Google's currency converter.

The official blog of the Coe College Rhetoric Department is now created. This day will be forever commemorated by this post seeing as nothing ever goes away once it is on the internet. Long Live the Blog! Look to this blog for all of your rhetorical needs. Even if this blog is rhetorical, I intend to see some comments and such eventually (just a hint rhetorical has multiple meanings). We trust many more posts more interesting and informative will follow.