July 2, 2012

July 2, 2012

     I just realized that most of what I’ve been writing this summer semester says nothing! I just read “How to Say Nothing in 500 Words,” and as I was reading Paul Roberts example of a “nothing” description of football all I could think about was that it sounded like something I would write. I honestly don’t know whether to laugh or cry! I thought I could take offense to this or I could try to learn from his article. I do think some of his advice will stick with me and hopefully help me with my writing. I’m going to try to not pick the obvious choices when discussing a certain topic. Also I found out when I write I tend to be timid and I need to just say what I want to say. Roberts says, “Call a fool a fool.” Stop using, “in my opinion” type phrases that turns writing into vague pieces of text.  Roberts speaks about using colorful words, which is something I struggle with. I use the thesaurus a lot to mix up my vocabulary. I am not sure if that’s a good resource, but if I didn’t use it I’d be saying the same thing constantly. I am a pro at colorless words though, which are words that add no description at all. I am now laughing, because I keep looking as the bottom of this page to check the word count and I’m now thinking about when Roberts says, "The student toiling away at this weekly English theme is too often tormented by a figure: five hundred words.” This is so spot-on! As much as I want my writing to be great, I am a student after all. I can’t help but want to finish this at three hundred words!