Kiernan DiMeglio's ENWR Portfolio One

Here is a link for my draft meme essay for my ENWR class! I hope you guys like it, please give me comments! Final coming soon!

It iz hard to compreehend a world in which ther iz not a series of defined spellings for the wordes in the English langwege. To continue the joke on any longer would be unnecessary, you get the point. Anyway, I do in fact find it hard to comprehend a world in which there is not a series of defined spellings for words. Whenever I spot a spelling mistake today, I typically cringe or squirm a little bit in my seat. I have grown up learning the right way to spell, fascinated by the annual spelling bees. What's the purpose of words being spelled correctly though? I have read the studies which say that the only thing that matters is the sound of a word, not the actual spelling or order of the bulk of the letters. For example: msot peploe can raed tihs mesgsae wthiuot hvaing to tihnk too mcuh aobut it. Additionally, living in a world of constant spell check, I begin to wonder the question more and more. The opposite of us, "Cawdrey lived in a time of information poverty," (52) and was therefore on a constant quest to answer questions for himself and lay the groundwork for future definitions of correctness with his book A Table Alphabeticall. As humans begin to progress further and further into an assumed state of 'perfection,' I believe it gets increasingly important to remember our personal roots as people before answering the question of why we need uniform correctness.

As a young kid I spent arguably too many hours peering into the pages of a dictionary. However, this did not necessarily mean I was good at spelling, nor that I had 'goodly grammar' either. Conversely, I was horrible at it. Around this time I was in second grade, the grade in which I met my worst enemy - the spelling test. A teacher would yell out a word, and instantly I would have to revolutionize my long-held thought process of just speaking and drawing to a system of ordered writing that made sense. It took me a while to grasp how to simply spell the words, but until now I had never conceptualized just how greatly the world has been changed by the establishment of a dictionary. As I began to further my studies of the dictionary, I embarked on a similar (though a lot less pioneer-like) path to that of Robert Cawdrey writing a dictionary. "Meaning comes into the dictionary in its definitions, of course," (59) and that was exactly how I was starting to interpret the language. I was surrounded with words, and intelligent people speaking what I knew to be proper English. However, it had not meant anything to me until I actually began to grasp all of the denotations behind what it was that they were saying. As I saw a more defined, uniform version of the English language, I became more in-tune with the world around me. Though Cawdrey was not much of a prominent historical figure, nobody knowing anything about his life other than his magnum opus book, Cawdrey shed a light on the English language that persists even through today (63).

Approximately four hundred years after Cawdrey drafted a preliminary dictionary, John Simpson, "the editor of a grander book of words, the Oxford English Dictionary," (55) came on to the scene. Everyone knows what the Oxford English Dictionary and its significance, but I would wager that few know the roots that John Simpson had in Robert Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall. As I grew older, and was understandably not as interested in reading the dictionary "for fun," I got more interested in using bigger words in conversation, writing, and overall trying to make myself sound more like a pretentious intellectual than I truly ever was - Mom, I swear it was simply a phase. I entered myself in the local spelling bees, I did the library literary submission contests, and I was a total bookworm for a while. As I became consumed by the stringing of words and clever synonyms, I began to develop a new mastery of the English language as I procured a mental dictionary pages longer than it had ever been before. Reading, listening, indexing, all things that I did to better my vocabulary and educate myself in the meaning and spelling of words. In this sense, I was very similar in actions to both Cawdrey and Simpson, pioneering my very own dictionary, always wanting to be better at English.

A few years ago I spontaneously decided to join the forensics team. For those of you who don't know, forensics is an oratory challenge (I know, my apologies if you had an excited moment thinking about Criminal Minds episodes) that focuses on presentation of a literally work or self-drafted presentation before a panel of judges. Categories and facets of forensics ranged from humorous interpretations of plays, to improvisational speaking, to my category: original oratory, a category that requires you to present an original ten minute speech before judges. I dove into a world full of pretentious speakers and writers that have a quality that Helen Sword refers to as a "compulsive proclivity for discursive obscurantism and circumambulatory diction," (3) in her book Stylish Academic Writing. Helen Sword uses the book as a means to attack the conventional understanding that educational or academic writing for those 'cultured' in the field must be verbose, dull, and full of words that absolutely nobody else has heard of. However, when authors obey these sorts of conventions the reader is left with a work that creates immense barriers to entering into an altogether world via paper, and an aura of pretentiousness runs the world of anti-interdisciplinary academia with attempts to learn being "thwarted by gratuitous educational jargon an serpentine syntax" (5). In the world of forensics, watching my teammates preform speeches on theoretical and distant topics, I struggled to feel as if I could properly do forensics, disconnected from any of the things that they found so important, or tragic. But hey, I took the road less traveled by in a wood where about 92 odd roads diverged and greatly enjoyed doing so.

I used to hate it when teachers told me that I should "make projects my own" or use my own "artistic liberties" on completing assignments. I have always been the kid to enjoy a good ol' fashion rubric that spells out exactly what I need to do to get my desired grade. Though papers written throughout my middle and high school years are a far shot off from academic writing, there are some serious parallels between my feelings on writing and those of the rest of the world. Sword quotes that academic writing has a strict formula that "demands dreariness" (7), and that "today's professors are the people "nobody wanted to dance with in high school" (7). Rarely does it seem that we are to be expressive and individualistic with our writing, despite the fact that we should be, Sword argues. And until I joined forensics, I had also fallen into the trap of wanting to fit the mold with my work, never bold enough to branch out and try something new. Like Sword conducted a survey of all different forms of academic writing and prose, I similarly conducted a survey of forensics. Predictably, there is not one way to do original oratory. Some people start off bold. Some people start of in whispers, tears, etc. Anything to try to gain an audience rapidly from the beginning. Speeches and presentations were brilliantly choreographed, grammatically sound, and filled with an obvious level of knowledge about the topic. The speakers made gestures to be engaging, used clever intonations to their words and phrases, all to try to maintain an attentive audience. However, the speeches were all theoretical and based on long-winded (though well-justified) hypotheses that I simply couldn't relate to.

I know I said I took a different road when I joined forensics. That was a half-truth. Not the first year. The first year I was a groupie and followed the path of stupid intellectual topics and wrote about the lex lacuna of cybersecurity legislation in relation to international computer piracy. Cool, yes. But has it ever actually effected you? Less than likely. Did I write a good speech? Yes. Was it properly emphasized? Yes. Did I meaningfully help or change people as a result of my speech? Hell no - I didn't care that much either. After presenting at various levels, I continuously got comments such as "Great word choice!" or "Wonderful diction." However, I never got any actual comments about the message behind my speech. Months later, after long reflection I realized that I was missing many of the characteristics that Sword directly references as 'good writing' in Stylish Academic Writing, but above all I realized I needed to write with "passion, with courage, with craft, and with style" (11). How to go about learning to do that? I did what I do best - I read a WikiHow.

Little does the common man know about the origin of the manuscript, or of written language altogether. In The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood,  James Gleick provides the reader with just that. Starting with Claude Shannon's founding of the electronic communication age, then jumping back to the ancient illiterate civilizations, Gleick provides the reader with a fundamental understanding of how writing has progressed throughout the ages. Through the history of tribal communication and contemporary philosophical thought, writing is essential to our lives, influencing the ways that we go about life as a whole — a storyboard filled with words that are "stable and immobile" (47).

The modern first-world life has a relatively cookie-cutter flow. First, a child is born to a mother and father in a hospital with no sense of communication, no real defined sense of mathematical principles, and a general sense of blissful ignorance. Throughout the first few weeks of its life, a baby wails and cries, each of these sounds trying to convey one of many messages pertaining to the things that he or she is innately feeling. Whether it be hunger, thirst, or a need to relieve themselves, babies make their needs known. Though these needs may always be decipherable, the principle of communication behind them is fascinating. When Gleick writes about native African tribes used drums to convey their messages over miles of ground to nearby tribes, "the drums metamorphosed speech" (22). To someone unfamiliar with the drum language, all you could hear was a series of beats. Similarly, to someone unfamiliar with the language of babies, all you can hear in obnoxious screams or giggles that signal attention. However, the babies like the drummers "were not signaling but talking: they spoke a special adapted language" (22). This form of language, based on tonality, expression, and inflection, is the first stage of language development among modern people and is the first dive into a world of standard, definite means of communication.

Progressing past the years of infancy, we approach the 'terrible twos' and 'terrible-er threes' where kids begin to develop even more cognitive power, and are inundated with the world of numbers and letters. By this time in their lives, toddlers are likely watching cartoons or listening to stories that echo the alphabet and basic word structure. They can communicate ideas through expression and actions, but are limited greatly in terms of their word choice. In The  Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood , Gleick tells us that as words and vocabularies began to evolve, Plato warned that the "multitude cannot accept the idea of beauty in itself rather than many beautiful things... instead of the many specific things" (36). In this passage Plato is discussing how forcing words upon a people is a inhibiting, and that it limits their ability to express themselves when all they have previously known in oral lifestyles. The life of a young kid is strikingly comparable. Though society teaches that the more words and phrases one can tactfully is a measure of intelligence, children are unable to express the full ideas they have in their heads through the limited words they know as they begin to learn the language. This is similar to the problems people face when trying to learn a new additional language. Learners revert to thinking in their original language, unable to fully process ideas in the new system they are researching. However, as soon as kids begin to "purify the medium: eliminate ambiguous words and wooly syntax" (41), they begin to wield the language with a new degree of power that starts to define a stable means of communication uniform between themselves and others.