Self-Absorbed Reflection

It is the end of the semester. A time for thinking, reflecting, and receiving final grades. With those final grades, theoretically at least, there comes the final knowledge of how well you did. For the ninja, the information thus received is pretty good—in addition to sneaking and prowling skills, ninjas tend to be very brainy creatures, though we keep that information classified so governments and the like don't continually pester us. A grade, though, is just a number, so I would like to explore my writing over the semester, and see how well it reflected me and my views. --I did mention in the title that this would be self-absorbed……

I always write to an audience—writing is meant to be read, and I have never written with the idea that the product would be "for my eyes only." As a child, I was obsessed with my own mortality (why yes, depression does run in my family—both sides ^_^), and a favorite genre of mine was always the real or imagined diaries of historic people, like the Royal Diaries series (a fairly enormous series imagining the daily lives of various princesses from history) or the more poignant Diary of Anne Frank—so it never occurred to me even in writing my diary that it wouldn't eventually be read. To put it in more technical terms, my ethos is always on my mind—and always being edited, too.

Ethos, for reference, is the sense that the reader receives from the writing of who the author is—whether, for instance, the author is someone whom, as a reader, I would trust to give me the facts impartially, to be fair to the opposition, to have carefully considered the implications of both sides. The Wiki article on ethos (the relevant section is titled Rhetoric) points out that ethos is something which exists in the mind of the audience, which I found particularly interesting—I as an author can influence my ethos, but not entirely control it. There's a certain amount of indeterminacy (a term used in both music and quantum physics), then, involved in how authors present themselves to the world. Perhaps that's why I spend so much time and effort in my writing on it—it's the impossible project, in a way.

Another difficulty with manipulating ethos is that everything affects it—from grammar and spelling to content and presentation. One of my favorite methods for establishing rapport (and thus trying to get the audience sympathetic to my ethos-jiggering) is humor, which I'm sure comes as a great shock to my faithful readers—so, for instance, the title of my second major paper this semester was The Course of New Technology, a sly (possibly to the point of invisibility, but I know it's there) reference to the well-known quote, "The course of true love never did run smooth" (A Midsummer Night's Dream, William Shakespeare). It actually works on two levels, considering that I argue in that paper that while there are hiccups with these revolutionary technologies now, things will eventually work out.

Considering that I am so ethos-obsessed, and that everything affects one's ethos, it may not come as a shock to you that I approached our last big project of the semester—a group project—with some trepidation. Bad enough that I can only influence my audience—now even the project has areas of influence-only! (I am not nearly as much of a control freak as this makes me sound, believe me—I'm just very attached to my 4.0.) The experience wasn't horrible at all, though—everyone contributed something valuable, and the whole project is interesting, and, I think, adds up to more than the sum of its parts. What more can you ask from a group project?