Day 29: (Metaphorically) Out to Dinner with Derrida

Thought of the day: There is great irony in the fact that I feel I have least to offer in the way of amusing others when I'm at my most thoughtful, productive time of the semester. (This is when I've moved past the "slightly crazy but in an amusing stage" into the "truly focused on nothing but the writing I have to do" stage. I have not quite yet reached this latter stage this term, but feel it approaching.)

This doesn't mean that I have nothing to offer, I think, to others, during these times--just that such a large proportion of my attention is funneled into articulating some of what I'm learning in written form before I can articulate it orally to others once again.

It's interesting, I think, that I still catch myself viewing this attention to communicating in written form as a lesser form of communication than conversation with others, at moments like these.

Then again, it's more that when I'm busy being my most productive/creative, that creativity isn't always balanced between the different parts of my life, but put into primarily one kind of outlet. The same problem happens in a different form when all of my time is spent communicating face-to-face and I have no opportunity for written communication.

And these papers I'm writing ARE conversations: they're conversations with everything I've been reading. The fact that I feel myself narrowing in on the items I'm responding to, in order to prepare my written responses, is a reduction of ambient noise much like focusing in on what one's dinner companion is saying rather than listening to what's going on at the table next to yours at the restaurant (while in another circumstance you and your dinner companion might decide to go over and join in).

So yeah, I'm not trying to ignore all of you other bloggers out there at the next table right now by not mentioning you or linking to you in my posts. It's just that I'm mostly paying attention to the scholarly dinner companions whose words I've been reading, and figuring out how to respond to what they've been telling me for several months (in term paper form)....

The Power of Syntax...

As a girl who spent a good chunk of my summer transcribing, I noticed something reading a CNN blog article just now.

See, ever since I had the experience of transcribing speech just as it's been said, I've realized how much we, on a daily basis, smooth out what others say in our heads. If you've been transcribing for awhile, you begin to notice that the inevitable fillers in newscaster's talk gets left out of the closed-captioning, for instance.

However, in the world of public speaking, there are expectations for a more polished syntax (sans fillers). And with our current president, people started noticing exact syntax. And I find it fascinating that this CNN blog entry, in reporting Governor Palin's exact words and word order, gives us transcript form rather than reporting the gist of what was said rather than smoothing it out, as reporters have so often done in the past.

Question: are our political reporters increasingly moving to the modern fiction model of "show, don't tell"? There is certainly an emphasis lately on non-verbals as well, in the debate coverage...Are these moves natural ones, highlighting the re-ascendancy of oral and visual culture? Or does it take the oral out of context, since we so often correct for the oral internally, emphasizing syntactical moves that look wrong in print (where we're not used to transcript style, as anyone who has tried to go back and re-read their IM conversations could testify) and therefore doing injustice to the person whose words were included? A little bit of both, perhaps?

Inquiring minds want to know...