by Evan Perez

3/3/2023

English 110

The City College of New York

Professor Vicars

Literary Pieces Packet Written Responses 

“What Writing Is” by Stephen King

At first, this piece had me a bit confused and frustrated even. It felt as if the author was constantly going on detailed tangents and I was just sticking around for the ride. However, the author brings everything together with the mention of telepathy and even performs an experiment of some sort with the cage and the rabbit. The conclusion confused me even more as I thought I would have some sort of resolution to the experiment, but after looking over the piece again, I think I understand now. Stephen King mentions telepathy, real telepathy as he says, to be possible and it’s through writing. The author and the reader do not exist in the same space or time, yet the communication from the writing is real. The reader creates their own interpretation of all the scenarios and tangents that the author rambles on about and it becomes real, it’s real communication between two people without speaking.

“Why I Write” by George Orwell

I liked this piece as it appealed to me in a couple of different ways. I think it’s very interesting how the isolation that the author experienced at a young age caused him to create his own little worlds in his head. It’s very apparent in his writing, the way he makes his descriptions vivid and alive. I really enjoyed the poem he wrote about the Spanish War, it reminded me of The Jabberwocky. I also liked how he outlined the different reasons why people write. I remember reading animal farm in 9th grade so it was cool to read a little bit more in Orwell’s style.

“Learning to Read and Write” by Frederick Douglass

I really enjoyed this. It felt like watching one of those jail break-out scenes in movies but in this case, it was with learning to read and write. I found the author to be very clever in finding ways to teach himself to read and write like meeting with younger men to teach him to read by bringing them bread and then challenging other young men to trick them into teaching him how to write. It was inspiring to see the author’s determination in facing the hopeless hand he had been dealt and gradually educate himself.

“The Perfect Essay” by John Kaang 

I related to this one as I remember vividly receiving stern constructive criticism at a position I had at a company. It hurt, but I knew it was necessary if I were to do my job correctly and save time. I like how the author mentions that those who give genuine criticism are the people who care enough to see you through the difficult process of improving one’s work. I found the end to be warming with “If perfection were possible, it wouldn’t be motivating.”, which emphasizes an earlier mention of the point of writing a “flawless essay” was to not give up.

“The Importance of Writing Badly” by Bruce Ballenger

I related to this piece very well. First, because of the free writes that we do in class, I get what the author means by “not feeling bad about what I write”. I have a personal journal for each day and I feel the same way about it as was described in the piece: I don’t think about what to write, I just start writing about the day and my thoughts/feelings. The writing itself might suck, like a lack of proper sentence structure or grammar, but if I were to worry about all of that, I wouldn’t be able to convey the same flow and idea as my thoughts are at that moment. I would hold back and leave out some important elements that would appear only in my bad writing.

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“Why I write” by Joan Didion

This piece of pretty confusing, almost frustrating to read. The begin was making sense and had me like “Oh yeah, okay I can see what the author is saying.” But in the middle of the fourth paragraph is where I started to have trouble keeping up. I kept reading and found some sentences and parts that clicked and made sense, but where I really got frustrated was the part about the lady at the airport. It came together at the end, where the author emphasizes the idea that writing is to put your random thoughts and ideas onto paper so that you can see it and make sense of it. I enjoyed the last couple of paragraphs I went from feeling frustrated to feeling gratitude for seeing this perspective.

“Writing to Not Print” – by Nate Kreuter 

I enjoyed this one a lot, it felt relatable. I agree with the author that writing things down really does help us learn and make connections, no matter how much we think we know already. I am guilt of just looking over things and telling myself that I know it, but when I write something else down I can feel myself really knowing. I’m often paralyzed with the choice of where to start or what to start writing when taking notes or practicing math, but as the author says, all writing is productive as it helps us reach a cognitive point that we would not have reached otherwise. 

“The New Literacy” by Clive Thompson

I like how this piece started off on a negative note and then turned around with positive research and observation. The line “-young people today write far more than any generation before them” made me really think about that fact. We write all the time, it’s interesting. I wonder what kind of benefit this has for us compared to previous generations that did not write as much. The part about having an audience was relatable as well, writing for an actual audience is more motivating as you are able to share your ideas and thoughts to people, but sharing them with one person for a grade is not as motivating. 

“I type, therefore I am” by Tom Chatfield

This piece made me think a little deeper about how we interact with the world in today’s age. We have access to not only various forms of communication like email, direct messages, and text messages, but we have various ways of communicating through the metaphors we develop and trends we catch onto through social media, just like early emoticons as mentioned in the piece. The way people speak and the phrases they use can sound alien and irrational without the context of the internet. The line ”Everything can be undone instantly and effortlessly then done again at will”, is so interesting when we step outside of ourselves and think about it. 

“Can an Algorithm Write a better news story than a human reporter?” by Steven Levy

As someone who has worked directly with machine learning models as a data science intern, this piece was relatable and interesting. It was easy to understand as I have knowledge of the process of training an algorithm to do a job and interpret data. The article was written in 10 years ago in 2012, but it felt like it could have been published yesterday as the media is always talking about Artificial Intelligence solutions and the threat of people’s jobs being taken over by it. I like to think that we’re living at the beginning of new developments, just like when the first iPhone was released, technology shot up in progression. Technology being the physical computers and devices that have been developed. Who knows what kind of artificial intelligence-based technology, technology being software used as tools, we’ll have in another 10 years?