COMMERCIAL WRITING

Based on its name alone, this subject did not stimulate my enthusiasm. Anything related to the word ‘business’ doesn’t switch on my interest, and this feeling didn’t improve at the beginning of this course. But as it progressed, this subject has been able to change my opinion and reveal itself as a very practical source of information for approaching a career in the writing-editing field. It has been like a shy person who shows their potentiality and value only when you get closer.

At the beginning, in fact, the subject appeared cautious, avoiding exposing its true character and revealing its particularities. Its arguments were focused on how to produce a résumé, how to face a job interview and so on — useful knowledge to anyone, with the writing and editing components covered only on the surface.

Gaining in confidence, lesson after lesson, the subject started to relax and show its potentiality and personality. It revealed itself to be a good resource for learning how to write for different contexts and purposes. Writing is not just about being creative with fictional or non-fictional stories. It’s also about communicating with customers if you work as a writer in a company; communication that can be positive or negative. It’s about promoting yourself and your manuscript to publishing houses, if you aspire to be an author. And of course, it is about conforming to certain structures to meet the purpose of your writing so that you can optimize your message. For example, an effective negative message will follow the rule of ‘kiss, kick, kiss’. But writing for a commercial context doesn’t necessary mean writing in a boring style; there might be situation in which you can play with words and make the communication more attractive.

If you write a letter, seeking for an agent or a publisher you need to present your ‘product’ in the best way possible, concise and intriguing. There are other many tricks this subject has introduce us, and as what happens when you get to really know a timid person I marveled at what it had to offer.

EDITORIAL ENGLISH

This was one of the most difficult subjects of this semester. Editing is hard and doing it when English is your second language is almost impossible.

I faced the text trying to examine it scrupulously, but it was as if there was a barrier, an opaque screen over the written words that allowed me to see it only on the surface, and I struggled to understand it on a deeper level.

Editing means working on sentences and words with the purpose of improving the original text, maintaining though the author’s style and being consistent.

So, for example, let’s say that an author generally uses simple words, then he/she shouldn’t, at some point, surprise the reader by using a more sophisticated word, because it interrupts the normal flow of the reading and the author’s voice, at that point would not sound authentic, right? Consequently, an editor needs to recognise that word and change it. Yeah, here is the point! If you work on a text that is written in your second language you might miss the subtle difference of word selections for two reasons:

1.   the word is difficult for you to understand, so perhaps it doesn’t stand out from the text because there are also other words that you don’t know. You need a dictionary for understanding that word as well as the others so, you think that that word sounds weird to you due to your lack of knowledge of English and you fail to amend it;

2.   the word looks familiar to you. It is really similar to a word in your mother tongue, or it might look different but translated in your language doesn’t sound weird, but a common word used in your country habitually, if not everyday.

There are also other aspects involved; therefore, the complexity of doing it in your second language extends as well. Fundamentally, editing is fun but doing it in a language that is not yours is like leaving out fifty percent of the fun and adding fifty percent of frustration, and sometimes is the second half that prevails. 

TECHNOLOGY, GRAPHIC COMPUTER PROGRAMS AND I

Technology is not my cup of tea, so anytime I achieve success in something related to it, I quite positively surprise myself.

I don’t like technology, but I do like almost anything that is creative. Sometimes, I think I could be a good graphic designer, if only design had stopped at the Seventies or Eighties, when ideas and a good hand were the only requirements you needed to have and when papers, pens, pencils were your main tools. Sometimes, I think I was born in the wrong era. Someone or something has made the mistake of catapulting me into this time and, because of this mistake, I have to struggle with the computer and its programs.

I have heard about some of these graphic programs: Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator for example, and I have always wanted to use them. This semester and in the previous one I have been given the opportunity to learn a bit about them and we, these programs and me, have begun a ‘hate-love’ relationship. Approaching them with suspicious, I ask them to help me in doing what I have to do. Like enemy, they try hard to hinder me resulting in great frustration. If computers were cheap, I would have enjoyed myself many times throwing them and watching them crushing against a wall as I say: “See, I told you to be careful!” Unfortunately, it is the computer that retains power over me; so the only thing I can do is rely my manual ability and scan my sketches and paintings to fit in to my graphic-digital work. Only then, computer programs call a truce and we find an agreement: “I don’t ask of you too many and complex procedures and you respond by allowing me to complete my task.”

The result? A business card, a bookmark, a brochure, a postcard and a magazine page! Not bad for a luddite like me!       

IN DEFENCE OF DIARY

Diaries have always held a fascination for me, but I have never been able to write one. I mean, I have attempted many times but I always gave up. I started to write one between primary and secondary school. I remember it had a lock, but that didn’t prevent my curious sisters from reading it, so, I stopped. I kept my thoughts inside of me until the white pages called me again. But because I knew that my sisters would most likely read my diary again, I was never a hundred percent sincere or honest about what I wrote.

However, constancy has never been a faithful friend to my writing. Besides, there was another issue: keeping a diary was considered among my peers as something younger kids did, at an age when they wanted to be seen as being mature. I never pretended to be older, but I didn’t want to be uncool! So, I lost interest and gave up again.

Regardless of my inability to keep a diary I continued to read some of them, some of ordinary people who, like Anne Frank, became SOMEONE by having written a testimony of a very important moment of history. I like this consideration, that our life and our, perhaps, insignificant moments could become important traces of history for generations to come. Everyone might become a writer through writing a diary or a journal. Anybody with some form of literacy, in fact, is capable of relating on paper their thoughts or the events that happened to them. Of course this doesn’t make them a writer, because their style, their choice of words might be confusing, non attractive, or lacking in structure. Not everyone is a natural writer, not everyone is Anne Frank. In most cases, their diary will remain a document known only between their own four walls. But that doesn’t mean their diary is insignificant and worthless. A personal diary is an important historical record of one’s life. So, if you do keep a dairy please, don’t through it into flames, out of shame of what you have written, because one day you will enjoy and maybe laugh reading about a different and younger you. You might rediscover events you’ve forgotten; people and friends who used to be your world at a time that has buried in your past. Your diary should be treasured if only to provide revelations about why you become who you are today. So, don’t be another diaries’ arsonist; there are too many out there, and after all, your diary has been your companion for a while.