Rules, Rules, Rules,.... Break the Rules?

First of all I just want to point out, I really do not know how to respond to this.

   While I was reading I felt like I was being told that I was stupid since I know that I do the things George Orwell was talking about. At some points I even felt as if i was being hit with an literary brick, but I do not see myself as a failure. The five examples he used at the beginning weren't that bad. At least not to me. I meant yes I could see where they needed work, made no sense, or just rambled on about something, but they were not terrible. Just because the selections didn't look exactly right doesn't mean anything. In my view it's more of a personal opinion. I'm sure that if Orwell saw our writing now or even the way many of us text with all the short-hands, he would have more to say than what was in the article.

   Something else that bothered me as I read was the fact that Orwell seemed to put down the use of Latin based words. I can't say that the Saxon vocabulary is less valuable than the Latin vocabulary, but there is no reason to be, or seem to be, putting it down. There are many words that we have in our vocabulary that came from Latin as well as Saxon that I can't think of not existing. As Orwell states in the sixteenth (i think anyway) paragraph "A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outside and covering up the details." I don't see this as true. Yes, some of the words are complicated, but a word on its own does not "cover up" anything. A word can be read by its surrounding words. I can usually find what a word means by using the context of the sentence.

   In response to Orwell's six rules, This is where I got confused and asked myself what the point was. All of these rules have their own flaws, especially the last one. He goes through and puts all these rules that he uses then the last rule says, in my understanding, "break the rules sooner than say anything against them." So basically follow the rules, but break them when you need to? Is this what he meant? Looking at them, the rules are not that horrendous (and yes I just broke rule 2), but what is written depends on what is needed to be said and the occasion. If you are reporting on something knowledgeable, you don't want to sound like your vocabulary only consists of small words or non-scientific words. Then again, if you are trying to explain something to someone that has no idea what you are talking about, you'd want to use small, everyday English words. This is where it depends on the occasion, setting, or overall need.

   In the end, I do agree with most of what Orwell says. Given that there are reasons to break the rules and situations that are excluded from his rules. The English language is crumbling around us. Many, including myself, put to many words or don't organize sentences correctly. That and there are just to many words that I can possible use for any given idea. I do believe what Orwell says about the English language being "full of bad habits... which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble." I know that there is more to what I can learn about writing and the best way to do so. The example about "failure" at the beginning of the article was one of the few things that hit right off. For writing, and anything else for that matter, it fits just the same. If you consider yourself a failure at writing, then later when you try to write again you will only fail more. This is what I believe. More so since if you give up, it becomes harder to get back into something that you feel that you will only fail at again. So that's why I don't consider myself a failure when I don't finish one of my stories, I just keep pushing forward and come back to it later.

A Book is as UNIQUE as the person reading it.

    To start off, everything that I read hit me like a freight train. At first I found that I was just doing an assigned reading, but soon found that I was realizing or finding things that I had noticed (in some cases that is). Alberto Manguel was able to open my point of view, in the area of books and such, to where I was not just looking at a page covered in letters, sentences, paragraphs and many cases of punctuation. I was finding that books are one of a kind to our own minds. If we enjoy reading, then we read. If we enjoy writing, then we write. In this case it showed me that many writers were also readers and vice versa.
  
    The first thing that struck me was the fact that we do not read just a book. What we read is "a certain edition, a specific copy, recognized by the roughness or smoothness of its paper, by its scent, by a slight tear on page 72 and a coffee ring on the right-hand corner of the back cover." (Manguel, 15) The book is specific to each single person, whether we notice or not. If you check out a book from a library, and go back to check out that book again you will look for the exact one that you had before. Another book is not the same, it doesn't feel the same, it weighs different. Even though it is the same text, it is not the same. To feel comfortable, I have actually waited for the exact one I had before to be returned.

    Maybe it is the way I make reading that book, or any book in that case, comfortable and unique. When I read I try to keep myself from falling into a brain-dead state or reading myself to sleep. So I try and set up ways to keep this from happening. I set up my office chair and foot-stool and relax and read, set up my bed table and sit against the wall, or if I know that I will be there reading for a while I might pile in on the couch in the music room. In all these cases, I am alone and away, tucked into a room where I wont be interrupted, or sitting somewhere where it is quiet enough for me to sit and think and process what I am reading. Apparently, I am not alone in this reasoning. "Emerson believed that reading a book was a private and solitary business." (53) Even Edith Wharton was known for making her bed into an area where she could read, write, and sometimes ate. (160) Not only these but there are cases like the Greek kline (154), the Roman bed for reading and writing (154), and even the monk reading in his cell. (155-156) All of these spreading over centuries or decades, but showing reading as I do it now, in my own home.

    One thing that surprised me was about reading silently. In some cases it was looked down upon, but in others, or in later years it was built upon. I do understand that is would be looked down upon in certain cases, since "reading out loud is not a private act, [so] the choice of reading material should be socially acceptable to both the reader and the audience."(122) I for one, would not be able to stand it if everyone read out loud today. I have enough issues with distractions while i am reading now, and that it is in the quietest environment i can achieve.

    The favorite part that I read was something that stayed with me after I finished, and I had to go back and read it again. I, myself, have never been to a huge library. The only ones I have been to were at the schools I've been at, or the one at the other University, but I have always wanted to go to one of the big world known libraries. This getting farther from what I am wanting to put, I will come back. The last paragraph on page 199, struck me in a way that I did not expect. I pictured this library of books, rooms, shelves, and computer catalouges just as it was depicting. When I reached the last part of the paragraph I wasn't sure what to think. I had to go back and read it a couple of times to drive into my comprehension what I was thinking. It wasn't that "the reader" has to "rescue the book from the category where it was condemned," but the fact that every time I go to the library I know exactly what I am searching for (if not exactly I have an idea). I would be doing research for something, but the idea of rescuing seemed odd to me. In my mind "rescue" goes hand in hand with a dangerous situation or something that is lost. Here It seemed to mean that it didn't belong where it had been placed, but it could also mean to rescue the books that we passed looking for a certain book.

A little about Me

   I guess I should have done this first, but I didn't want to forget anything, so here it is now. My name is Blake Covington. I'm an English major and hope one day to be an author. I live one day at a time and hope for the best results.

Twilight Of The Books. By: Caleb Crain (my view)

     As I read the the article I understood that reading was falling to television. Reading doesn't give the imagery that we receive from watching T.V. Giving the fact that I am not an avid reader or t.v watcher, I would still rather sit down and read than sit and watch a program. I can usually figure out what is going to happen next during a show, but reading, unless you already know the ending, seems to keep its secrecy. In the lines of reading dropping, if we could just pick up a list of the type of literature that each person prefers then we could stay away from the t.v more. As children we like literature that entertains us or that is in an area of our interest, but after we grow into teens and adults what do we like? We are not going to like the same things we read as children, it might be in the same area of interest, but our understanding of things change. For me it's not that i don't like reading, it is the fact that if I start reading something and it doesn't interest me I am going to put it down. It has to catch my attention. If it does then I usually don't put the literature down until I have to or I'm done. The question is why is it so hard to find literature that catches our interests?