What exactly are "rights"?

I am choosing to do my expanded definition on the term "rights". I recently had a conversation with a co-worker who said that he has recently spent some time thinking about what exactly a right is. He had been thinking about this after the elections with the California Proposition 8 being passed. This banned gay marriages. So this co-worker was relating to me that there are a group of people who say, "We have the right to marry who we want to" and that got him thinking about what exactly that means. I did some quick Wikipedia searching and found that this is a huge topic as well as an interesting one. Rights can be divided into different categories like civil rights and natural rights (for those that believe that some rights are given to us inherently by nature). The U.S. Declaration of Independence makes reference to "inalienable rights" and those against animal cruelty speak of "animal rights." I think this provides much opportunity for classification and division to attempt to define what rights are, or, at least, to show that the term is highly subjective and has different meanings to different people.

My Editorial Topic

For my editorial, I want to write about my opinion that OU is not doing enough in terms of course availability. Since the early 1990s, I have attended several colleges and universities of different sizes, and in different parts of the country. Never before have I found my choice of courses to take in any given semester so limited.
I am an older, returning student with a full time job and a family, but I realize that todays
"traditional" students are also finding themselves entering the professional world much earlier than I ever had to back when I was a traditional student. Fortunately, I have never skipped a semester at OU because I couldn't find a course that I needed at a time when I could attend it. But there have been some close calls some terms.
OU, which is clearly a commuter college, needs to do more to make available the courses that students needs at a time when they can attend.

Persuasion: Heart and Head

With persuasive writing, I find, personally, that a mix of emotional appeals and rational presentation of facts is most effective. My personal opinion is that people most quickly respond when their heartstrings are tugged. If you want to get someone to see things from your point of view, then try to elicit an emotinal response from them.

However, that will only get you so far. If you don't show readers some evidence that appeals to their intellect, then you won't convince them of anything in the long run. I like evidence in the form of concrete examples. I tend to be very skeptical of statistics, because I think they can be presented in different ways to say different things.

So one thing a persuasive writer can do is to use an example that is well documented as completely truthful and factual, but also has a heartfelt angle to it. Then it's like killing two birds with one stone. The reader is persuaded on an emotional and intellectual level.

The Art of Procrastination

Here I am on a Sunday afternoon, stressing about getting the final draft done of my memoir. I hate being in this place. I am not talking about my current geographic location--the Rochester Hills Public Library. I mean that I hate having something that I need to get done by a certain time and being in that particular zone of anxiety, stress, and fear of failure that always seems to accompany that brief span of time leading up to a deadline. Why do I always allow myself to get here? Why do I put myself here? Is it a lack of discipline? Is it a lack of time management? Or is it something else?

I am not going to make excuses, but I can say that I can come up with quite a lot of reasons why I didn't get working on this earlier in the week. I am married with two children, one of which isn't quite a year old, and I do work fulltime with an hour long commute each way to my place of employment. I can mention that I had family come to stay at my place these past few days. However, there have been plenty of times in my life when I didn't have all these responsibilities and I still found myself in the "procrastination zone."

I guess what I am suggesting is that perhaps some people work better under pressure than others. Maybe some people need the pressure to motivate them to get things done. I certainly hate how I feel when I am in the zone, but it seems that I do better getting done everything else that is expedient in my life first so that I can be free to bring all my powers to bear on the task that I need to get done by deadline. The feeling of relief I feel when making a deadline, perhaps, is my trophy for a completed task.

I hate pressure and stress, but historically I seem to pull through and get jobs done on time under the yoke of those two nasty, intangible motivators. At any rate, now that I got this blog done I can get on finishing my memoir.

So this week, as I understand it, I am supposed to blog on the expectations and standards I have for the reviewing process that we are doing for class. To begin with, I hope that the reviewers of my memoir first draft will not pull any punches. I have been through a couple of writing workshop classes now, and I feel that I have developed a pretty thick skin. I know that I will improve as a writer more from things that are pointed out to me that just aren't working for the reader. It's nice to get praise and compliments, but then, how do you improve if you think everything you write is gold? I just expect that the reviewers will let me know when a joke falls flat, when a scene is not set up well enough, or a character is not completely fleshed out. In short, I just want to know if the reader is "getting it."

As far as what my standards are for the memoirs I will be looking at, I will be as fair and honest as possible. I will try to balance the negatives with the positives. I will be looking at the overall effect of the narrative aspect of the memoirs. I will try to cite specific examples of things that aren't working for me. This might be an image that doesn't work. It might be an awkwarrd sentence that leaves me wondering what is meant. Overall, I will be looking to see if I got anything out of the memoir, even if it's just entertainment value.

Strunk & White's Elements of Style

While I was reading the part of Stephen King's On Writing entitled "Toolbox," it struck me how much respect he has for Strunk & White's Elements of Style. He makes frequent references to it and even quotes it. Then I flipped to the beginning of the book and read in the second foreword that King claims that the book should be read by every aspiring writer. This is a book that is now ninety years old (Strunk originally wrote it at that time - White revised the book in 1959, source Wikipedia), but yet still has great value in terms of the effect it has on the English language. King, a successful, modern novelist, is letting his readers know how much of an influence the book has had on his writing style.
I actually have Elements of Style, but I have never read it. The funny thing is that the professor of the very first college English Composition course I ever took recommended that everyone in the class get the book. It's not very long, but perusing it gives one the feeling that it's not meant to be read cover-to-cover. It seems more like a quick reference handbook. Either way, I've never done more than maybe read the introduction or start the first chapter. Perhaps Mr. King has given me the extra push I need to sit down and read it. With all of the changes in the English language over the past several decades, the book has seemingly stood the test of time.

Do memoirists have to tell the truth?

After reading Ben Yagoda's "A Brief History of Memoir-Bashing," I began to reaffirm, in my thinking, the absolute necessity for memoirists to tell the truth, to the best of their ability, in their writing. Given that there has been a long tradition of negative criticism towards the genre, writers who present falsehoods as fact are not only hurting theri credibility, but are also given more fodder for those critics who don't think much of memoir anyway.

I agree with the anonymous author that Yagoda quoted as saying, "the form should be the province of people of 'lofty reputation' or who have something of 'historical importance to say'—not of the 'vulgar' who try to 'excite prurient interest that may command a sale.'" I think if a memoirist feel the tempatation to stretch the truth, or to "sex up" his or her story, then perhaps they really have nothing of historical importance to say, and they are only trying to make big bucks off of a sensationalistic story.