Shane Salm
8:00 a.m. Section
99102854450
Assignment 4.1
Peter Ho Davies, a man that has honestly seemed to be one of the most realistic authors that I have ever read about caught my attention in so many ways. I never read a piece on such a matter. Sure there have been books and articles about the matter, in which the author tries to captivate the audience with the details about what he or she has seen or is describing, but Davies seemed to hit the nail. This is yet another piece in which I did not find anything really in the norm, I guess you could say.
One thing that I noticed is how he talks about mainly a specific subject and that is his students and there struggle to not only use proper word usage, but also writing about certain subjects. In this case he mentions suicide. When you think about it, it is rather hard to talk or write about suicide, unless you go through with it fully, and in that case you can’t really talk about it, or write about it. I think his main purpose in writing this was not only to try to show us the difficulty of trying to even write about someone that went through murder and then suicide in a day. Even though he attempted to follow some of the steps to go through what Clark might have done, it is impossible to enter the mindset of the actual suspect/victim. In the end he just shows us the difficulties of trying to write about a subject that is really close, almost a personal matter.
I think that he is trying to tell us that in order to make some good text, we need to be realistic about what we write and something that we know much about. Things that haven’t happened to us are rather hard to write about. In his case though, he even tries to attempt to follow steps of a murderer and a suicide. I also believe that past experiences also might have influenced him about it. He might have had lots of death in his family, and also might have known what it might be like to an extant depending where he taught and what it was like where he was living. In general he might be telling use to stick with material we are accustomed to knowing information about, rather than attempting to write about a murder or someone that killed themselves.
2 comments:
After reading your 4.1, I think you have many good ideas and get to the point. However, some sentences seem a bit long and a bit confusing. This just makes it hard to follow from my perspective but its no big deal if you think it is fine. Also, you could include some examples from the text. At the end, you say to write about stuff we know about, perhaps you could add an example there? Also, length is a little short, you could interpret his thoughts or yours on his trip to the shooting range, etc.
After reading your 4.1 essay i think you need to use more examples. Like kyle said, you have very good ideas, but you don't support those ideas with examples. If you do this, i think your paper will be much better.
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