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ENC 1131 Writing Through Media |
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Diagnostic Essay Your diagnostic essay is due Monday. Your completed two-three page essay should use Times New Roman Font (size 12), double-spacing, and 1” margins all around. Be sure to include your name on the finished essay. You’re free to write informally, reflectively, narratively, imaginatively, analytically, and/or creatively on this assignment, but you should also try to write with “correct” syntax and mechanics. Also, please respond in prose, not poetry.
Imagine yourself living in a strictly oral culture. Words in this culture are auditory events. They have no visual presence. Language is valued for the way it sounds; repetitive, rhythmic, musical. Words seem to have an almost magical potency, especially in the way sounds of naming can seem to exert power over the things they name. In this environment, you know only what you can recall. What you can recall is only what you and others can sing and recite. The music and rhythms of language help you to remember knowledges that are essential to your life… ancestry, history, faith, remedies, and warnings. Recently a foreign visitor has come into your community and introduced you and your people to a striking new technology known as “writing.” You all required some time to master it, but now this innovative new technology is yours to command. However, as your culture becomes literate and embraces the techniques of writing, you pause to consider the impact of this development. Will this new technology of literacy entrap you or free you? Will you become so dependent upon it that you lose all the old ways of doing things? Are you eager, expecting the new ways of remembering to open new pathways into knowledge; or do you resist, wary of a technological advance into the unknown? You wonder, in gaining this powerful technology, will you and your people lose something ineffable and irretrievable? Using your newfound technological skill, explore the ways in which your life is about to change. |