"It's through writing, I believe, that you do start to understand yourself."
[Hebeler]
You’ve kind of addressed the next questions I was going to ask you about procrastination, and I really liked the way that you put of all that, so I think I’ll let Dan ask his questions.
[Davis]
Okay.
[Davis]
You’ve told us about different applications of writing, and you’ve told us about different steps in your writing process. Is there any one process or any one aspect of your writing that you particularly like, and conversely is there one aspect that you just absolutely dread?
[Perry]
Well, okay so let’s take the different kinds of writing—the part I like for the writing has to do with the job and all that. The part I like there is defining on the front end: Audience, message. Because that clarifies a lot for you right there.
And once I get that clear in my head and that’s not always clear because you’re meaning. Let’s say you’re going to be meeting with the Mattoon Rotary, and you’re going to be talking about something. The audience isn’t the Mattoon Rotary.
You’ve got to look at who’s all in there, the different segments of the community, and then you’ve got to think what are the common threads there, so you may end up knowing you’re going to be addressing, you know, one audience when you’re talking about the Renewable Energy Center, another audience when you’re talking about enrollment, and another audience when you’re talking about community service. And so I that’s the part I like, it’s getting that identified.
In terms of more personal, really personal writing, I like it when I find the right word.
In haiku, you know you’ve got these syllables, and I know of course if you in different languages of course the syllables change and meaning changes and all that, but I just do English okay? So, getting it right, at least what I think is right, is very satisfying because sometimes you’ll write it and you’ll have the write number of syllables and you’ll be getting almost the intent you want. But changing one of the words sometimes can really make things fall into place, kind of like a jigsaw puzzle, you know. You do a jigsaw puzzle, and you’re down to just a few spots left, and boy this looks like it goes right there, you know, it almost does, but it doesn’t quite. So it’s the same with words. So that’s very satisfying. I like that. A lot of enjoyment out of that.
[Davis]
Well splitting it up again into your professional and personal writing, what would you say have been your most successful or favorite writing experiences?
[Perry]
Well, I’d say maybe a couple of the mathematics papers I wrote. I felt like, you know, when it was all done, I felt very good about the way I had put together. A lot of the stuff that I wrote was in applied mathematics, so I was wanting to strike the right balance, you know, between theory and application, you know.
Proofs but also computational examples that show that the theorem not only is true because you proved it, but you actually can use it to compute solutions to certain kinds of equations. So that’s been very satisfying.
But I think my personal writing, I think students already know. They get to us and they’ve already gone through a lot in their life. And there’s going to be more of that to come, and I think to the extent that they can see writing as a way to deal with issues. It’s not like their writing for anybody else. They’re not going to publish it. Some people keep diaries. Some people just every now and then say I’ve got to write about this. Sometimes they tear it up. Sometimes they keep it in a book.
But, I think words have such power for us. That’s why we have to be careful, you know, in using speech with other people. I mean, yes, we have freedom of speech, but we can sure hurt people with our speech. But the power of words enables us to deal with our own emotions too and deal with the things that are happening to us in our lives. So it’s been satisfying when I’ve been able to face some of those things, deal with some of those things in that way.
[Kory]
Well, to take it back into maybe your professional writing, when you see other people doing the kind of writing you do, so you read a speech, or, you know, you see some of that, when do you think like “Oh, I wish I said that.”
[Perry]
I wish I’d said that.
[Kory]
What do you really admire in that you see people doing well in the kind of writing that you also do?
[Perry]
Well, I see brevity and imagery.
Someone will write something, and it will bring something to mind. I think that’s very valuable. You know, you think about examples: with malice toward none, charity for all, ask not what your country can do for you but what you, I know there are names for that kind of construction.
[Kory]
Right.
[Perry]
But wording that connects you to the speaker and to the speech.
I think one of the great things about Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech is its, we all know the part about I have a dream, but you look at the whole speech, and you see imagery in many, many places, very powerful imagery and it’s not with a lot of words.
It’s just, you know, a few words you get this imagery towards you. Franklin Roosevelt, and of course a lot, you’re shaped, I’m shaped by what I studied, what I’ve heard. Those are the kind of things that get me: just short, powerful words with imagery and a call to action. You see this as something more than just some words sitting on the page. It’s something that’s reaching out to you, saying, you know, you need to do something.
[Kory]
So it’s about when you see writing that works, or sort of that sort of good writing that sort of you know it when you see it. Has anyone ever, to take a sort of more intellectualized version of that, is there, has anyone said anything to you about writing that you said like “Yes!”? Have you gotten good advice about writing?
[Perry]
Oh well, the best advice I ever had, got was “Know your audience.”
[Kory]
Do you remember who told you that?
[Perry]
Yeah. My wife.
[Laughter]
[Perry]
“Bill, who’s your audience?” And, you know, that’s just the best advice of all.
[Kory]
So I had thought you had invented classical rhetoric, but it turns out it is your wife.
[Perry]
That’s correct.
[Kory]
That’s excellent.
[Taylor]
Well, before I ask the last question. I’d just like to thank you for being interviewed and the whole interview here.
[Perry]
Well, you know, I’ve enjoyed it. You know, my undergraduate work was at a liberal arts college, and we wrote a lot. And it was a very formative experience for me because we’ve talked about different examples of kind of writing here.
It’s through writing, I believe, that you do start to understand yourself. You’re taking, you’re synthesizing a lot of things you’ve read and heard, and now, you have to put something on paper. You have to make an argument. You have to convince, entertain, whatever the purpose is, and whatever the audience is.
But when you put it down on the page, it’s you, you know, and that’s powerful. So that’s why I think at Eastern with the Writing Center, with, you know, the General Education Core.
[Kory]
Writing Across the Curriculum.
[Perry]
Writing across the curriculum, all these things, that’s just really important for our Integrative Learning initiative.
[Taylor]
Well we’ll end on a tough note with you, a tough question.
[Perry]
Okay.
[Taylor]
Okay, sort of a grammatical test to see where you stand. What’s your favorite punctuation mark and why?
[Perry]
Ah, the semicolon.
[Taylor]
You’re one of those people.
[Perry]
I’m one of [laughing]. Now, let’s get beyond that. What is, what’s it called in writing where you put the marks and then you look sideways, it looks like a face?
[Kory]
Oh, the emoticon.
[Perry]
The emoticon. That’s the only one that winks I think, so that makes it interesting.
But the semicolon, and I don’t know how, I don’t really know how to use it, I read what is it? Strunk and White. To me, the semicolon shows promise that there’s something very interesting to come.
Now, the colon just says “Oh, here’s a list.” I know you can use it for more than that, and a comma says, “Oh well, it’s a comma. Should it be there or not, you know.”
But a semicolon, you say “Whoa, wait a minute. This writer is doing something special here.” And often times that’s the case, so that’s my favorite. I think if you’d of asked me 20 years ago, I might have said the exclamation point, but email has affected my thinking on this, right, because exclamation points in email “Whoa, what’s going on with that person today?” But semicolon, I try to use it. I think you can overuse it. But…
[Kory]
Well, if you have too many, then you start throwing in long dashes.
[Perry]
Right.
[Kory]
You can keep going.
[Perry]
Right, right right. So, yeah the semicolon. It’s just the most interesting, and partly because it’s a little harder to know how to use.
It’s a little more challenging, to me anyway, it’s a little more challenging to use and so that makes it interesting.
I’ve always believed that whether we’re students or faculty or staff or whatever we do in life, we want to do things that are interesting. We want to work with things that are interesting, and so when we’re writing, the opportunity to do interesting things with punctuation and sentence structure and things like that makes it more fun than just subject-verb-object period, you know.
[Taylor]
Well thank you.
[Perry]
My pleasure. I’ve enjoyed the conversation. Thanks very much.
[Collective]
Thank you.
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