Wednesday, October 14, 2009

What I Learnt in This Week's Tut

By Cassy van Eeden

This week's tutorial did not require us to prepare anything, however, there were a number of activities that we had to do during the tut itself. We began by examining our own lives and how we relate to those around us, who we are in relation to the people closest to us and those furthest from us. As part of the exercise we were required to delve into who each of these people are (from the person closest to us to the person furthest) and determine what their daily routines would be. For the people we knew, especially those we are closest to, it was an easy task to map out what their actions would be from day-to-day, because we know them so intimately. But as we moved onto people further away from us, for example lecturers and even the president, it became somewhat more diffiuclt to imagine how they would operate their lives.

To further discover how the people around us affect who we are - specifically as journalists/bloggers - we continued to examine the differences between what each of these routines look like and how the imaginary lives of these people can sometimes suprise us. It also depends on how we perceive the person as to how we would imagine their personal habits etc. It is possible to learn about someone, even if you do not know them at all, simply by knowing their daily routines. This I discovered after we partnered up and compared these individual routines.

The next task involved free-writing about something that truly enrages us. Topics such as child abuse, drunken-driving, rape and even waterbirth arose from my fellow tutling's work. We then had to summarise these pieces into one short, conscise, metaphor to express the exact feeling we had towards the topic we wrote about.

From this I learnt that pin-pointing your specific emotions towards a certain issue can often be very helpful when writing about it (especially in the case of blogging opinion pieces). It helps to determine a tone and even an overall intention of the writing.

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