11.15.2011

Your iPhone is cracking me up... not; I'm going to crack it in half.

Those stupid iPhone "FU Autocorrect" posts kill me.  They are so absurdly dumb.  Most of them honestly seem fake. Yet people post them all over each others walls on Facebook and text them back and forth.  I'll admit, the first time I saw them, I thought it was relatively funny and I laughed.  But then they caught on in full storm and everyone was posting them and reading them.  It's not even that they became "too mainstream" or anything, they just started getting obviously fake.  It's kind of sad/pathetic to think that people sit there and type back and forth just to make some lame conversation about an autocorrect that makes it look like someone is doing something they shouldn't be doing. Whatever.

In my english class we've been talking a lot about tone and voice.  There comes a point in every student's academic life where he or she must learn how to balance a personal tone with a scholarly one.  And the proper balance varies from paper to paper and subject material to subject material.  For example, in a chem lab write up, you probably don't want too much personal voice at all.  However in an academic narrative, you want some personal voice without going too overboard on the slang and while still sounding intelligent and scholarly.

Granted I don't like the autocorrect screenshots, I recognize that there is a place and time for them, just like there's a time and place for personal voice in academic writing.  The tricky thing is figuring out just when and where that is.  Eventually, you will find when it's fine to share iPhone screenshots (i.e.: with yourself, with your friends, etc) and when it isn't (when you post a link to one as your status or post a ton on someones wall...).  Just as you will find where it's fine to throw in a personal anecdote or a slang word as reference (in a personal writing piece) and when it isn't (in your senior thesis that is mostly empirical data).

Balance is key my friends.

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