Month: September 2017

Leave a comment Posted on

everyone’s a critic: week 9 update

by Annie Cooper

Week 9’s Wednesday class included another helpful grammar session. This time around, we looked at the New Yorker’s Comma Queen video series. The series includes 32 short videos, where long time New Yorker copy editor Mary Norris meticulously explains basic (and not so basic) grammar rules.

We watched two Comma Queen videos, both of which were extremely helpful.

The first, was on the difference between effect and affect. We learned that “affect” is a verb, and “effect” is a noun- except in certain occasions where they are the other way around. “Affect” means to make a difference to, whereas “effect” indicates a change that is a result or consequence of an action.

The second video we watched was on dangling participles. We learned that when you begin a sentence with a participle, that phrase has to modify the subject of the sentence. Norris used an example from Reeves Wiedeman’s article on Simone Biles to explain how a dangling participle can be fixed:

Incorrect: Seeing Biles at Pacific Rims, it seemed as if Isaac Newton had written a different set of laws on her behalf.

Correct: Seeing Biles next to her competition at Pacific Rims, I felt as if Isaac Newton had written a different set of laws on her behalf.

These videos were very helpful for our class, as both of these grammar rules are easy to get wrong. It reminded us of the importance of proofreading, and staying aware of basic grammar rules.

Leave a comment Posted on

nearly there! plans for week 10, 11 & 12

Hi everyone,

Crazy, but we’re entering our final weeks of the semester. We’ve all got those end-of-year glazed eyes, but we’ve got a bit to do to bring together what we’ve been working on, so please make sure that you come to class for the last few weeks. Down to business:

  1. We’re starting our class critiques this week (week 10). I have developed a schedule so that everyone will get a chance to submit and receive feedback — click here or find it in the shared studio google drive. I will also email everyone in each round with dates for submission, to make sure everyone is on the same page. Please make sure that you read each other’s work before class and bring along your comments and suggestions. I find it’s easiest to highlight and make notes on a printed version. You can also then pass this along to the writer for their use.
  2. Please cast your votes for the title of our publication. Voting method as follows: to go to the document where all the titles are listed: ‘CHOOSE A TITLE FOR OUR PUBLICATION’ in our shared drive. Everyone has three asterisks (*) to use to vote; you can put them all on one title, or divide them across a couple that you like — whichever has the most stars wins. Please do.
  3. PB4 is up — we will talk about this in class on Monday.
  4. Spectrum Culture – a web publication of criticism that is another good model for us? They’ve also put out a call for writers recently; if you’re interested, find them on twitter.

Hope the weekend is treating you well!

Leave a comment Posted on

everyone’s a critic: week 8 update

By Mikayla Hyndman

Week 8’s Monday class began with the long-awaited introduction to Alexandra Heller-Nicholas – an Australian film critic, broadcaster and writer. Initially, Alexandra guided us briefly through how she was going to run the discussion for today, including topics such as the role of the critic, consumer advice and cultural criticism.

Alexandra then spoke to us about an inspiration of hers; Pauline Kael, a film critic from the New Yorker. To give us a taste of why she considered Kael so great, Alexandra showed us a film clip titled The Current Critic where Kael details her time at the New Yorker, and states that the best films are the “ones least expected”. Here, Alexandra used this clip to drive the discussion about what is and what isn’t good film criticism

Here are the points she discussed:

  • TASTE ­– “Taste classifies and it classifies the classifier”. Alexandra made sure that we understood the factors of taste, such as class and social differences and we can distinguish taste from context and opinion.
  • PRIVILEGE AND BIAS – Racial, class, gender bias/differences, privileges. Alexandra also mentioned something called “ego privilege” before proposing the question of a film critic’s authority in telling the audience what films are considered great and what are not.
  • AUDIENCE – We should always be cautious in considering our audience. Who are they and how can we connect to them?
  • SCALE AND DETAIL
  • HISTORY
  • CONTEXT & OPINION

When Alexandra mentioned the concept of opinion, context and taste by advising the class to use our taste as a guide but to keep it in check. However, she also mentioned that having taste isn’t a bad thing as we are all human and have things that we enjoy and things we don’t enjoy.

Towards the end of the class, we watched an Australian short film by Lucas Testro titled I’m You, Dickhead (2014). The class was divided on whether they enjoyed the short or not, and before long, we were asked to write a capsule review (around 200-400 words) and then swap our work with someone else in the class. Overall, we discussed the interesting concept of how everyone can watch the same thing yet still take on different ideas and create totally different arguments.

This was the last time we got together this week, as Wednesday’s class was cancelled. If anyone wanted to watch the short film again, here is the link: https://www.shortoftheweek.com/2015/08/13/im-you-dickhead/

Leave a comment Posted on

week 8 summary + what you’ll need for week 9

Hi team,

Hope everyone enjoyed the class with Alex on Monday. For those who missed it, we wrote capsule reviews of the 2014 Australian short film I’m You, Dickhead, which you can watch on Youtube here. Alex guided us through the process of note-taking while watching the film twice, and then we swapped reviews and discussed the different ways we responded to the process.

Next week is the opportunity you really don’t want to miss, where Alex will read examples of all your work and we’ll workshop them together. I’ve sent out an email with detailed instructions about this, but wanted to note the below here too, for consistency.

  1. Your 600 – 800 word review of one of the three films Alex has provided is due on Friday 15th. You need to send it to me via email, so that I can pass these onto Alex, so she can read them before we meet again on Monday.
  2. To make more time for this, I’ve extended the due date for PB3. Instead of being due this week, I’ve shifted it to Week 9 (Friday 22nd September). You can, of course, submit it earlier.
  3. And finally, as per email, I’ve cancelled our Wednesday morning class this week. But if anyone would like to meet with me on Thursday or Friday, please feel free to send me an email to make a time. I’m more than happy to meet one on one if you have questions, would like extra feedback etc.

Hope that’s not too confusing!

 

Leave a comment Posted on

everyone’s a critic: week 7 update

By Dana Louey and Katrina Salvador

Our Week 7 Monday class saw us pitching our ideas for the critical piece that will be published on our anthology website. The class was designed to be interactive, with each person proposing their idea and then receiving feedback and further points of consideration in return. It demonstrated the benefits of group discussion and collaboration, as each topic was fleshed out and our classmates could provide us with new or interesting angles that we hadn’t initially considered, as well as further examples that we could draw on. Overall, everyone’s pitches formed a highly varied pool of ideas – together, the class with be looking critically at a range of films, film genres, TV series, music, pop culture trends, food and much more.

Important to note, donuts were present in this class to fuel some of our energy and encourage the flow of ideas, generously gifted by Alexia. After 2 and a half hours of brainstorming our last half hour saw us creating something of a ‘lucky dip’ out of our (unashamedly) empty donut box through which we contributed ideas for the name of our website.

Wednesday’s grammar session made us put our editing hats on as we focussed on the grammatical errors that were common in our Project Brief 2 assessment tasks.
The topics we covered were:

  • Passive and active voices
  • The difference between colons and semicolons
  • The different types of dashes (hyphen, en-dash, em-dash)
  • It’s versus its
  • Effect versus affect

Alexia introduced the class with the simple activity of reading out sentences by switching from a passive voice (filled with film references) to an active voice. This made us realise how important it is to maintain an active voice in a critical review and how easy it is to trap yourself into that passive voice rabbit-hole.

 

Leave a comment Posted on

everyone’s a critic: week 6 update

by Jasmine Wallis & Grace Marks

Monday’s class saw us discussing the definition of a curator. We analysed how it has changed over time. It doesn’t solely refer to art gallery or museum curators anymore, now any individual can be a curator online using a blog, website or Instagram; much like the idea that everyone’s a critic. As a class we tried to outline the differences between a critic and a curator. In this task we unravelled the wide and jumbled web of a modern day curator like Gwyneth Paltrow and her lifestyle “instruction manual”, Goop. We asked ourselves is it a genuine collection of tips and tricks to achieve a healthy happy life or perhaps just a pretentious collection of products the average Jo or Joanne could never afford?

Alexia gave us two readings for the class to read out together, prompting more discussion that helped us nut out the confusing world of curation. The studio finished with an update on PB3 and what our coming weeks looked like.

Wednesday’s 8:30am class began with everyone picking a TV show to write about with no idea what the angle/ topic was going to be. Alexia handed out around a bag of one worded prompts and we then embarked on a ten-minute word association, brain dump extravaganza. After we’d all extracted our ideas we went around the class and shared what we’d come up with. Some interesting ones were ‘Sex and the City’ with the prompt “architecture” and ‘Everybody Loves Raymond’ with the word, “night”. This exercise is definitely a good way to get your mind running and make you realise that really there’s a way to write about practically anything.

bag of regret

Once we’d finished that exercise and had a few diverging discussion about Lockie Leonard and other celebrities we’d met, we began a lesson on grammar. It’s really important to get a refresher as we begin our writing careers, especially considering that most of us haven’t had a grammar lesson since primary school. We discussed the difference between active and passive sentences, for example,

Somebody stole my laptop.

My laptop was stolen by somebody.

We identified the object (laptop), the verb (stole) and the subject (somebody)

We can identify the first sentence as ACTIVE because the subject does the action to the object. It’s more clear and gets to the point more quickly.

Another example is:

While Mr. Taylor was driving down Highway 101, he was pulled over and given a ticket by an officer. (PASSIVE)

 While Mr Taylor was driving down Highway 101, a police officer pulled him over, and gave him a ticket. (ACTIVE)

Alexia encouraged us to use active sentences in our writing and be aware of the point we are trying to make. These are all great tips to assist us in our writing and improve our work for our portfolios!