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!