Semi-Daily Scribbles

This week's peer assessments may have a bit of prickliness attached, but they are certainly not a thorn in my side. On the contrary, the comments I've received on the Hawthorne essay are some of the more interesting and helpful to cross my computer screen. Reading through the comments, it appears as though I understand the mechanics of writing, but my message isn't connecting with the audience.

Once an essay has been submitted, there is the element of "How's this gonna play in Poughkeepsie?" that I find intriguing. I'm a believer in listening to different perspectives and considering all constructive feedback. I even take the comments from week to week and see if there's anything I may apply to the novel I'm working on. It's gratifying to have people read my writing. If something doesn't ring true for a reader in 320 words, I take stock of the shortcomings and seek to improve my ability to communicate. One thing is for certain. I always have something to say. The goal is to have my words sound right to as many sets of ears as possible.

Here's how my peers reviewed my Unit 5 assignment ~

FORM

student1 → Good grammar, verb tenses. The essay is easy to read and understand.

student2 → Great language use.

student3 → Intro seems a bit disjointed; lots of interesting thoughts, but need a bit more coherence. Otherwise, follows nicely intellectually, and conclusion is a lovely finish.

student4 → You can write, good style and fluid. I've nothing to pick on at all – 2 points from me. For 3 points, I'd be looking for a more creative delivery as the grading guide below suggests: "writes in ways that are particularly vivid or uses particularly incisive key terms to focus the argument or in some other way is outstanding in usage or structure"

student5 → The form is too complicated and it actually looks like it has been made complicated ON PURPOSE. It doesn't help to percept the content at all.

Score from your peers: 2

CONTENT

student1 → Just excellent.

student3 → If Owen is a transcendentalist, I think it's worth pursuing why then he finds inspiration in the mechanical as opposed to another artistic medium–painting, writing, etc.? We often posit the mechanical (read artificial) in direct contrast with the natural, but here they're inexorably intertwined. And, in the mechanical butterfly standing as the fairer specimen, it's almost as if human has triumphed over nature, rather than being one with it. Perhaps this is why the butterfly needed to be destroyed? For though it's the fairer specimen, it's not the 'truer' one? Just thoughts.

student4 → Excellent content, especially for such a short essay. I would have left out the Emerson paragraph though, and given more meat to your main thesis. You haven't tied it in with your main thesis and it's almost an entire thesis in itself. 2 points from me. I think with a little more content, would have been a 3.

student5 → Possibly, because of puzzling form, but I could not catch the main idea of the essay.

Score from your peers: 2

Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World – Coursera Assignment 5
Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories

It wasn’t wretchedness or an aversion to work that made Owen Warland dwell in the dark regions of his mind, alternating between passionate states of doubt and elation. After all, as Hawthorne’s “The Artist of the Beautiful” showed us, Owen was a skilled mender of timepieces when he applied his faculties. His troubles, however, stemmed from not extending that same dexterity to knowing his own soul. It is no flight of fancy to surmise that along with Owen’s disdain of Father Time, he was also a student of Transcendentalism (1).

When viewed through the lens of Transcendentalism, we gain knowledge of Owen’s penchant for wasting “the sunshine, as people said, in wandering through the woods and fields and along the banks of streams” (2). He was doing more than flitting about like a butterfly. He was practicing a philosophy where, by immersing himself in the pure joy and perpetual inspiration found in nature, his spiritual body could ascend to a place of visionary reason rather than brutish understanding.

Owen perceived his path to the divine was through his works, and this is when the butterfly became more than the sum of its mechanical parts. The case can be made that Owen’s inspiration for his clockwork butterfly came to him after reading R.W. Emerson's essay titled "Art" (3). In it, Emerson posits: “In landscapes, the painter should give the suggestion of a fairer creation than we know. The details, the prose of nature he should omit, and give us only the spirit and splendor.”

Owen took to heart the concept of the sublime, but he also discovered being an artist of the beautiful was to embrace alienation. He believed his fellow man clung to an outmoded, false knowledge, and that they’d never see the utility in beauty. Owen’s art, his true occupation, was the crafting of a universal perception of the everyday divine.

Works cited:

(1) Goodman, Russell, "Transcendentalism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)
(2) Mosses from an Old Manse and other stories, Nathaniel Hawthorne
(3) Essays, Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Munroe Company Boston 1841, Essay XII
Because the soul is progressive, it never quite repeats itself, but in every act attempts the production of a new and fairer whole. This appears in works both of the useful and the fine arts, if we employ the popular distinction of works according to their aim, either at use or beauty. Thus in our fine arts, not imitation, but creation is the aim. In landscapes, the painter should give the suggestion of a fairer creation than we know. The details, the prose of nature he should omit, and give us only the spirit and splendor. He should know that the landscape has beauty for his eye, because it expresses a thought which is to him good: and this, because the same power which sees through his eyes, is seen in that spectacle; and he will come to value the expression of nature, and not nature itself, and so exalt in his copy, the features that please him.