And welcome, to the second installment of the brand-spanking-new formal occasion, Double-Post Day! For those of you still confused, check the prior post for an explanation. To those of you still confused after that, you've wandered into the wrong classroom once again despite this being the sixth week of class, and I'm afraid the fun in this regular occurrence has rather worn off for the rest of us.
And now, on to the topic of the day, a reflection on the recent Ghostwriting Assignment.
This assignment turned out to be a bit more challenging than I had expected, primarily because trying to write an actual paper while coordinating meeting times with my roommate was a bit more work than a simple paper might take. Looking back now, I probably should have seen this coming. The easy and the unexpected part of the assignment turned out to be the attempt to match my style to my roommate's. We've since discovered that our two writing styles are ridiculously similar, making the work primarily a matter of removing my own "quirks" in the writing and adding in his.
Since then, I've discussed this with him, and we now believe that this similarity is due to the fact that we've had the same English, history, and writing teachers all through middle and high school, and we also tend to share certain things, like our majors and ideological leanings. This certainly was a departure from what must be the normal experience for ghostwriters; I can't imagine most of them fitting their employers' writing styles to a tee without any real effort. While this did not change our relationship with each other, it caused us to learn a few interesting things about ourselves as writers.
If the fellows from the Nature vs. Nurture debate were to have a talk with the two of us, we would have quite the story for them.
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2 comments:
Sounds like an interesting experience. I'm interested, though, in how exactly your two writing styles overlapped and what your "quirks" look like compared to your friend's.
We generally maintain the same structure in our essays, having been taught "Topic Sentence, Body, Conclusion," etc. exhaustively by about 4 consecutive shared teachers. Our vocabulary is roughly the same because our high-school courses supplied the words we use at the moment, and we do talk a lot and pick up each other's habits and such.
My transitions tend to be indirect and are usually there, his are blunt and infrequently tacked on to the end of paragraphs. One thing that I've also never understood about his writing is that he will regress into a familiar, informal tone at times, then turn around and offer up some extremely technical information in the same paragraph. I prefer a tone and tense that remain mostly consistent throughout a paper, while he is satisfied with keeping tense constant only for separate paragraphs. He tells me that it keeps him from going insane when trying to word things properly.
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