Professor, I'm back.

I guess I'm to blame for the lack of "blogs" being posted. The fact is I've spent the last twenty years trying to provide for a family of vultures who, at the time, didn't care about my well being. Like so many species that feed off of the defenseless, once the nourishment of resources evaporated, I was given time alone in my own plane of existence to rediscover my own wants and needs. I realize the lack of computer skills has left me at a disadvantage in your class but, hopefully, I am striving to learn the basics everyone else takes for granted. Long and hard is the weaving road out of the darkness, littered with black bars of others sins, in a traumatized mind that I had nearly lost myself to the confinement of my fleshless, bony soul. The search for an illuminating light, shielded in my own life sustaining white marrow, took two years to find. I dare not quit my stumbling exodus from hell. I dare not hesitate while the vultures, lurking in the dark, hungrily eye the last of my will, my desire, my search for meaning.

Logos, Ethos, and Pathos

I find that Ramage's Chapter three is instructing us about three different writing styles based in Latin from the philosopher Aristotle. The idea, defined by him, pointed to how writers can slant the delivery of their words and format to appeal to different audiences.
Logos is a style which appeals to reason and strengthens the thesis statement with clarity and evidence. Ethos appeals to the speakers, or writers, trustworthiness and credibility. The format is professionally done with an emphasis to proper grammar and neatness in appearance. Pathos appeals to the empathy's, or sympathy's, values, beliefs and emotions of the reader.
I personally find the strongest writings prey on the readers emotions. The authors who manage to manifest the greatest range of emotions with the highest amount of impact in expressed feelings leave the best works mentionable in history. I hope that someday I will be able to leave such a work of art for the public to admire and ponder over and over again.

Writing From The Darkness

I believe the author of "Writing from the Darkness" has had a deeply troubled childhood based on the underlying themes of depression and suicide throughout the before mentioned chapter. The structural and mental overview of their families simple view points created the perfect intellectual prison for her evolving, young mind's, addiction to writing, language, communication, and self discovery. It seemed to me that the more the author experienced the spiritual joys of writing, along with the encompassing emotions harvested by their negativity, the stronger her prison became. The inevitable paradoxes leading to her soul's personal torment grew between the love of creation and the shackles of confinement, between happiness and depression, and a reason to continue living while denying the temptation of the painless release in the darkness of death itself.
The irony, I found in the writer's own words, was her desire to write created enough of a love of life to survive all of her self-binding conflicts. The admiration I feel for her being able to write freely in her diaries throughout her childhood is an advantage I wish I had experienced in my own youth. I found her writing style to be reader friendly with a steady tempo, or pace, attesting to the timeless pursuit of a craft nurtured by a souls deepest desire.

The Debate: What Should Colleges Teach?
The article, "Think Again", attempts to point an opinionated finger at the degradation of America's college curriculum. The author, Stanley Fish, begrudgingly uses the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) as a reference to elude to substandard academic skills being instilled by our nations current college graduate programs. He implores anyone who respects his credentials, especially the trustees and alumni of the colleges in question, to revise their substandard curricula and requirements particularly in the faltering lore of today's writers. Stanley believes that writing "should be the real core of any curriculum".
The fact is that Stanley may have a valid point. The cultures of the world florish or die by the information attained by the created archieves of the pen. Knowledge and the recorded information passed from one generation to the next has led to humans becoming the world dominate life form on the planet. There is not one aspect of our lives that hasn't been altered or obliterated by our quest for knowledge and the overwhelming advantages of our survival it provides. But is he wrong in assuming that the college institutions deviation from higher academic standards should be changed? Could we be at an impass in our social evolution that is causing our scholorship programs to tarnish?
The answer lies in the vary structure that nurtures us. The amount of recorded information avaliable to today's modernized human could not be learned in a single life time. The fact is it would take a life time to just read the New York's Metropolitan Library's paper back section, provided you were an exceptionally good reader. The information stored in the computers that can be accessed from the before mentioned library would take thousands of years to review. The information age we live in is also not showing any signs curbing it's avalanche of growing computer records. The storage continues to grow exponentially based on our global population and their ever expanding computer networking in to third world countries.
The bottom line is we have failed to physically evolve our brains at the pace of our inventions and the information they help create and store.

What is good writing.

What is good writing?
I believe that good writing is the ability of the author to reach their audience with a sense of clarity and purpose. The audience, or readers, should be able to access the infornation they want or desire without confusion. The author must strive to craft their writting in a way that is user friendly while following an intended topic for a specific purpose. The writer is in a never ending quest to improve their writing because of the opinionated view points of their audience.
What is bad writing?
The concept of "Bad Writing" is the opposite of "Good Writing". The quality of information the author arrempts to convey is not what the reader expects. Again, low quality writing is usaully an opinion formed by the reader in comparision to other works and styles they have sampled from other authors.