So I definitely should've posted this first, but I didn't think of it until a little while ago! This is the "survey" we had to take at the very beginning of the semester. It's quite interesting how some things have stayed the same and how some things have changed so much in such a short time. Check it out!

1)Where are you from?  How would you describe your hometown? 

I’m from Fort Worth originally. I would describe it as a place with good people and good food everywhere you go!

2) What are your favorite fields of study?  What are your least favorites? 

English/Writing and science are my favorites. Math is my least favorite.

3) What brought you to TCU?  What do you like best about TCU?  What do you like the least? 

My mom works here so I get free tuition; also the campus is beautiful and I love the small class sizes. I don’t like that it’s constantly under construction and I also hate the parking. 

4) If you were suddenly made Chancellor of TCU, what are the first things that you would change? PARKING and the Greek. (Both of those things have changed since I answered this question! There is more parking now--although not really convenient--and there are plans to beautify the Greek that are ACTUALLY being carried out!)

5) Describe your reading experiences.  Do you like to read?  How often and how much do you read?  Do you read for enjoyment, or do you read primarily because you are required to read for your classes?  What do you like to read the most--newspapers, magazines novels, class texts, letters?  Does reading bore you or put you to sleep? 

I love to read. I probably read every day. I read for a mixture of pleasure and requirement. I like to read novels and letters best. Reading certainly can bore me/put me to sleep; it depends on what it is that I’m reading. (Mostly read as a requirement as the semester went on...)

6) Describe your writing experiences. Do you enjoy writing?  How much and how often do you write?  Do you write for your own enjoyment or primarily for your classes?  What kinds of writing do you do most often--papers, letters, reports, stories, essays, poems, email?  Do you find writing a difficult task? 

I do enjoy writing. I write pretty often as I am currently a contributing writer for three different neighborhood magazines here in Fort Worth. I write for enjoyment, classes, and my internship. I probably write reports/stories, essays, and emails the most. I don’t think writing is difficult but I do think it is very subjective (obviously) so I may really enjoy my writing but someone else may not; that’s probably the most difficult thing about it. (Everything here is still the same as far as my feelings go but I don't work for those magazines anymore!)

7) What are the three most important lessons you learned last semester? 

1. Don’t drop all your classes when you get stressed. 2. Don’t let stress get in the way of your happiness. 3. Grades/GPA is important but not as important as the relationships you build in life wherever you may be. (Yay for not dropping every. single. class. this semester!)

8) Describe a failure and what you learned from this experience. 

I stopped going to class last semester and then eventually dropped all my classes. I’m not sure if I could describe this as a “failure” per se but I definitely learned to budget my time more wisely and to try not to let outside forces distract me from one of the main goals right now, which is graduating! (Two more semesters, people.)

9) What are your goals for this course and this semester? 

To stay on track and maintain a balance. (I think I did well for the most part in achieving this goal.)

10) What do you think makes a course successful?  What makes a course a failure? 

A flexible professor: AKA one that will understand that one pedagogy may not work for every student, one that pays close attention to the responses of the class as a whole but also individualizes/customizes to create an atmosphere that engages every student and makes possible a new knowledge of whatever the course material may be. Also it has to not be boring. The opposite of the conditions I just described makes a course a failure. (Good thing this course was a success!)

11) Describe the worst class or the worst teacher you have ever had. 

10th grade English. Terrible class, terrible teacher. We didn’t even finish half the books and she only had one way of teaching so more than half the class did poorly because they weren’t understanding the way she was explaining the material, including myself. (She sucked. Probably still does.)

12) List three books, stories, poems, or films that have deeply touched your life. 

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, “poem to my uterus” by Lucille Clifton, Silver Linings Playbook starring Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence. (I actually really like "Mirror" by Sylvia Plath too, and lots of other poetry as I've read a lot in my women poets and poetic traditions course this semester!)

13) List three books that you disliked reading (if not hated reading) 

The Human Web, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish (idk why I hated One Fish, Two Fish ha)

14) Tell me three things that I ought to know about you. 

1. I am struggling between two worlds: I am a mainstream sorority girl with a gypsy soul, 2. I can make a four leaf clover shape with my tongue, 3. I have trouble with deadlines. (1. Wow, so hipster August 2015 me. 2. Still pretty proud of the clover tongue thing. 3. Why did I admit this? Can anyone say first impressions?)

And there you have it folks. 

Editing & Publishing Project Revamped

So in my editing and publishing class this semester we learned a lot about Adobe InDesign and worked closely with the program for a major project we had to do. I thought this kind of went hand in hand with the material we have covered in this class. At the end of every project, we did a reflection just about the overall project: what worked well, what didn't, what our rhetorical choices were as far as editing and the design principle in this case, etc. Here's my reflection:

            Project 3 was by far the most involved project yet. There were a lot of elements! Honestly, I probably enjoyed this project the most (likely because I made myself stay on track and work on it little by little so I could finish by the deadline). I treated this project most like a “real life” project compared to the other two. I think that was because I was more used to the format of copyediting. The edits weren’t difficult (although they typically aren’t too involved as far as grammatical/spelling errors go) because there weren’t many to do! It was kind of hard figuratively “biting my tongue” when it came to things I wanted to “fix” and it was pretty tedious having to write down ALL the irregularities since sometimes there were so many. Otherwise, that part of the project was pretty breezy. We got to throw in an extra stressful (but rewarding) element into the mix as well with InDesign. I was very frustrated with that at one point because it’s very difficult to be thrown into a program kind of blindly. We didn’t get to cover much in class when the program was introduced so I felt like I was sort of thrown to the wolves in a sense. I figured it out, of course, so it wasn’t terrible in the end and I’m pretty proud of how our Table of Contents turned out! As far as that goes, there were some design principles that I sort of went against the grain in choosing. Here’s why:

•           We chose to keep stand-out text a blue color (although we did change it from the turquoise to more of a readable blue and I deleted the lines under the author’s/artist’s name so it wouldn’t be mistaken for a link) because we felt that we really liked the contrast and interest that a different color provided.
•       I kept the quotes from the prose as they were in my very first design edit. They aren’t all the beginning sentence of each piece BUT they were all chosen to create intrigue and the first sentences of these particular fiction stories weren’t always very attention-grabbing. Also, the volume that we wanted to emulate (Tin House) only used the first sentence in two cases; all the others in the fiction section of the contents were pulled from the middle of the stories. Furthermore, some of the first sentences in descant’s fiction section droned on and on and were not going to work aesthetically with the material on the contents page.
•        Lastly, I chose to keep the page numbers italicized because in the fiction section the quotes pulled from the text are all italicized to differentiate them from the actual titles, so visually it looked better to keep the following text (the page numbers) homogeneous and unvarying. Although the Fiction section is the only one with italics in the text, I kept the italicized page numbers throughout the contents to remain consistent. (And again, Tin House’s contents utilized this same principle.)

As you can see, there were several things that worked well and a lot of stress as far as InDesign goes. This program is used in SO many publishing companies and if you want to go into copyediting (which usually doesn't entail a whole lot of design elements), you should be familiar with this program just to say you have it under your belt (anything to help you stand out in the industry!) My professor did respond to my reflection and she said a lot of people tend to feel the same level of stress and I was not alone. But once you learn it, it's actually fun! Try it out if you're feeling artsy and inventive. 

The History of Punctuation: A Riveting Account of the Evolution of Text

The uses of punctuation today are integral parts of writing structure and we wouldn’t easily understand forms of writing without our beloved commas, semicolons, and periods. Yet the earliest readers and writers managed without it for thousands of years!

Ancient Punctuation

The Greeks wrote their texts so that the letters ran together with no spaces or punctuation and without any distinction between lowercase and capital letters. Understanding a text on the first read was unheard of.

In the 3^rd Century BCE, a librarian in Alexandria named Aristophanes devised a new system to help readers more easily shuffle through texts. He suggested that readers annotate their texts with dots of ink aligned with the middle (·), bottom (.) or top (·) of each line. His ‘subordinate’, ‘intermediate’ and ‘full’ points corresponded to the pauses of increasing length.

The Role of Christianity

Not everyone saw these early punctuation precursors as helpful. When the Romans came into power, they quickly abandoned Aristophanes’ system of dots. The Romans experimented for a while with separating words with dots, but by the second century CE they had abandoned that too.

In the 4^th and 5^th centuries, the Roman empire crumbled and Christianity began to become more widespread. Books became an integral part of the Christian identity, acquiring decorative letters and paragraph marks. In the 6th Century, Christian writers began to punctuate their own works long before readers got their hands on them in order to protect their original meaning.

Later, in the 7th Century, Isidore of Seville (an archbishop turned saint) described an updated version of the dot system in which he rearranged the dots in order of height to indicate short (.), medium (·) and long (·) pauses, respectively. Moreover, Isidore explicitly connected punctuation with meaning for the first time: the re-christened subdistinctio, or low point (.), no longer marked a simple pause but was rather the signpost of a grammatical comma, while the high point, or distinctio finalis (·), stood for the end of a sentence.

Spaces between words appeared soon after this, an invention of Irish and Scottish monks tired of prying apart unfamiliar Latin words. And towards the end of the 8th Century, in Germany, the famed king Charlemagne ordered a monk to devise a unified alphabet of letters that could be read by all his subjects, creating what we know now as lowercase letters.

A New Era: Revitalization

Soon came a plethora of new punctuation like punctus versus (a medieval version of the semicolon used to terminate sentences), punctus elevatus (an upside-down semicolon that evolved into the modern colon which suggested changes in tone as well as grammatical meaning), punctus interrogativus (an ancestor of the modern-day question mark), the octothorpe (or modern-day “hashtag”), the pilcrow (modern-day paragraph marker), the ampersand (&), etc.

Eventually, as other, more specific symbols were created, Aristophanes’ distinction between low, medium and high points grew indistinct until all that was left was a simple point that could be placed anywhere on the line to indicate a pause of indeterminate length – a confusing mixture of the comma, colon and full stop.

Punctuation as We Know It

This dot was almost completely phased out when a 12^th century Italian writer named Boncompagno da Signa proposed an entirely new and visually distinct system of punctuation comprising only two marks: a slash (/) (or virgula suspensiva) represented a pause while a dash (—) terminated sentences.

By 1500 CE, da Signa’s slash dropped to the baseline and gained a slight curve to become the modern comma; the semicolon and the exclamation mark joined the colon and the question mark; and Aristophanes’ dot got one last hurrah as the full stop. After that, the evolution of punctuation began to fade as the new evolution of printing standardized punctuation as we know it today.

For More Information:

The Mysterious Origins of Punctuation: http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20150902-the-mysterious-origins-of-punctuation

The Ancient Roots of Punctuation:

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-ancient-roots-of-punctuation

Image Source: http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/wwfeatures/1600_900/images/live/p0/31/c3/p031c34v.jpg