Blog post 5

A remediation is “the representation of one medium in another” ; there are many different ways to approach this project. I feel like the best way to approach this assignment is to find different audiences and then begin to brainstorm what I want to do my remediation on. The first audience I would choose would be my fraternity brothers. I feel like I could convey my message to them in a way that is very easy to understand. I think I could use a short film to express my message to this particular audience. The next audience I would choose would be my little brother. The best medium to get my genealogy through to my brother would be a photo collage. I think that would be the easiest medium to show the evolution of the camera. The third audience I will choose would be my grandparents. I think I would have to use a visual medium since their hearing and vision is not as good as what it used to be.

I think for this assignment I may have a difficult time trying to do a remediation on a camera. I feel like I may need to pick something else to do my remediation on. But for my fraternity audience think it may be a little difficult to do a short film for because I have a lack of props. For my second audience I feel like I could pull off a photo collage of how the camera has evolved. If I could change my remediation then I would maybe choose a movie character such as Spiderman. I am still a little confused on how to do a remediation.

Blog Post #4

In the first section of THE INTERINANIMATION OF WORDS, THE PHILOSOPHY OF RHETORIC, Richards is evaluating the relativity of the way people may communicate or the perception of language. Richard’s admits that he doesn’t believe that has any truth behind it such as to be correct or incorrect. The only thing that really defines the word is the way that it is being used or the context that it is used in. Richard’s goes on to say how if we were to look upon other writings or books that we’d see a look of misinterpretations of words as they would be used without a complete understanding of that language. One part of this section that was confusing was when Richard’s is saying that we guess about characters even though we don’t know them and we’re just told that they’re evil. The author goes on to say that we guess better when we know that we’re guessing then when we think we know. I don’t see a difference when this applied to a situation though as an evil character even though I haven’t met him this doesn’t change my persona on the actual character as he is still evil.

In the next section Richard’s discusses Symbolism and Symbols. The basic context of this section is play on words kind of. If I said the poolman is cleaning the pool it isn’t really him but whatever device he uses to clean the pool. We see a direct relationship as we as people are able to comprehend what a person is saying even though it’s not directly stated as it “should” be. I’m also confused in this section as Richard’s says context in the section even though Shakepsear can be taken multiple ways?

Blog Post 4 - Vitor M.

            In Richard’s text, he is explaining how people have gone to let words have one meaning in texts. Why is it that a certain word can be used for a meaning, but is not allowed to be used for another? It seems as if people have given words these concrete meanings that cannot be twisted or reused in different ways.

            This topic strongly relates to me because I cross this issue many times while writing my papers. I hate the fact that I have to remove (or add) certain words into my vocabulary because others don’t accept them. Teachers nowadays have a strong policy for what words have certain meanings and that’s not fair.

            Richards specifically said that certain context around words have been able to give these words the meanings that they possess. If we switch the context around a word to something else, can we give these words different meanings? I don’t agree with him 100% on everything he claims, but I do think that writing has a very concrete format to it that should be able to change.

            I can see this concept applying to many writers, including myself, because not everyone has a wide variety of vocabulary words to choose from. I know that if I could successfully give a certain word another meaning, I would most definitely do it.

            When writing an essay, if should be up to the author to portray his text how he wants to. If he would like to give a word an opposite meaning, then so be it.

Blog post 4- Humphrey Minott

In this work by Richards he explains that words do not necessarily communicate a meaning, or a message; they cannot stand alone or else they mean nothing at all because there is no context. He also mentions symbols, thoughts, and relations in his philosophy of rhetoric.

In the first excerpt about words, and intonation in writing I believe Richards is arguing that everything depends on the literary context in which it was stated because it could mean all sorts of things that cause verbal misunderstanding. In the second excerpt about symbols, I believe Richards is arguing that symbols in language record events and communicate facts. Between the communicated facts and the recorded events, there is an indirect or direct relation.

Some parts in this reading were very puzzling. When Richards was talking about science and recent revolutions in physics I was very confused because I did not see why it was relevant, and I really did not understand what he meant by it in general. Is he trying to say how the idea of symbolism has been question and rejected and compare that to other theories and their rejections in science? I have no idea.

Richards stated “…the people Wordsworth was thinking of when he wrote his preface, confused the poetic product with the poetic process and thought a poem good because it used poetic diction… and used them in the same ways”. Richards basically explained how poets are an assemblage. He goes on to say that we take fixed factors built up in meaning through sentences of mosaic and put it together in discrete independent tesserae; Richards basically summarizes an assemblage, or remix.

Grace Nelson Blog Post 4

The whole section on “The Meaning of Meaning” confused me.  I think the point that Richards was trying to make was that all a symbol is, is a reference to something else therefore when using symbols, you are not being original. I think that he was also trying to say is that symbols can only be interpreted by intellectuals who understand the language as it has been set up by the author. If I understood this excerpt correctly, then it relates to our discussion of Remix by claiming that when we use symbols we are not being unique because using a symbol is just referencing a preexisting thing in a new way.

I think that the section on context was trying to get at our word choice and how the context of our piece will dictate the words we choose to use. This contradicts the first passage stating that there are not “correct” or “incorrect” words as long as your audience is able to interpret them in a way that makes sense. The context section kind of suggested (unless I am completely not understanding these sections at all, which I think might be the case) that your words should almost be predictable to where if one was omitted, you could still understand what was going on because the reader is familiar with the context in which you are writing. This goes along with our discussion of Remix because we if everything has to be based off of something else (because nothing is truly original), then the reader would be able to understand the remix by knowing the works that have come before it. Since the new remix is rooted in previous texts, then we can still understand the new by understanding the old. In other words, the context has not changed (if we consider the context the original backbone of the remix) only the fine details and arrangement has changed.

Blog Post 4

I had difficult time trying to understand. I think Richard’s article is one of the more difficult articles I have read so far. The first part of the article I understood. Richards mentions the Doctrine of Usage and how we should ignore that. Richards wants us to believe that words cannot be judged on how good or bad they are. He then goes on to say that words are here just to possess.

In the second section, Richards discusses symbolism. He says that symbols organize, and communicate. Richards then says that it is our thoughts that are responsible for organizing, recording, and communicating. Words mean nothing by themselves and cannot stand alone. Meaning can be given to the words when a thinker takes the words and makes them stand for something, or gives them meaning. This section was a little confusing. I was able to understand most of the section but once I read past the Diagram I got a little lost. The diagram helped me a little but I still had trouble understanding Referent. Richards talks about delegated efficiency, which is, that it applies to the to the “meaning of words, whose virtue is to be substitutes exerting the powers of what is not there.” Delegated efficiency can also be called context.

Context is essentially a remix. This is seen when the media takes something that is said and puts it out of context. This is a remix because there is a different spin put on what has been said. A new meaning is given to what has been said but its original state has been kept.  Context can have a big effect of a piece of writing.