What's 1 More Degree

The San Franciscan accent

whilstinsf:

basically 

Tell me something good…

Recently, I’ve been describing myself as a storyteller. Strange description, but seemed fitting thanks to my past in the theatre. As actors, you are conveying a story. The words aren’t you own, but the are given life through your performance. 

Yet, whenever I say it aloud, I can’t help remember the voice of one of my elementary school teachers saying, “Now, you’re not telling stories again, are you?” Referring to my colour retellings of past events. Was it my fault that my love for reading made my imagination and thus my memory more intricate than hers? But it begs me to wonder, am I just telling stories again when I call myself a storyteller?

I can say with FULL confidence that I am not a writer. I write, but writer I am not. Just like my Shower Grammy doesn’t allow me to call myself a singer. You, dear reader, have put up with my incoherent musings for a while and for that I am very thankful, but when I think storyteller today, I think one who creates art through words. I just finished reading “Reading Lolita in Tehran” and the way the writer constructed sentences made images just dance off the page. A skill I don’t even think I could attempt to possess. And with the death of one of my favourite Nigerian authors, Chinua Achebe, still fresh in my memory how can I hope to inspire movements when I can’t even use commas correctly?

But the storyteller comes from an oral culture, before words went to page. So creating a fluid line to pitch my business plan, to engage an audience into the humanity behind financials, to put pictures when abstracts aren’t enough just seems obvious to me. Why give someone a boring 16 page document when you can tell a story that conveys the same message?

Story… teller. I’m still wrapping my mind around that I guess. 

Twitter Punctuation

You might be reading this and thinking that this song is about you; that I am here on my last grammatical nerve on the verge of a pedagogical aneurism… Oh reader, you silly goose. Of course not. This is for me (as most things are, especially those donuts). Almost on a daily basis my tweets (btw follow me @graceskii) and tumblr are on display for the WORLD WIDE web to judge, and many do. Mostly my ideas or thoughts are subject to the Judgie McJudgers, but more recently, grammar and punctuation use. It’s rather embarrassing. Regardless of whether I want to blame it on auto correct or whatever, even now as I write this, my punctuation is all over the place. I write as I speak, placing comma bombs all over the place rather than where they should actually go in a sentence structure. It wasn’t always like this. There was a time dear reader when I could break down a sentence using those tree thingies… 

It strikes me as I gawk through twitter beefs, that it’s a growing problem especially among the younger generations. No matter how crass a young person will be, all their railing ends up being cut down by poor use of grammar, spelling or punctuation. With childlike energy does a correction of their grammar shut down the firebrand with a simple “Your stupid!” or something far more colourful. As a society that has become more dependant on gleaning information from things we read and write on the internet, our basic english skills have become poorer. <-peep my passive voice and grammatical anemia

I know famous writers, journalists and even politicians are on the social media, whether by choice or force. They read and gawk just as much as anyone else, seeing for themselves the downturn of basic english skills. Why have they said nothing? What are the english teachers doing nowadays?!?! Oh that’s right, they’ve become counselors, and bodyguards, and surrogate parents to students with little time to teach state mandated topics to push for high test scores for fear of losing their jobs. Honestly. It’s far too much. In the inner cities and poor school systems it is even worse and for this neglect the language and it’s use is suffering. 

It’s utopian for me to think a politician would take the initiative to do something without economic benefit or something for themselves, especially with the Congress that we have today. Yet, I would hope that they would read what is said on twitter and realize that a semi-colon should be where the comma is and people should only WrItEE LiKe tHiSss to be ironic. And MAYBE we should even learn to use the word “ironic” properly. (You’re right, too much) 

The fights over you’re/your & their/they’re/there are important, but they are a small tick on the larger bull of a problem that I hope will get noticed by people that will actually do more than just point it out, fix it.