When Your Essay Rebels Against You...
We all have those days. It's the night before due date, you're exhausted and probably buzz-crashed from Red Bull withdrawal. You decide to rest your fingers and avert your eyes for a second... next thing you know, your essay has jumped from the screen and is rampaging through your Cheetos supplies.
No?
Just me?
I need to stop drinking Red Bull.
Anyway, our final assignments had to include two essays, one long and one short. For clarification, a short essay is comprised of three paragraphs, whereas a long essay has five. Oddly enough there are no minium word counts, but I can live with that.
For my short essay, I wanted to tell the story of what Tesler did (invent copy and paste) and how he did it (through direct manipulation modules).
PRE-WRITING
The Man Who Led a Cyber Revolution
Copy-pasting is a controversial topic. Is it merely another tool to ease your work efforts, or is it a testament of your incompetence? Because of that, I wanted to do an argumentative essay on this. The difference between an argumentative essay and an opinion essay is the number of facts you have to include. In an opinion essay, it is fine to include supporting facts for your point of view only. But in an argumentative essay, you have to include facts for the opposing view as well---and somehow rebutt it.
PRE-WRITING
Slack or Smarts? Debunking the Controversy Behind
Copy and Paste
Next, I moved on to my poster.
It was largely inspired by grunge typography, mainly Raygun magazines. Since Academic Writing puts emphasis on, well, writing, I wanted to use words to create the art. On one side of the poster is a disarray of really long and complex words, from Physics textbook passages to Latin phrases. They create a sort of chaos, and the idea is that having to type these really long words gives you headaches. On the other side of the poster, I created a calm atmosphere by 1) aligning them and 2) creating colour contrast. I used blue for this purpose as well, since blue is supposed to have a calming effect on the brain. I highlighted phrases that I wanted to emphasise, and of course, created a catchy title that makes people want to read more. In this case, it's "Tired of Keyboard Acrobatics?" It's a direct reference to the turmoil happening next to the paragraph. I also highlighted the thesis statement---"Copy and paste revolutionised how humans and computers communicate", and the key phrase---"When it comes to progress, efficiency is key."
Fun fact: since you can't copy and paste words onto Adobe Illustrator, I had to manually type the long words and passages. Fortunately, I like words. Unfortunately, some of the Physics statistics are really bothersome.
Next up is the booklet, and I'm sorry to say that the real-life result was not as good. It was my first time printing a booklet EVER, and I missed some essential tips (which I'll be sure to remember next time!)
It's worth noting that I did not include the essay titles in this booklet. I originally did, but felt like they disrupted the flow of the booklet, so I took them out.
Overall, I love writing and wordplay, so I genuinely had fun on this assignment. I especially love the idea that we're exposing these underrated icons to society. I got the concept of copy and pasting from two different professors: one who likes to say "nothing is original" and another whose favourite phrase is "time is money." However, this is not to say that originality is sacrificed for efficiency---copy pasting is merely a tool, and as such is not inherently good or bad. The way you use it is what determines whether it's good or bad. For me, copy pasting is an essential part of everyday life as a graphic designer, and as such, sometimes I forget about it because it's so readily available. I hope that by creating these posters, essays and booklets, more people will appreciate copy and paste and the marvellous man behind it, Larry Tesler.