At the start of
this project, I was ready for their to be difficulties, namely with editing.
I’m not normally a pessimist, but with so many contributors in one space, I was
worried. Not only was I concerned about the cohesion of the entire project once
we put the sections together, but I was apprehensive about how editing would go
in such a public setting. However, I am surprisingly pleased at how everything
came together and the level of communication within the classroom.
With editing,
it’s easy to unintentionally hurt someone’s feelings. You may cut out a section
on which they worked for hours or a quote they really felt tied the paragraph
together. Since we did a portion of the editing in class, I know that I had
scrolled down on our Drive space to see how badly my section was gutted or
riddled with edits. It wasn’t too bad
actually, though that didn’t stop me from feeling guilty when I did it to
others. But, having been called on to explain those edits probably smoothed
things other. We were able to have a discourse about why we made this
particular note or thought about removing a sentence. I, as a writer, felt
better about knowing the thought process behind the editor, though I was
completely prepared for the class to be divided into separate camps for the
start of our very own World War.
For me, the
project all came down to cohesion and we spent quite a bit of time talking
about it in class. In Carra Leah Hood’s “Editing out Obscenity,” she describes
how the Wikipedia space is not always
a cohesive medium:
“The nature of
the writing that takes place on Wikipedia, primarily a result of
multiple contributors and value placed on achieving consensus over time, leads
to the circulation of articles that, at any given moment in the writing
process, ‘often have a choppy quality’ (Rosenzweig 132) or appear ‘a lumpy work
in progress’ (Schiff)” (“Wikipedia in
Composition, Hood).
However, we did
things a little differently. Our multiple contributors and editors were our
peers. Over a couple weeks, we wrote our sections, edited, and edited again. By
the end, things looked pretty good and cleaning it up in the Wikipedia space was all that was left.
But I have to wonder what is going to happen to it once it goes live and we
post it as an actual article on the site. The article is now visible and open
to all of Wikipedia to edit and
alter. I don’t know how I’m going to feel if I return to the article and see my
section moved or gone entirely.
We also spent
some class time discussing elegance and grace. They were hard definitions to
pin down, though I was confused about how to make our writing for Wikipedia elegant and graceful. We were
supposed to be informative, neutral, and concise. No technical jargon or
adverbs allowed. Joseph Williams and Gregory Colomb’s Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace says this of elegance:
“But while most
of us prefer bald clarity to the density of institutional prose, others feel
that relentless simplicity can be dry, even arid. It has the spartan virtue of
unsalted meat and potatoes, but such fare is rarely memorable” (90).
I definitely
belong to the latter category. I like long, descriptive sentences, instead of succinct
statements and creating those was sometimes a struggle for me. I understand
that our article is not some great work of fiction and that such language would
be out of place and distracting for a Wikipedia
article. I didn’t mind having to curb my style; it was just a challenge, though
a welcome one. I want to be a versatile writer and this project really helped
me add another skill to my arsenal, and it was a nice break from the standard
academic writing that I’ve done in various papers.
Works Cited
Hood,
Cara Leah. “Editing Out Obscenity: Wikipedia and Writing
Pedagogy.” 2008. http://www.bgsu.edu/departments/english/cconline/wiki_hood/index.html.
Williams,
Joseph and Gregory Colomb. Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace, 4th Ed. United
States: Longman, 2012.
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