I am now officially so happy that I will make your stomach hurt. My English-course teacher loved my latest work, and she didn't hesitate, not even a bit, to say so. The work was to make a descriptive essay about an interesting place, and I chose the previously-mentioned Kawah Putih. You may ask: "Why Kawah Putih? I thought you said that it has been molested by obnoxious tourists?" Well, I am the writer, and it was completely up to me to choose which ones go into the writing and which ones are better forgotten. So, I took the liberty to omit the current ugliness and crowdedness of the crater from the masterpiece. I blindly described it according to my very first visit there a couple of years ago, before throngs of Jakartans swarm the place.
Because we were working on compositions, she told us to make a formal outline. The outline part is helpful, while the formal part is a major burden. We had to make the outline grammatically correct -parallel and everything- and painfully detailed that in the end, it took more effort to make the outline than to make the actual writing. But I have to admit that by doing much of the brainstorming in the beginning, I could put more effort into "beautifying" the whole half-truth writing.
Anyway, some of the credit should also go to all computer geeks that made typing on my laptop possible, and anyone who suggested putting thesaurus in Microsoft Office Word. I love writing on the computer, because after each work, I genuinely feel like editing. I always scroll up again and read everything to make sure the flow's good, the choice of words attractive, and the spelling correct -OK, it's the computer's job. If a word became too repetitious, I could always open up the thesaurus and change it. If that's not satisfying enough, there's always the internet. I love this "age of technology". If I had chosen to write naturally, i.e. by hand, I wouldn't have even dreamt of checking anything, because it would be a pain in the ass, and the wrist, obviously.
On my laptop, it doesn't matter if I mess up a whole paragraph. I could always write the replacement, and just delete the ugly paragraph into oblivion. Kinda like performing a surgery without any stitches, or torturing your frenemy without leaving any mark. By hand, don't even ask. First, I would have to erase all of it. If I succeeded in not tearing the paper apart, I'd have to squeeze the new paragraph into the former's space. Some words would be squished together, while some would have huge spaces like Bugs Bunny's teeth. Naah, it will never feel right.
Buh-bye, it's quite late already, and I don't want to offend any old lady who thinks that sending an SMS for holidays, instead of a greeting card, is a crime. Hey, I used to have one of the best penmanship in my elementary school class. Btw, I plan to blog the work I did.
No comments:
Post a Comment