Friday, February 29, 2008
Reflection on Ghostwriting Assignment
I had a fairly hard time doing this assignment because I did my paper on the Miller's Prologue of the Canterbury Tales, which is written in Old English. Therefore, I had to rely on my friend's explanations of it and summaries that I could find on the internet. The friend who I did my assignment on is a Legal studies major and this was a paper in English 367, a more advanced class than any English class I have taken, and I noticed a lot of the vocabulary he uses in his papers are ones that I barely know the meaning of. It definitely made me realize that people's styles in writing are fairly easy to notice. It seems like a lot of others attempted to ghostwrite by first writing in their own style, and then trying to change it to make it sound like the other person's work. I did this as well, but found it very difficult to do this because it just didn't seem to sound right to me if I changed it. I think this is because I like my style of writing and how it flows. I think my papers usually flow fairly well even if I don't use difficult vocabulary like my friend and in my opinion, flow is more important. This resulted in a pretty bad job of ghostwriting for my friend and I don't think he would want to use it for his paper. Nevertheless, I feel like I have learned a lot from this assignment and I think I can appreciate the work Ghostwriters do now because this assignment made me realize how hard writing in someone else's voice can actually be and it also made me appreciate my own writing style more.
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3 comments:
What about the Old English style (other than the vocab) made it difficult to understand and your friend's writing difficult to mimic?
Since you were using vocabulary that extended beyond your normal repertoire, did you feel you had any ownership over the work that you created? I ask this because I'm starting to wonder whether it is the language used or the ideas expressed that determines who is able to claim authorship (ownership).
This assignment definitely provided a greater respect for what a ghostwriter must go through in their everyday career. And to feed off of Paul's comment, i personally feel that it is the ideas expressed that allow one to claim ownership over a work. When talk of plagiarism arises it is generally because someone stole the ideas of another person not necessarily their writing style. But this assignment shed light on that question and has made it more difficult to answer.
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