Classmate Response 2, Week 6

David's Week 6 Calisthenic focusing on recursives:



Your big ol' blocks of text are so intimidating. Especially when the entire thing loops upon itself so much, it is incredibly easy to get lost in and I had to reread certain lines a few times to regain where I use to be.

What I'm getting from you is that you like to rant, and I think you're right, the recursive method is right up your alley. I also believe that for a lot of your works you have this same pattern of going off at full-speed without stopping. Granted, I say "a lot" and not "all" because I have read a few things from you that demonstrate a successful manipulation of flatter language and I think you have some talent in manipulating tone. Your work about the sex Q&A and rape victims really worked well with this language. But when it comes to something like the recursive method this particular piece tends to come off as lyrically elevated, and I wish you would implement some of that lesser tone.

The reason I say this is because in this particular piece, it is a huge block of text. With recursive, I feel like ideas run together and as a result the period almost seems null and void in this situation. So you have a huge block of always going text and as a reader I feel like the speaker of this work is nearly shouting at me. What's more, I think while reeling in on these things, you might want to consider how many ideas you are packing into one sentence. I'm impressed you managed to reuse so few ideas so many times, but it is difficult as a reader to keep track of all the reoccurences when there are three or four of them per line.

My best advice is consider shorter sentences. Not necessarily write this entire thing in shorter sentences. I think that would disturb some of the twisting intrigue you have here. But consider giving your readers a mental break. Give them something short and digestible in between all the commas.

I hope you don't find this as a personal criticism. I am simply trying to make a judgement off of what you have given me thus far and what you have here.  As I always say, I hope you find some help in this.