Chapter 3: "My Word"

In chapter three of “My Word”, Blum begins with a great quote to describe the authentic writer, as well as a great intro to the chapter. Lawrence Lessig says, “We live in a ‘cut and paste’ culture enabled by technology” or best define in Chapter three as ‘performance self’. Do I agree with it? No quite as Blum describes it in the book, the best description of the two in my opinion was good and bad. The authentic self is described as an honest, hardworking, and unique person; on the other hand the ‘performance self’ is a cheater, lazy, and copy-cat. The author makes a clear distinction between the two in order for us to really see a difference. But I feel like she goes on and beyond for the ‘performance self’ in the since that she makes them seem really bad. When I was reading the description Susan Blum was giving each type of writer I felt like I could relate to both, but because she made the performing self seem bad I would think of reasons not to relate to it. But the more I thought about it, the more relation I saw myself to it. For the most part I think I would consider myself to be more of an ‘authentic writer’, reason for being so is that I like to be unique and come up with my own ideas. I hate relating to others’ ideas, and their opinions about things, I rather draw my own opinions on it. On the other hand though, I also related to the performing writer in the sense that in some assignments it is a required for me to draw insights on others work. Not necessarily to plagiarize, but use others work to expand my knowledge of certain things, and then make my paper that much better. On page 89 of chapter three Blum expresses her opinion in that performing writers are more likely to ‘cheat’ their paper than the authentic writer. To by defense I’d disagree with this statement because I also relate to the ‘performance self’ and never have a plagiarized a paper; I would use others opinions but I’d properly cite them. On the other I agree that performance self is most like to plagiarize because it’s not like they care about what they are researching, as long as they get quotes to fill their paper in.

What is an Essay?

As a noun the word Essay is defined as, 'a short literary composition on a single subject usually presenting personal view of the author'. As a verb the word Essay is defined as, 'to make an attempt at; try or to subject to a test'. Some synonyms for the word Essay are; 'composition, paper, theme, proof, test, trial, attempt, and effort'. The term Essay comes from the French word essayer meaning, "to try or to attempt". What I think an Essay is, is a written piece that has some kind of subject or argument that you are trying to express through words. Essays can be written in different formats and styles. For example: Descriptive writting, Narrative, Compare and Contrast, Persuasive and so on.