- from 'The Phantom Tollbooth' [Norton Juster]
[Readings : 02] Narrating Personal Experiences
Friday, July 9, 2010Big Phone, Big Screen, Big Pleasure
How I Used Twitter to Live-Blog the Opera
Riding the Rails of Malaysia, in Singapore
The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved
All of the articles attempted to relate to the reader the first-hand experiences of the writer. Each used devices that could possibly hold the readers’ attention throughout the story.
The easily readable one, is of course, “Big Phone, Big Screen, Big Pleasure.” The article effectively utilized short paragraphs and fresh humor. It was also successful in simplifying and relating to the non-techies the geekspeak of Android phones.
The next one is “How I Used Twitter to Live-Blog the Opera.” In a way, the article attempted to merge the old and new–the opera and Twitter. Maybe because what the article anchors on is the “Twitter Transcript,” I did not feel that the story the writer wanted to tell was justified because of the 140-character limitation of each tweet. I guess there must be other ways to entice the younger generation to appreciate the opera.
I think my favorite article from the set is “Riding the Rails of Malaysia, in Singapore.” The witer was able to picture the contrast of an old railway station and the modernity of its location–Singapore.
Probably the hardest ones for me to read are “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved” and “The String Theory.” The first used a fiction-like narrative to describe the grand horse race in Texas. The other article, which is about tennis, seemed to be a bit overloaded. The writer, though I could see attempts to simplify the language used by the professionals of the sport and giving human interest to the topic, was not fully able to make the non-tennis reader, like me, understand what the sport is all about.
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