Random thoughts post 'em

[Shadow Step]

So, in the long run, you will better grasp the English language... Something you profess to have achieved already. But, to what end? English teacher? Novelist? Editor? Roaming internet grammar critic? Have I mistakenly overestimated the significance of selecting a major? Or, rather, the significance of being an English major within a scholastic context?

You don't necessarily have to be right in psychology, law, medicine, or mechanics, either. You just have to convince others that you're more right than they are. It's entirely possible to be incompetent in a field that, in and of itself, might inspire some measure of confidence or reverence among the lay.

And your example makes no sense without the benefit of hindsight; and, even then, arguably little. It was necessary for the author to commit suicide for the reader to interpret their work as satirical? There wouldn't have been a clue otherwise? xD Generally speaking, accurate reading comprehension (so far as the writer's intended message is concerned) is something that should be possible to accomplish without knowledge of the author's life and, especially, their demise. Unless, of course, the author went out like Robert E. Howard.

"All fled, all done, so lift me on the pyre;
The feast is over and the lamps expire."

Addressing the second part first, you would think, but 90% of literature professors will go, "Okay, did you look up who this is at all and what their life was like?" Knowing nothing about Emily Dickinson you might assume she had some homosexual feelings, reading a quick bio of her life reveals that's not even remotely a secret and people pretty much accept she has sex with her sister-in-law, which sheds a lot of light on some of her poetry. It might seem a bit strange, but they do in fact often ask people if they know about obscure tidbits from the lives of certain authors because it's the only way to get context for certain things. I had one kid, overly religious, try and argue a poem was totally not homosexual at all, until the professor pulled up the guy's biography and pointed out that he commonly had male intercourse, never had female callers, and died unmarried. Some people need the biography, badly. I wish I could remember who the poet was, because it was just one line where he like oogles a statue and makes a remark about the muscle structure.

As for the end goal, it's first worth noting that my achievement is only in sounding intelligent. I've actually gained quite a bit of knowledge about story making and technical aspects like comma usage. I'm eloquent, but eloquence means nothing if your prose is broken, disjointed, and grammatically salad. Towards what I'm going to do, I don't know. Whatever I'd like to when I'm wrapped up with it I guess. I've been working on a novel for several years already, I've written the length of two novels in fan fiction (for ponies) and am rewritting a LOT of it for being terrible. But, I'm also working on getting a capture card and a mic for recording let's plays and kicking around the idea of starting a three man indie dev studio with a guy. I've also always got a few stand by ideas that I've never really put down as well.