From the vault II

And now, because I can't think of anything compelling to write about, I will reach back into the mists of time and retrieve an item from a folder -- a folder known to most only as My Documents.

This time I give you a masterpiece dated April 27, 2005, although the date modified time stamp tells me it was last edited at 7:55 AM on April 28... 35 minutes before it was due. From freshman year of college:

"The way in which a movie is edited is key to how it is understood. With some movies, the editing is thoroughly thought out in order to advance the plot in a very specific way. The Conversation, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, is one such movie. The film’s use of temporal relations helps create suspense, confusion and a sense of mystery."

Note the masterful way in which I expanded my word count by adding useless words like "in which." Consider my choice to write a list when one word could easily have summed up the thought. Take a moment to reflect on my scholarly assertion that some movies use editing for a reason.

I imagine the single most important factor in choosing to write my essay on The Conversation was the fact that Francis Ford Coppola goes by three names. That's one more name than most other directors. That's one less word I had to put thought into during my efforts to reach the minimum word requirement.

This has been From the Vault. Join me next week when I mull over "Poverty Reaction Paper 3.doc."

From the vault

I now bring you the unedited text of a document I recently unearthed from 2005:

"Innocent until proven guilty."
"You make it sound like a forgone conclusion."
"That's the saying, Jack."
"Innocent unless proven guilty. Our justice system should really take a look into adopting that saying."

By kc

Bravo, "kc." Bravo. This is some pretty awesomely hokey dialogue.

Part of me is embarrassed to have written this. Firstly (what a terrible word) because I'm sure a bunch of other idiots have come up with the same thing thinking they were really clever, and secondly because there is no story to go with it. It's just a bit of dialogue I apparently thought was cool. I'm not sure this is the kind of thing you can flesh out into a screenplay...

There's another part of me that cautiously supports what I wrote. I guess this is pretty normal trepidation for a writer. Sometimes you can't convince yourself something you've written is crap until someone else tells you it is.* And why should I feel stupid that other people have written the same thing? I'm pretty sure I came up with it independently.

"By kc." That seems to assert pretty clearly that this is my intellectual property. Still, looking back at the lowercase letters of my name makes me wonder if I'm betraying some kind of doubt that this is original work.

Hopefully it's just a personal flourish I've forgotten about.

*Sum of "somes" in that sentence: 3.