I read through all of these and found essay #4 to be the most humorous and most interesting. I need to print this one out and tape it on my bathroom mirror to read in the mornings.
The insights on entering contests was interesting and something I’ve never thought about. The author is definitely right though — there cannot be anyway that judges actually read all of those long entry essays. I did the math and if the average essay length is 500 words and there are 15 essays and 41 students, he’ll have to read 307,500 words to get through this entire blog in one semester! Sheesh. I’m curious how his eyeballs don’t fall out…
The ITC Garamond essay was also well written. I really really want to become a font snob, but right now, I can really only identify Helvetica with confidence (and there must be an ‘a’ in the sentence). On the other hand, not being able to read a book because of the font? Can that be determined as a type of OCD? Maybe it is a blessing that my eyes can’t tell the difference, or have a font preference for reading!
Last, the essay on plagiarism was quite insightful. My entire life, all I’ve been told is that plagiarism is absolutely awful. With the way our society has shaped its views around plagiarism, I am equally shocked that source codes of websites is open for anyone to view! I am incredibly grateful that it is, because I use it quite often as a learning tool. I wonder how views on ‘plagiarism’ will change in the next 100 years with the innovations behind open source software and technology.