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Project #1 Elizabeth Bloomsburg

Memo

To: Toby Wray

From: Elizabeth Bloomsburg
Date: September 4, 2020
Subject: Project 1

In this memo, I analyzed my essay, “Animation Parallels” This analysis was requested by
Professor Wray to establish the positives and negatives of my style of prose. The information
will determine if my report is concise, precise, and direct according to technical and scientific
prose style.

Concise:
Being concise means to explain a subject in a clear and concise manner, often using only the bare
minimum of words to address the audience and the purpose for writing.

Repetition: I used the word animation far too much.

Example: Computer animation, in the 1970’s, started to become more familiar to

what we see today. The animation studio Pixar stated in this time frame and
began to accomplish human-like animation. The resulting frames of animation,
while revolutionary at the time, can only be described as off-putting today.

In hindsight, I could have shortened or left out instances of using the word to modify
nouns. I also could have used words like movement to describe the movement of
animation. Doing so would have contributed to a more engaging experience for readers
and given them a better flow of words.

Redundant Words and Phrases: In this report, I only came across a few redundant
phrases that gave no support to the writing.

Example: There are three examples of animation that are prominent in the world
today. There is traditional Western animation, computer animation, and anime.

The uses of “there are” and “that” are redundant, as they could have been removed.
Leaving “are” in the first sentence would have made the sentence stronger.
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Project #1 Elizabeth Bloomsburg
Dead Phrases: Within my essay, I found some dead phrases.

Example: Western animation definitely contributed to the rise of Eastern style

animation, or more commonly known as anime. It influenced every aspect of the
art but is most commonly seen in how the eyes are drawn.

Here, I should have completely taken out the “definitely” and the “commonly”, and left
only the “contributed” and the “most”. This gets rid of the dead phrase and offers a
smoother reading experience.

Unnecessary Modifiers: This is something I know I need to work on to help become

more concise. In this essay, I found a few instances in need of fixing.

Example: The higher your probability to score, p, is the higher chance you have
of actually scoring. This is how probability can really help us analyze different
sports and how one scores or wins the match/game.

I was trying to get the point across that estimating probability can lead one on their way
to success in the sports world. As scoring is the way to win, I hoped to emphasize its
importance as well and how probability can predict its occurrence.

Precise:
Being precise means using certain terms and wording depending on the audience. It’s better to be
precise when speaking to an audience with low-level knowledge of the subject and technically
accurate when speaking to an audience with high-level knowledge.

Audience Expertise, Technical Terminology, and Consistent Terminology: For this

paper, the audience had low-level knowledge of the intricacies of animation. I think I
used consistent terminology to address high-level concepts, but also gave examples to
flesh out the term. The following lists are the terms I used consistently in the essay.

Animation (high): Squish-and-squash, uncanny valley, cels, multi-layered

drawings.
Explanations (low): elastic, creepy, frames, differently drawn backgrounds.

I had to define or provide examples of these terms because the audience, my high school
English teacher is not very knowledgeable on how animation works and how it is made.
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Project #1 Elizabeth Bloomsburg
Specifics/Details: The essay required step by step explanations of how animation differs
between mediums. During a few parts, I found that I start to get too excited about the
subject and start to go into too specific of detail.

Example: Because traditional Western animation was mostly drawn on special

pieces of paper that would then be flipped through a special camera, most of the
time there would be frames that would look very weird because they were
supposed to be translating movement. These would look very weird, yet gave the
final product a very nice, sometimes very Bob Iwerks-esque feel.

To fix this, I should keep in mind that not everybody is going to know who Bob Iwerks is
and use a more generic term. A good example would be Disney-esque, instead of refering
to a specific animator.

Direct:
Direct means being straightforward. In this case, it’s achieved using active verbs, voice, topic
stance, and stress on the subject.

Active vs. Lazy Verbs: Within my essay, I found both lazy and active verbs. I used lazy
verbs like drawn, colored, and altered which made my writing seems flat at times. Some
active verbs I found were styled, animated, and expressive that helped to help the reader
be interested.

Examples:
Lazy: “The frames would be drawn, then colored by cel artists, would then
hand them of to another artist to be altered.”

Active: “Most animators had a special, styled mark when it came to parts of
films they would draw, like the head-waggle some Disney characters would do in
the 60s.”

Use of the lazy verbs made things seem unengaging, while the active verbs helped my
writing come to life.

Passive Verbs: In this paper, I found a few occurrences of passive verbs like “is” and
“are”. These were hard to avoid the entire use of, but it is frequent enough that I should
have found another way to show being in the essay.

Example: “There are three kinds of animation. They are traditional, computer,
and FLASH animation.”
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Project #1 Elizabeth Bloomsburg
In these instances, I could have switched around the sentence structure in the first
sentence to be “Three kinds of animation get used today”. That would have then made the
next “are” used more tolerable.

Passive Voice: I couldn’t find any passive voice within my paper, due to long sentences.
That ruled out the use of the “zombie test”.

Example: “Using cels made high quality animations but was also very expensive,
with studios like Warner Brothers spending about 50,000 USD to produce a
Looney Toons cartoon in the 50s.”

While I am sure this sentence has other grammatical issues, I know it’s got an active
voice. Adding on “by zombies” does not make sense with this sentence.

Topic Position: I think my use of topic position was well executed. My introduction
paragraph explains what animation is and how it affects our perception of the natural
world.

Example: “With the use of certain drawing techniques, characters often come to
life with over-the-top facial expressions. Otherwise, they would seem flat and
sometimes creepy.”

Without this topic sentence, readers would be very confused as to what animation
affected their perception of the natural world. And they would find it even more
confusing as they continued to read.

sStress Position: Like the topic position experience, my stress position summarizes and
adds to my main ideas. I usually use this to round up the ideas within my conclusion.

Example: “As witnessed, the way that animation evolved over time has greatly
impacted how human beings perceive expressions, and by extension emotions. It
helps by conveying emotion through sight and sound, drawing style, and timing.”

Here I was able to summarize what I said about animation. Stress position is a key aspect
of a person’s writing and will leave their audience with a takeaway to remember.

Conclusion: In conclusion, this project helped me find common writing mistakes of

mine. One of the biggest problems I noticed was how much I would tend to ramble on a
(exciting to me) topic. Something that surprised me was how I was very good at not using
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Project #1 Elizabeth Bloomsburg
a passive voice so that I can engage the reader with my writing. English is something I’ve
always had a knack for, but it’s always nice to find your flaws and figure out how to fix
them.