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The English language is full of idiosyncrasies. Why the there, their, and they’re? Why do c and s sometime have the same sound and sometimes not? How do poop, shit, and feces all mean the same thing, but have three entirely different connotations? The answer may never be entirely clear, but in a way that’s the beauty of English. I’ve always loved language and its power. The power it has to move, to shock, to express, to relay, to convey, to make change. How cursive, print, and American Sign Language can all have the same alphabet, but look entirely different. English is an art. My Spanish professor once told our class that he loves English because it is one of the most creative languages he has ever encountered. I thought he was crazy at the time, knowing how ridiculous and unclear the rules of the English language can be, but looking back on my career in English, I think he may be right.

As a lot of kids do, I used to dumb myself down in school to interact with the other kids. It’s apparently cool not to care. Senior year, however, something changed in me and I decided to start using the pile of vocabulary that had been gathering dust in the back corner of my mind. I began incorporating scholarly vocabulary into my every day life and you know what? It felt good. I finally understood what my father had been getting at when he encouraged me to use “50 cent words,” which turned into a little game where he would score my integration of more uncommon and intellectual words into every day sentences. I now use 50 cent words as often as I get the chance.

I think the most powerful thing about language, the reason I dedicated my college career to studying the English language, is its profound ability to impart some of the most breathtaking beauty. Language has an amazing ability to engage all of the human senses with a mere syntactical feat or an elliptical that can say all at once, “this sentence is over, but this is not all.” Phrases can induce tears, words can build characters and worlds that we can explore from nothing just by putting words on a page. Words are an endless realm of possibilities and I want to continue to explore them, learn them, play with them, exhaust them, exasperate them until they can do nothing else for me (though I doubt this will ever be the case). This is why I am an English major, this is my art, this is all of our arts. This is Harry Potter and The Great Gatsby and Othello. This is all of the poems I wrote in middle school and the complete works of William Wordsworth. This is nature and culture, history and the future, reality and fiction. Wherever my future holds, I’m ready because I know the power of language.

Before August 9th, few people outside of Missouri knew about the suburb of St. Louis called Ferguson. Yet with the shooting of Michael Brown Jr. by police officer Darren Wilson, this suburb of 21,000 was thrust into the international spotlight reinvigorating the national conversation on race. As mostly peaceful protests take place in Ferguson, Chicago, New York, Seattle and the Bay area, people have taken the streets, internet, and national television to share their thoughts on the grand jury’s decision not to indict Darren Wilson.

One such peaceful protest occurred on Sunday when NFL players Cook, Austin, Bailey, Britt, and Givens came out during pregame introductions with their arms raised in the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” gesture. That evening the St. Louis Police Officer’s Association requested the NFL to discipline the Ram players who participated in that protest. While the NFL has declined the request, questions of the appropriateness of this very public protest have been raised.

In the context of modern society, the players are both athletes and entertainers. While their venue is a football stadium broadcast directly to millions of TVs every Sunday, they perform the same basic function of traditional entertainers: to hold the attention of their audience with something amusing or diverting. Many entertainers have come out in support of various causes, bringing attention to their causes at their performance venue before or even during a performance without detracting from the experience. At a performance at Hill Auditorium in 2011 Audra McDonald interrupted the performance to speak about marriage equality and anti-bullying. Was there any outcry about this brief tangent? Not that I heard.

As an entertainer on a national scale the athletes are expected to be role models, knowing that people around the country are watching their every move and many strive to emulate their behavior. The backlash that the players received from their peaceful protest stems from disagreement with their stance and the unfamiliarity of football being used to make a political statement or show support for a cause. Regardless of the intense physical requirements of football at the end of the day it is simply one form of entertainment, and for me, the best kind of entertainment always has something to say.

I’ve been writing a lot for classes lately – one TV script (final draft due tomorrow!), one movie screenplay, an essay, and also this weekly gig. I got pretty sick of staring at my old-school style of outlining:

1. Thesis – this outline’s goal is to show how I used to outline

• I used a hierarchy of bullet points
• relating back to my main theme
• each sub-point adds another intricacy to my core argument
• And finally, I tie it all back together in a:

1. New direction – this may be another

• topic paragraph for a blog post
• scene for my screenplay
• Section of my essay
• And finally, I reach

****THE CONCLUSION – That this gets really boring to do for hours.

So, I came up with a new style of outlining. Something refreshing, colorful, exciting – something that I could do for 5 hours in a row without wanting to kill myself and cure the overwhelming boredom.

I created: The Board.

The board uses color-coded post-it notes and color-coded ink on them to divide up my themes, plot twists, character arcs, by color so I can keep track of them visually. Post-it Notes also let me feel my story out, literally moving scenes by hand to visualize the order and progression of arc, theme, or plot.

I got this idea from Blake Snyder, a screenwriter who wrote an awesome book on screenwriting advice called Save the Cat.

I created a second board for this screenplay (a super-hero stoner comedy, that’s why I have green post-it notes for the main plot and green ink for the super-hero’s dialogue-lulz) using one of Blake’s ideas from his sequel book Save the Cat Strikes Back, in which Blake notes the value of using different organizational logics in order to stimulate the creative process.

(This board’s structural logic is inspired from Snyder’s Chart Called the Conversion Machine)

Moreover, the board’s physical presence really helps me feel connected to my writing. My writing isn’t just an electronic file on my computer anymore, it’s a physical object I spent time and energy creating. And it looks so PRETTY!!! Every part of the writing process becomes a work of art in its own right, filling me with a fresh creative energy to push through writer’s block. So I guess what I’m saying is, don’t underestimate the value of outlining – and also, don’t underestimate your ability to invent creative, artistic ways to innovate on the very nature of the outline – an outline says a lot about your creative sensbilities.

I hope everyone is having a wonderful Thanksgiving break.
Here is a link to an interesting Thanksgiving related series of photos so as to linger on a festive mentality for a bit longer before entering into the last days of classes.

Thanksgiving Special: How 10 Famous Artists Would Plate Thanksgiving Dinner