Danielle Oviatt

As per request. Heaven knows, I tick off enough people on purpose, there's no need for me to be ruder than usual. . . I will still try to leave up my page as UntamedShrew? at least for a while, unless of course you'd like to see it go.

Danielle Oviatt or The Shrew, as she likes to call herself on occasion, is an admitted techno-peasant, in the worst way she is afraid. She does tend to hang out with programmers and other technologically adept sorts on a regular basis, though she often wonders why since they have many good laughs at her expense due to her technical ignorance and ineptitude. Thus she discovered this page one day, and was intrigued with the concept and felt compelled to check it out. Oh the fun she could have if only she could figure out how to use it properly--GroupInteractiveSestinaWriting? comes to mind, but the Shrew digresses. Eventually, she found comments on tech-writers and felt compelled to comment, as she often does on virtually everything. Thus her presence was made known on the Wiki, if only briefly and not for much use to anyone other than herself, since she does so enjoy the sound of her own voice.

The Shrew has a B.A. in English and most of a Masters in what has been deemed professional communications--the Shrew finds this slightly pretentious considering what it really is: a means for flaky humanities types like her to possibly make a living, decent or otherwise. As she enjoys hanging out with programmers, despite their ridicule, she has seriously considered becoming some species of tech-writer or web page contributor and is trying to educate herself accordingly, if for no other reason than to reduce the programmer ridicule and prevent apoplexy when she asks the really smart people, a.k.a. the programmers, to do the equivalent of making pigs fly (simple with MultipleInheritance.

She reads too much, writes virtually everything when she can, thinks she knows how to fence, and more or less does what her cat tells her to.

making pigs fly

Simple with MultipleInheritance and a properly designed object oriented system. ;)

Welcome to Wiki! An editing tip. If you want to enter poetry, put a space as the first character of each line; this turns off the auto-word-wrap and thus allows your poem to be correctly formatted. Otherwise, the poetry looks like prose.

With spaces, you get: 

 Roses are red
 Snakes are sneaky
 So says Tom T. Hall
 Welcome to wiki!
Without, you get:

Roses are red Snakes are sneaky So says Tom T. Hall Welcome to wiki!

You can read the TextFormattingRules to see how to do other things (like italics, boldface, etc.)

Danielle, your GroupInteractiveSestinaWriting page was marked for deletion for being OffTopic, and so I moved its contents to here. -- ElizabethWiethoff

Hmm, where to begin? First of all what is a Sestina? Essentially a form of poetry. I have tried on more than one ocasion to describe what one is, but generally it comes across like badly translated stereo instructions so I will just publish the following description, in sestina form, no less, from Rhyme's Reason, by John Hollander 

 Now we come to the complex sestina:
 In the first stanza, each line's final word
 Will show up subsequently at the ends
 of other lines, arranged in different ways;
 The words move through the maze of a dark forest,
 Then crash out, at the stanza's edge, to light.


 The burden of repeating words is light
 To carry through the course of a sestina;
 And walking through the language of a forest
 One comes on the clearing of an echoed word
 Refreshingly employed in various ways,
 Until one's amble through the stanza ends.


 The next one starts out where the last one ends
 As in the other cases, with the light
 Sounds of two lines, like two roads or pathways
 Meeting before they drift apart. Sestina
 Patterns reveal the weaving ways a word
 Can take through the thick clauses of a forest.


 The poest dances slowly through a forest
 Of permutations, a maze that never ends
 With seven hundred Twenty ways those words
 Can be disposed in all six-line groups). But light
 Falls through the leaves into the dark sestina
 Picking out only six cleaer trails, six ways,


 Like change-ringing in bells. The wrods find ways
 and means for coping with an endless forest
 By chopping out the course of a sestina.
 Walking a known trail sometimes, one emends
 The route a bit to skirt a green stone, light
 With covering moss; or rings changes on words-


 And so it is that the first stanza's word
 Order--"Sestina", "Word", "End", and the "Ways'
 (Three abstract, three concrete like "Forest", and "light"
 Which interweaves with leaves high in the forest)--
 With the words' meaning seving different ends,
 Repeats its pattern through the whole sestina.


 Now the envoy's last word: as the sestina's
 End words make way for curtain calls, in the light
 That floods the forest as the whole poem ends.
So, clear as mud, yes?

Now on to the group interactive part. I had a creative writing teacher in high school who was pretty innovative. We had just learned about sestina form and tried, somewhat in vain, as they are a pain to write, to write one. The teacher had read a novel where a character was a writing teacher and had her class write a group sestina. My teacher decided to try it. So we chose six words to use as end words and each out of about fifteen students wrote a first line, then passed the paper on to the next person, who then wrote the next line and passed it on and so forth. It was sort of crazy, but fun in a way. I guess the teacher wasn't that innovative because after seeing what we were coming up with, she decided we weren't accomplishing much, although as I said, I thought it was sort of fun, and even Zen in a way. -- UntamedShrew? aka DanielleOviatt

Hi there,

I just read your comment on the ProgrammersAreWriters page, and thought I would leave you a response in a more private forum. Seriously, if that comment is an example of what you might consider to be effective writing, then maybe you should consider something less technical. The length of your explanatory sentence alone makes me shudder. I won't even go into your flouting of some of the basic rules of readability for technical documentation. Anyway, I'm not really here to criticize (even if I just did), but instead want to suggest that you rewrite your comment in a more stuctured and lucid manner. If you hadn't professed to be a technical writer, then I probably wouldn't have cared, but if your comment is any indication of your ability as a technical writer, or, worse still, if programmers trying to writing technical documentation follow that comment as the correct way to write clearly, then technical documentation as a whole could well be doomed.

Please feel free to delete this message once you have read it.

-- EarlJenkins

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