Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Can’t think of anything to write about? Back to freshman English.

It was one of the first classes I took in college. I took it the summer after high school graduation. It was a writing class, I guess it was called English Composition or something. We had a great teacher for this seven-week summer couse. His assignment:

Write something in a notebook everyday.

He would collect and read through our notebooks periodically.

One of his frequent reminders, I won’t call it a college lecture as it was too practical, was that there were always plenty of topics for our daily writing. Just flip through the newspaper. We didn’t have to read any articles, just look at the ads.

For example, today on the Internet, the annoying ads show me…

• an abandoned cruise ship
• Apache Spark

Okay, so I can write an essay about the cruise ship industry or about how we discard really useful things or how we can use discarded things to help people around the world or how we seem to love floating on water. Then the Apache thing…why is it that computer geeks use such awful names like Apache or what in the world does “spark” have to do with what the software actually does or why is it than they want three-syllable names for everything or why can’t they just speak plain English?

And then there is an ad about the best ads of the year. Gosh. That one goes on forever.

And then if I am not interested in the ads, I can actually read news stories from the top newspapers from all over the world.

Nothing to write about? Really?