When it comes to writing, tone is important to me. It says a lot about what I try to convey and because of the type of texts I’ve written in the past, I’ve aimed for an academic tone. So, when given the chance to retell a popular story creatively, I came up with an idea and ran with it.
I based my annotated story on Little Red Riding Hood. After a considerable amount of research, I decided on the path my story would take — a twisted family tale. I enjoyed having so much room to work with and so I decided to use a creative, non-academic tone with much of my writing for the project. It was fun and quite liberating. Through the project, I had many ideas flowing because I didn’t feel so restricted. I met the length requirements without feeling very stressed about it.
Unfortunately, I had the tendency to overdo this newfound freedom. For my annotations, I think I failed to isolate the creative and academic aspects of the project. Explaining my research should have had a serious tone. Instead, it came across as somewhat of an informal rambling/brainstorming on paper. I could have worked on narrowing my ideas down; maybe doing so would have made my project more solid and coherent.
The audience had an impact on the choices I made, too. When I wrote the story, I knew that my main readers would be my peers and teacher. Knowing that fact made me feel more comfortable with doing something differently. Had it been the general public/UAF, I would have probably thought more about writing with an academic tone. This is why my contribution to the museum project had a more “serious” quality about it than the annotated story. I knew that I would have a wider audience.
With all this in mind, I now know one more point to work on with my writing. Besides our class projects, writing blog posts have helped me explore different options. In my opinion, there should be a balance between the creative and academic aspects; there’s a time and place for one or the other. Hopefully, I won’t stop searching for that balance myself.
Collective Stories 
I agree that tone is very important, but tone is dependent upon what you are writing. I have to say that I too struggled with the annotations, switching from an academic tone to a more creative tone could be difficult. One thing is that the blog posts are on the internet so technically it has the potential to reach the world, because of that I actually had the hardest time with them. The museum project was definitely a second. I think that it is hard to please a wider audience so people tend to be more comfortable the smaller the audience. Was it difficult for you to write the blog posts or was that easier?
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Finding a balance between the two aspects of writing is definitely important, and there’s certainly a time and place for both. I’ve always found that being casual can help ease a reader of any type into something you write, as it creates less of an uptight atmosphere about the piece which may ward off some readers. Having the facts where they’re needed is necessary, but finding a time and place for both sides is what’s important. When you write enough, you’ll find your own way of telling a story, writing an essay, anything, and it may be casual or it may be professional, but either way sacrifices definitely need to be made for certain situations.
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A consistent tone is pretty much required in academic writing. In fiction it’s perfectly fine for the tone of voice to change, as long as it suits the story, but when it comes to essays, or annotations in this case, the tone needs to be the same throughout. If the tone becomes casual, or the language starts becoming biased, it can be hard for a reader to stomach. Learning what tone to use and how to keep it consistent is a very good way to make your reading more enjoyable.
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I feel that in good time, you’ll be able to achieve that balance that you’re looking for. A person such as myself, I actually have a hard time writing in a creative tone because I’m so used to writing in an analytical tone and I seem to not be able to veer away from that. That’s why this semester, I tried to write in a more emotional sense in that I wanted to not be a dull writer. I feel like I had some success with that in my Paul Bunyan story, but I know the annotations I did were definitely more academic sounding. The only reason though why I seem to not be able to digress from the academic writing style is just because I’ve done it for so long. So, long story short, you just have to keep practicing and you’ll gradually become more adept at being academic in your writing.
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