This week in Journalism we had to read Upon This Rock,an immersion journal piece, by John Jeremiah Sullivan. I am going to share my thoughts on the piece for my response to a piece of writing I read. Let me start off by
saying, I don’t think the author will want to read my thoughts anytime soon. For
Starters, this article was more like a drawn out research essay instead of an
immersion journal. It literally took me three days to get through this 15-page
article on how this guy went to a festival called Creation and was suppose to
write about what he saw. The idea was excellent but the execution was poor. If
he had cut down the length to maybe six, seven or even eight pages, it would
have been so much better. I felt like there was too much detail in every
paragraph, after reading-and sleeping- for a while I just had to go do
something else so my mind could process all the adjectives and understand what
he was saying. Every time he referred to his RV, he wrote “the
twenty-nine-footer”. Looking through his paper, I realized he referred to his
“twenty-nine-footer”17 times. Seventeen times its mentioned in a fifteen page
story where about three pages is John’s back story, two pages is his intro, two
pages is about him getting to the festival and parking his RV, and about half a
page is spent describing Christian Rock and what it is all about.
My over all opinion of this immersion
article, is it was too drawn out. If he had cut down everything he wrote about
to half it’s size and took out a lot of adjectives then it would have been the
right length, maybe even make you want to experience a festival like this. But
after reading this article I feel like I can’t even fully grasp what they do at
these events.
8/28-Upon This Rock (15 minutes)
8/29-Upon This Rock (10 minutes)
8/30-Upon This Rock (10 minutes)
