The Uncreative Writing of a Tribe

Uncreative Writing...what is it?

The first thing that comes to mind when a professor tells you to work on an assignment where you're only allowed to take material from others, the first thing that should come mind is...

However, on the topic of being an "Uncreative" Writer sometimes choosing to make something of your own isn't necessarily a bad thing. Take Night Moves for example, no not the song, the digital work of Stephanie Barber. The excerpt from her novel is a short piece that was created by taking the YouTube comments found under the song Night Moves and creating a work of her own.

You might consider what she's doing as a MASHUP or a REMIX but strictly in regards to the writing. Kenneth Goldsmith discussed his views on the topic,

"it is a writing imbued with celebration, ablaze with enthusiasm for the future, embracing this moment as one pregnant with possibility."

In the same way that this:                                                             Is related to this:

Media continues to be influenced by past media. It then becomes a discussion as to who really "created" the media. Who is the author?

           The poem of uncreative writing called "I do Pageants" is one that my class read and discussed. After I read this for the first time, my first thoughts were thinking someone just wrote a bunch of random thoughts and scribbles on a word document and called it a poem...  

              Later, when we discussed what this piece was I understood what this was portraying and it definitely made a lot more sense. What this piece is, is a bunch of quotes from Honey Boo Boo, Gordon Ramsey, and the Kardashians. The quotes that were taken out of whatever video they came from were typed by a group of people. From what they heard, they typed out their "renditions" into their work. All of the quotes are put together and cleaned up to make one cohesive piece of literature. Personally, I have never seen this type of literature be used, but it is definitely one of a kind and is also pretty interesting.


               Authorship is always tricky when it comes to things like this because the way we typed our uncreative writing was copying phrases from other peoples mouths. However, the way in which we created our piece and the certain order in phrases, we used to make it our own. Authorship for uncreative writing is both the "source" of the words and the writers. Yes, the source spoke the words, but the writer took those words and created something unique from it, some may even call it beautiful. The creation of the piece should be credited to the person who wrote down the words in a specific order/way, however, the persons words that they used to create their piece should be mentioned or cited in order to prevent any discrepancies in the future.

In conclusion, though at a first glance uncreative writing may seem as if it is borderline plagiarism, it is actually a useful exercise that can be used in order to think about the act of writing rather than what it is that you are actually writing.  This exciting, non-traditional form of free-writing is a promising tool that can be used to shape the way in which students approach their writing assignments.  Below we have our example of uncreative writing linked.  We were asked to transcribe four separate videos of celebrities with our tribe on the google hangouts messaging service.  The celebrities the class selected were Gordon Ramsey, Kanye West, Betty White, and Michael Scott (Steve Carrell on the sitcom: The Office).  As one may imagine, these transcriptions of our first two celebrities are quite colorful at times, so there is a lot of adult language used.  View at your own risk.

https://tinyurl.com/y9d5khed

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The Digital Human Resources Tribe