WB Post 3

As an overall theme, I have chosen writings that have to deal with my research topic, Giles from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The first of my pieces of writing is an article from Slayage Online, a place with a lot of Buffy articles. The article is called "Watching the Watcher: Analysing the character of Rupert Giles. It was written by Barbara Maio. The link for the article is http://slayageonline.com/SCW_Archive/Maio.pdf

The article has many up's and down's, as do most. One huge flaw in this article, as the title suggests is the grammar and mechanics of the author. Although it is clearly a scholarly article with good observations backed up by factual evidence, the fact that there are many misspellings and grammar mistakes really does take away from the credibility of the article. The mistakes aren't drastic or extremely bountiful but again, they seem to "dumb down" the article a bit. I think this woman honestly doesn't know english as well as she knows Giles. The upside to this article is that Maio really does an excellent job of getting her point across. She makes bold observations at the beginning of her paragraphs and then follows up by providing much information and evidence from different Buffy episodes to back up her opinion. This not only helps support her argument, but all the evidence makes things easier on someone who doesn't watch the show much. I have not seen many of the episodes mentioned in the article, but I understood Maio's stand and why she chose it on every issue mentioned because of all the evidence provided.

My second piece is also a Slayage Online article. This one is titled "Rupert Giles and Search Tools for Wisdom in Buffy the Vampire Slayer". It was written by GraceAnne A. DeCandido. The link for this one is http://www.well.com/user/ladyhawk/Giles.html

This article took a somewhat different approach than the other, but it was very effective. I like how DeCandido started out by making her claim right off the bat, gave a generous amount of general background information on Giles's role as well as how he does things (and also gave some background info on other characters, which helped), and then got into the details. I think that by making one's thesis right off the bat really gives the reader something to think about throughout the article, and it really got me (the reader) interested from the very beginning. Putting the background information directly after the "thesis paragraph"made sure that reader knew those important facts about the show before diving into the article. The article felt a little scattered to me at points, but everything went together pretty well. The writer definitely puts a lot of facts about Giles in her article to back up her point that Giles is a good image for a librarian, using a lot of quotes (all relevant to the thesis, mostly about Giles and his books) to really give hard evidence to support her claim. and I think my favorite part about the article was that when it came to talking about Giles, the author stayed to the librarian side of him, staying on topic and not straying to other aspects of Giles's character. This helped keep the article relatively short and to-the-point, which made it readable and entertaining.

If you stuck around until now, thank you for being part of my longest blog ever. Haha!