Prior to this Writing 20 class, I had little to no experience with academic writing. Over the course of this semester, however, I have learned a lot about the utility of academic writing and the many functions it serves. In this class, I learned about the functions and tools of this writing style through the lens of documentary film and theater.
Firstly, the most obvious use of academic writing is that it can be used to qualify one’s claims through the use of relevant research and background information. Secondly, academic writing allowed me to explore both the strengths and weaknesses of the pieces I worked on this semester. Initially, my naïveté allowed me to believe everything in both the works as being a thorough retelling of reality. However, as I scoured the many reviews available on the Duke library resources website, I was able to garner insight into the general critical responses of the pieces. This process allowed me to more critically analyze the pieces that I had worked on and to see both their strengths and weaknesses. Documentary theater appeals to emotion and the connection that exists between actors and the audience. For example, in the play My Name is Rachel Corrie, we identify with Corrie and are very disturbed and troubled by her untimely death. While the piece was powerful and moving, however, we should note that Corrie’s journal entries were taken from a young person’s diary who, arguably, did not understand the issue well. By analyzing the shift in medium from theater to film in Gaza Strip, I learned about the editing tools that filmmakers have at their disposal and the amount of conscious decision making that goes into cinema verité film making. The filmmaker makes choices in the editing process which are a reflection of his/her perspective and bias.
Lastly, when I first heard the term “creative reality”, I thought it a witty term for documentary, however, I did not realize its implications. Academic writing allowed me to understand what this term entails; the promise of documentary to provide access to factual documents while creatively mediating the interaction between the audience and the material. We can see, after culling through some of the materials in the databases, the pitfalls that documentarians face and the care and caution we must exercise when viewing a documentary piece, be it theater or film. We must realize that there will be shortcomings as the documentarian is limited in that he/she must decide which portions of the archive to present. On the other hand, however, we should not get too hung up on these shortcomings but instead should accept that there is no way around them. We must, however, keep these pitfalls in mind and realize that the function of documentary is not to give us a reality or truth but to give us a window to experience another time or place from someone else’s perspective. Academic writing has encouraged me to approach a work more critically, to not accept documentaries at face value, and explore the truth from different angles.