Something that I found particularly interesting with this week’s readings was how differently Ruskin and Baldwin work between these two types of texts, the very personal and (sometimes, but not always) the very impersonal.

Like Allison, I found Ruskin’s lecture kind of dull. It was very interesting on an informational level, yes, and employed a structure and style that facilitated that well. However, it was also impersonal to a point at which it became a tinge boring. It reminded me of the Lecture portion of my SOSC class, whose purpose is to impart as much academic material as is humanly possible, whereas the Discussion Section can be more personal and, at times, anecdotal. His letter, on the other hand, was really fun to read. It was less stiff and even self-effacing at times. From a Linguistics perspective, I really enjoyed his remarks about one of the sentences’ grammatical structure; those were rather funny. In short, the differences between Ruskin’s letter and lecture were stark and refreshing.

Baldwin, on the other hand, was more consistent between letter and lecture. Both were rather serious and, at times, tense, as he tried to inform his nephew about the situations that he would face as a young black man surrounded by white men. They were both quite sobering, specifically in that he chose to maintain a tone of seriousness despite the two forms’ conventionally different styles. I think that that decision was telling and reflected the issues that he was addressing quite succinctly. He also summed up the difficulties that education can bring up, and the contradiction that exists within it, in a way that I don’t think that I could have.