#workshop stories

[alternativephotographycom]

Elizabeth Opalenik Workshop Stories and how she came to Mordançage

Elizabeth Opalenik shares her love of the Mordançage process and discusses memorable workshop stories from her new book featuring over 100 iconic photographers.

Elizabeth Opalenik shares her love of the Mordançage process and discusses memorable workshop stories from her new book featuring over 100 iconic photographers. Writer and photography / Elizabeth Opalenik Why is mordancage your faviourite process? Elizabeth Opalenik: When something strongly resonates with you in photography you tend to remember your first encounter. I was mesmerized in 1982, the…

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[reyescarolina]

Workshop Story #2

[reyescarolina]

Workshop Story #1

[zenithdannadir]

Bahasa Python

Hello there! Apa kabar?

Saya lagi ingin cerita nih, beberapa hari yang lalu saya ikut sebuah workshop tentang Bahasa Python, and it was fun :) jadi rencananya, kali ini saya mau share apa saja yang kami lakukan saat itu.

Sebelumnya, i’ve never been into programming language. Kalau mendengar bahasa pemrograman sih lumayan sering ya.. C, C++, java, pascal, delphi, dll; tapi kalau nyobain coding sih belum pernah. Jadi saya ini bener-bener cuma di level ‘sering mendengar’ saja.__. haha

Terus ya tiba-tiba ada ‘selebaran-berformat-jpg’ nyasar di newsfeed fb, isinya menginfokan ada yang mengadakan workshop tentang Bahasa Python ini. Kesan yang saya tangkap sih tujuannya memang untuk mengenalkan seperti apa Bahasa Python itu ke khalayak ramai. Dan di selebaran juga tidak terlihat tulisan ‘just for experts’ atau ‘cuma untuk yang sudah jago’ atau ‘workshop tingkat lanjut’.

Jadi, ya saya coba ikut saja :)

Anyway.. dengar-dengar, Bahasa Python ini termasuk yang paling mudah diantara saudara-saudaranya yang lain. Coba tengok infographic ini...

See? Difficulty levelnya 1 of 5. Jadi penasaran kan?

Workshopnya mulai jam 10.00-14.00 wita, in real life mulai jam 11.00-15.00. Ada 2 coding session yang belum sempat dibawakan karena keterbatasan waktu. Sayang ya?*sigh*

Pembawa materinya saat itu adalah founder titiktanya.com which is Mr. Rahmat Ramadhan. Nah, titiktanya.com ini dibuatnya pakai Bahasa Python. He has been in relationship with Python for 5years and still counting. cieeeh.

So, here it is.. 

Jadi, Bahasa Python ini bukan varian parseltongue-nya Harry sama Voldemort ya.. Ini adalah salah satu bahasa pemrograman, yang mana dipakai untuk memprogram komputer. Contoh program/situs yang menggunakan Bahasa Python ini adalah Youtube, Instagram, Google, NASA, Facebook, dll 

Di awal, Mas Rahmat cerita tentang kelebihan-kelebihan Python; diantaranya; easy to learn, simple, fleksibel, dinamis, multi-OS, termasuk tipe interpreter (bukan tipe compiler), sudah mendukung OOP(object oriented programming)(bahasa pemrograman yang lain ada yang belum OOP, maksudnya lebih memakai logic daripada data), errr... sesi ini lebih banyak membahas tentang perbandingan Python dengan bahasa pemrograman lain, and the thing is.. i didnt quite understand, :) so, what we can REALLY highlighted here is ‘simple’ and ‘easy to learn’ :D these words are pretty relaxing ,huh? XD

Selanjutnya ada pembagian bahasa pemrograman. Menurut kedekatannya; bahasa pemrograman dibagi 4; 

Bahasa Mesin (perintah-perintahnya pakai bahasa yang ‘mesin banget’ cth binary number; 0 dan 1); 

Bahasa Low-Level (sudah mulai pakai kode-kode perintah sederhana, tapi tetap lebih dekat ke bahasa mesin daripada bahasa manusia; contoh Bahasa Assembly); 

Medium-Level (instruksinya ada yg memakai bahasa manusia dan simbol-simbol, seperti begin, end, if, {}, &, ||, etc etc; contoh Bahasa C); dan yang terakhir, 

High-Level (yang ini perintah-perintahnya sudah ‘lebih manusia’ daripada yang tadi-tadi; contoh Visual Basic, PHP, Java, Python) 

Di slide selanjutnya kami diperlihatkan video-video pengaplikasian dari Bahasa Python ini. Menarik lah.

Karena Bahasa Python ini tidak bisa langsung dijalankan di windows, maka kita diminta nginstall programnya dulu. Yang belum punya bisa langsung ke sini https://www.python.org/downloads/ terus pilih yang versi 2.7. Kenapa bukan yang paling baru? katanya versi terbaru sudah jauh dari nilai-nilai ke-Python-an gitu, katanya. Untuk yang pakai linux, biasanya sudah ada dari sananya. Untuk memastikan, coba ke terminal, lalu ketik python.

Selanjutnya kita masuk ke sesi coding. It was fun. Berasa programmer gitu haha(what?). Beberapa peserta ada yang sudah kenal bahasa pemrograman lain alias they are a real programmer, jadi tidak terlalu sulit mengikuti. Yang lainnya sepertinya benar-benar baru macam saya. Ada sekumpulan anak sekolah yang ikut acara ini didampingi guru matematikanya. Ada juga mbak mas mahasiswa/i gitu.

Jadi waktu coding session, kami diminta untuk menulis perintah-perintah sederhana. Paaaaling pertama yang diajarkan adalah 

print “Hello World!!” (klik enter)

Hello World!!

Mas Rahmat bilang, ini kalau pakai bahasa lain, minimal 3 baris baru hasilnya bisa sesuai dengan perintah diatas. Selanjutnya, ada beberapa hal, seperti membahas perintah-perintah yang berhubungan dengan string, integer, dictionary, if, else, elif, loop, dll banyaak. 

Saya sempat berkali-kali salah dan ‘diingatkan’ sama si Python ini apa kesalahan saya dan di-line keberapa. Keren ya. Tapi karena pada dasarnya memang baru belajar ya, jadi kadang kesalahannya ketemu dan bisa diperbaiki, kadang “hmm-perasaan-ini-sudah-benar-deh” gitu. 

So, sepertinya segini dulu yang bisa saya share. Lain kali ngobrol lagi ya :D

See ya!

[everythingissymbolic]

Creative writing workshop classes are now a thing of the past, at least for my undergraduate career. Since I’ve made it through three rounds, I thought I’d whip up a post of some of the most common mistakes I’ve seen. These won’t be concept or higher order issues. I mean cosmetic or basic stuff that crops up a lot for some reason. Most are easy fixes, and they’ll make a better first impression. Of course, your content still needs to be good, but that’s a different topic.

I’m sure I’ve harped on some of these things before, but it never hurts to repeat.

Dialog Formatting

Unless you want to get artsy, standard American practice for dialog is as follows:

“That looks dangerous,” he said.

“That looks dangerous.”

He said, “That looks dangerous.”

Punctuation goes within the quotation marks. If you’re adding attribution, link it with a comma. I have seen way too much of this:

“That looks dangerous”. He said.

Now, sometimes people link tags/attribution when they shouldn't. Don’t do this:

“That looks dangerous,” he smiled.

I see this a lot, but you can’t smile a sentence.

“That looks dangerous.” He smiled.

I’m on the fence with ‘laughed’ and ‘sighed’. Some might say you can laugh or sigh words. Others might disagree. Go with your gut. But saying ‘“Whatever”, she said with a laugh’ is probably the safer option.

Bonus Dialog Tips: Ignore those ‘said is dead’ worksheets covered in additional dialog tags. Our brains are so used to ‘said’ that they skip right over it, keeping readers in the flow of the conversation. Other tags draw attention. If they’re needed to show how the characters are speaking, use them, but use them sparingly.

Also, if you feel you’re overusing attributions, blend dialog with action instead.

“I never said I felt that way.” I focused on stirring my tea, not looking up. “You’re jumping to conclusions.”

She raised her eyebrows at me over the rim of her own coffee cup. “I’m just saying what it looked like.”

Beats

Avoid mixing different characters acting and speaking together. 

“I found this book at the library,” Valerie said.

She lifted the worn volume off the table to display it. “How’d you convince them to let you check it out?” Jeanne asked.

Valerie is the one lifting the book. However, it’s easy to assume that Jeanne is, since that action is paired with her dialog. A tidier way to do this would be:

“I found this book at the library,” Valerie said. She lifted the worn volume off the table to display it.

“How’d you convince them to let you check it out?” Jeanne asked.

This is a judgment call a lot of the time. If characters are acting at the same time or in response to others’ speech or actions, it might make sense to group them. If you’re writing a battle scene, putting lots of characters speaking and acting in the same paragraph might convey the chaos of the situation. Always make sure it’s clear who’s doing what, though, and usually start a new line if a new person starts talking, at the very least. 

Tense

I don’t really have advice for this. Just proofread your work and pay attention. I’ve seen lots of stories from native English speakers where the tense bounces between past and present without warning or reason. Rereading ought to catch that, but I see it enough that people clearly need to be more careful.

Commas and Other Punctuation

Commas are the worst, but I see hyphens and semicolons misused too. 

For a quick refresher, semicolons separate two independent clauses (which could stand alone as full sentences.) The clauses usually are logically connected.

She had run all the way to class; I could see she was still out of breath. 

They are also used to punctuate lists with internal commas, such as listing off cities: New York, New York; Chicago, Illinois; and San Francisco, California.

(Here’s a guide to semicolons by the Oatmeal.)

Commas have loads of rules. Everyone messes them up sometimes, and I tend to be more descriptivist - I’ll bend the rules on punctuation for a certain effect. However, this is a good resource on the basics. It’s a good resource on everything. If you’re a student and you haven’t seen the Purdue OWL, learn about it now and never let it go.

Adjectives/Adverbs

Some people make it sound like you should never use an adjective or adverb in your life. I think that’s overkill. They can be very helpful sometimes. However, many workshop writers overuse them. If you’re modifying every noun and verb, you can probably cut back. As an exercise to see if you might be overdoing it, circle every adjective and adverb on the page and take a look. (You can also do this with ‘I’s at the beginning of the sentence if you’re writing in first person. It’s easy to lose sentence structure variation in that pov.)

These are a few of the worst offenders I’ve noticed in my time in workshops. I can’t promise that fixing these issues will make your story perfect, but it might prevent your fellow readers from focusing on those things so that they can give you advice on more vital areas.