Convinced that I should not be a journalist

After reading "Up, Simba" I was completely convinced that I would not be a good journalist. As Wallace described the lifestyle and craziness of his experience, I could not help but be glad that I am not him and that my dream career has no writing under pressure requirement.

The article was very very long and got boring at times but it did have its high points such as the Negative talk between Bush and McCain. I especially enjoyed the story of McCain and little Chris Duren because Wallace really questioned McCain's true motives and got me to thinking of people's true motives in general.

I noticed that Wallace touched on the topic of our last RA about truth at the very beginning. He flat out stated what I had theorized: his article was the truth as he had seen it. He also had several long sentences containing lots of dashes and commas. This sentence would turn out to be almost half of the page. His paragraphs were also long, and I noticed he placed one short sentence in between two long paragraphs at one point. This clearly stood out to me and emphasized what he said in that one short sentence. Lots of detail was written. He seemed to determine to give the reader as much detail about a person as possible - what they wore and looked like - and I wondered why little details like these were important but I'm sure they did have a purpose. Another thing that stood out to me was his use of parentheses. There were so many. Sometimes they were very distracting - I would read a sentence and then the part in the parentheses would show up and be very long and I would go back and reread the first part of the sentence to see what he had been talking about in the first place. Other times I noticed he used them for clarification and background information which was helpful, so the parentheses weren't all distracting.

I appreciated Wallace's use of humor. His description of the 12 Monkeys was especially entertaining to read about. For such a long essay, this made it easier to read and make the pages go by more quickly.