Your name: Mich Flombaum
Your home town: New York City
Your major(s): American Studies, Film minor
Are you fluent in any language(s) other than English? Hebrew
What are your career plans? Television production or entertainment law
What is your favorite book or author and why? Murakami and Vonnegut and Salinger and Roth
What is your most frequent grammatical error? Comma splices
What is your biggest grammatical pet peeve? Misplaced modifiers, but I find them funny
What is your favorite word? Garrulous because it sounds like what it means
What is your favorite procrastination method when you have a paper to write? TV always
Describe (in a short paragraph) a significant breakthrough in your development as a writer: In 12th grade I wrote an American History paper about Billy Wilder's 1960 film The Apartment and how it portrays women and men in a (then) new corporate workplace. This was my first paper using American Studies methodology (using a text as a lens with which to explore larger themes in American history) and I didn't even know it! I thought it was just fun to write a history paper using a movie as the main source. In writing that paper I realized that the way one uses and explains a text is what matters, and not what kind of text one uses. While part of this skill is analysis, powerful writing makes or breaks this kind of paper. Explaining ideas clearly and thoughtfully can win over any teacher or professor, convincing him or her that your favorite movie is indeed fair game in an academic paper, but only if you organize your writing to justify it.
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