Presentation is Key

When you're writing a letter to your best friend, to your boss, sending a text message to your cousin or writing a research paper, you use a different tone of voice in each one. Your science teacher would most likely not appreciate you using slang to talk about how osmosis occurs. Voice, tone, and the presentation of your thoughts completely change the feeling of your writing. Turning in a coffee ring covered, crumpled, hand written hard copy of a five page analytical paper using language you'd use to describe last night's party to your best friend is like going to a nice restaurant and receiving a plate of over cooked pasta with red sauce on a styrofoam plate.

Pasta can be served in so many different ways, some classy, others not so much. The way that it's presented changes the feel of the entree. It seems like when you eat out at a fancy restaurant and order pasta it's one of the most elegant meals you've ever eaten. Reading the name of the Italian dish to the waiter, the uniquely shaped, white, shiny plate and the freshly cracked pepper make eating pasta a whole new experience. When you make pasta at home it's not the same. You have to make sure the noodles are cooked correctly, that they don't annoyingly stick together, and the sauce is the right temperature. Your plates and utensils seem boring compared to the ornate one's from the restaurant, but in the end it is just pasta. Maybe they use a different brand or freshly made noodles with some random type of sauce or meat that you don't usually buy in the store. Despite these differences, pasta is pasta. In terms of writing, words are words; it's just a matter of which words are chosen and how they are strung together to represent your thoughts.

I have a sister who is vegetarian, so my family has started eating veggie products so that we don't have to make two different meals every time the family eats together. So, my Dad has taken to making an original, vegetarian pasta sauce. We mix together a jar of red sauce, a box of this 'meat' crumble that's made out of veggie product, and a packet of pre-made herbs and spices that's supposed to be made with taco meat. When the pasta's almost done, you heat up the sauce in a sauce pan and it tastes pretty good. I love the taco flavoring; although, I my San Diegan taste buds might be biased...