Writing 150 Overview

This was an enjoyable class for me because of the environment that I was in. All of my classes this semester have more than 70 people in them and this was the only one that only had about 20 or so. It felt good because I did not feel like an idiot when I would talk (which usually happens in my other classes) and the people were more familiar with eachother. Sister Elliott did an excellent job at keeping the class entertained and was always excited for a new subject that came along which made it a whole lot easier to focus and stay involved. The papers were a little difficult for me because I would usually get bored by the second page and not want to do it anymore. But by the way that Sister Elliott had us peer review and send us to the writing center really saved my butt when it came to the final paper. I learned a lot about peer editing and self-editing in this class because of the involvement. This course is structured well and I don’t think it was that overwhelming other than the online assignments. These really ticked me off because when I was about to finish my computer would flip out on me and I would have to do it all over again. This was really the only frustration that I really had in this class because of the technical problems. Other than that I think that it is a solid course and that Sister Elliott is an awesome teacher. 

Diane Rehm Podcast

The interview that listened to was the interview with John Hurt, an actor who is known for his deep voice and facial structure. He has acted in 100 movies in the last 5 decades and is a very interesting actor. In the show there are cuts of movies that he has performed in that show his talent in acting and shows why his voice is so legendary. The movie that he is most well-known for is in Harry Potter. He is the man who gives Harry his wand and gives Harry advice on how to use it. This shows that John plays fatherly roles in a lot of his movies because his voice is so comforting. The questions that Diane Rehm asks are ones that are very intriguing and helps the audience connect with the person who Is being interviewed. There are pictures on her website that show her and you would never think that she would look like that by the way that she sounds. I would probably make the interview a little shorter because I kept zoning out and then I would have no idea what they were talking about. When I clicked on the interview I had not heard of John Hurt at all before but then I realized he was in a lot of big movies such as Harry Potter. Another big movie that he appeared in was the movie about the Elephant Man which was a very interesting movie and has John’s legendary voice in it. 

My Favorite Movie

My favorite movie of all time would have to be Dodgeball. It is the funniest movie of all time for me and i always quote it with my buddies. It has a funny plot and has a twisty ending. Its a really good combination of humor as well as more humor. It is my favorite movie so far.

My good ol' Issues Paper

Well i will have to say that i have a really interesting topic and it is really funny how i am reading about obesity and gaining a ton of weight as i write it. Irony you could say but i thought that it was really funny. The paper is coming along and i am doing very well with my research. This is going to be a good paper and i feel like i am going to knock it out of the park.

Why Write Response to Arguments

This reading was very interesting in how it put many things into an analogy. The first read was about how you are to separate your paper and compares it to a sandwich that you put in your lunch pale. This was a unique way to put your paper even though this analogy has been used by teachers nation wide. One thing that stood out to me in the next section was when it was talking about emotion and it said that it was hard to control emotion. This is so true because so many writers put very intense words into a sentence that could go without any intense words and vise versa. This is very good advice when writing a paper because we try to use really big words and it could be so much better if we were to use simple words. Then at the end it says we have to find a balance and it just says that a balance of ethos, pathos, and logos can really transform a paper and make it even better. In the argument section it talks about choosing a good argument and know both sides of it. You really need to focus on this in an argument because if you are completely biased on one side, you will not know what the other side is going to throw at you. The rest of the reading focused a lot on arguing and bringing up a good point and in my paper about obesity it is going to be difficult in knowing what both sides present. 

My research topic: Pros and Cons

What i am going to write about for my arguments paper is about obesity. I find this a very interesting topic because it is talked about so much in our society. There are two sides to this topic and one of those sides is the side of that obesity is a disease that a lot of people struggle with. This side talks more about how obesity affects the brain as well as the body and people cannot help it. Research says that people who seem to be obese have certain tissue that produces certain molecules and increases the percentage of fat in the body. The other side of this topic is the side of obesity not being a disease to people and that is the side that i am supporting. This side seems to make so much more sense because it shows that obesity mainly comes from dietary decisions and shows that it can be controlled. I grew up in a house of big eaters and i was a very chunky kid when i was little. My mom seemed to let me eat whatever i want because according to my two older brothers i would grow up and be fit. But the problem to this was that i was A LOT bigger than my brothers were and so my mother changed the way i eat and i slimmed down and began to grow. This is just one example supporting that obesity mainly comes from the way we eat and our decisions. Obesity CAN be controlled and is not a disease.

Analysis of Rhetorical Paper

I feel like this assignment went really well for me. The fact is that i went to the writing center and that helped me a lot as well as the people who revised it. I also felt like i could relate to Martin Luther King. He is my homie and i have mad respect for the guy. He stood up for what he believed in and if i were black i would be right behind him.. word

"I have a dream" that i can write a good paper

Well my rhetorical analysis is on "I have a dream" given by Martin Luther King Jr.. I know that probably a couple other people in the class are doing this same one but i dont really care. I am coming along quite nicely and it is fairly easy because his speech is chalk full of good rhetorical stuff and i feel like i can knock this freakin paper out of the park... just sayin

"On Natural Death", My Rhetorical Source analytical snapshot

"On Natural Death" is a very interesting, informative essay written by Lewis Thomas which gives many perspectives on life and death. The purpose of this essay is to inform the reader of how death is to be looked at for humans against things such as a tree or a little mouse. He starts off by comparing to an elm tree about death and how it is to feel nothing when it dies and then people come and clean up the mess. He then moves on to the example of a mouse in the jaws of a house cat. He expresses how the mouse has a different way of dying than that of the tree. The central message of this essay is that death is looked at in many different ways and no matter how much to try to avoid death, Mother Nature will still get you no matter what you try to do. The world view of Lewis Thomas is simple and that is that life is a valuable thing and we should cherish it but no matter what we do we will have to face the facts and accept mother nature while she is to take our life. He also used many different tools and one of those tools was the examples of little things such as a mouse for us to realize that even little things might feel pain. Another one he uses is evidence from Montaigne, who was a famous writer and he uses some of his work. This is a great story on how you can look on life and pain and really caught my interest because i have had family members pass away and it really changed my views.

Letter from Birmingham Jail

At first i thought this was just going to be another boring story about Martin Luther King jr. rambling on about civil rights that you just had to read in middle school. About halfway through the first page it hooked me and he started using a lot of analogies relating to many different things. He began to use a lot of emotions from the beginning and it started when he talked about how if you were in a black person's position you wouldn't be able to tell your daughter why white people hate black people or why she could not even go outside. This really connects to the parents as well as the teenagers because they will soon have to raise kids of their own. The next huge factor to this letter was the logical and this was evident in the fact that he would basically admit that he was wrong but at the same time he would persecute the court for what they were doing. An example is when he admits that he does not like the "white moderner" at all and society has made them into devils. This is logic because he admits what he is thinking and also refers to the community and the judges. The last big contributor to this letter that makes it unique was the ethical appeal to the story. This was used very cleverly through the fact of describing what the black people had to go through as well as other people from different countries. It was amazing what the African Americans had to do just to get a little bit of freedom or even walk into a diner. This was an amazing outlook from an African American especially Martin Luther King and show us how he was feeling.

What Christians Believe Analytic Snapshot

This is an amazing perspective on the Christian faith written by C.S. Lewis. The outlook presented is amazing while he gives a genre of persuasive as well as personal experience. He begins by telling that he was raised an atheist but then converted to Christianity later in life which totally switched his perspective of God and his creations. The purpose of this was to show how the world looks at Christianity and to show what people are thinking about what Christians believe and what they look at. He gives an amazing message by putting the perspectives of good versus evil into play such as telling that if someone is only exposed to evil and can never really be revealed to good, he can never really tell the difference and only sees evil as good. He also talks about God and his creation of the earth and all that is in it and also gave everything and everyone free will which persuades the reader to think that even if something is bad, it had the choice to be that way. After reading this argument and persuasion, it seems that C.S. Lewis was leaning a lot towards how the world has so many views of Christianity and even if you are to bring up a subject that you think is not true, there is always someone to counter-attack that argument. According to this it seems his world view is shifted a lot towards everybody has their own ideas and should support it all the way and that God has given us agency. He then brings up the New Testament and the example of the evils and murmuring of evils in it to support his ideas of evil and good. I personally believe that this is true in many ways that the world has so many different views and some even have a lot of truth in them. 

"Veil of Fears" Analytic snapshot

The “Veil of Fears” is set upon the middle-eastern countries and how the women there have to cover up and be controlled by the talaban. The Genre for this is more of a documentary explaining what the veil on a woman means and the customs of places such as Iraq or Afghanistan. I believe that the purpose of this is to show the reader what is going on and what the feminist movements are aimed towards in those countries. It tells a lot of the rights women have and what they have to do to stay alive. I thought it was interesting when it talked about how a woman is to do very certain things such as cover up and not even make sounds when walking in the city. So this leads to the central message which is, we should cherish what we have in the United States and remember that we have a lot more freedoms than those in other countries. Not to put the other countries down because they have many qualities that compare to the U.S. but there are many things that distinguish us as a country. The world view of this documentary is that those in middle-eastern countries right now are rising up because of the conditions that they have to live in and what the women have to do. The tools and evidence that were used very well were showing what a woman really has to do and what a day might look like in the eyes of a middle-eastern woman. Another tool used is imagery because it describes the woman to be dressed head to toe and having a veil which really puts a good image in your head. 

Reflection on the good ol' Personal Narrative

This personal narrative seemed like it went pretty well and I revised it pretty well too. I just am not sure about a couple things because I didn’t have time to really think about things and get the detail right. I also felt like I had a solid story and plenty of detail to describe what I was going through. There were some minor details that I left out that didn’t really belong in the first place but I guess that’s good. What I found really easy about this paper was the fact of finding a story that influenced my life because I have had so many. Many of these took place when I was about 13 and the years that I was a teen because that’s where I grew the most. What I found fairly easy about this paper was remembering what happened and who was with me because it was such a significant story in my life and I can remember most of it even when I was so young and I didn’t really think about these types of lessons. The hardest part was finding words and sentences to describe what happened and how I was feeling. I always find this hard to be able to make sentences that sound really good and describe how I was feeling. One last thing that I found kind of difficult for this paper was avoiding awkward sentences because I am usually always using these. I just decided to read my paper aloud a lot and find the problems by myself. 

My Personal Narrative update

The personal narrative is coming along great even though I haven’t started writing it. My idea for this narrative is an experience that I had when I was about thirteen years of age and that was when I went on a fifty mile canoe trip upstream at a lake in Arizona. The reason I am using this idea is because it really changed me as a person and it was also about one-hundred and twenty degrees while we were doing it. So far the ideas that I have for this paper are good because it includes many factors and lessons that are good to learn. One of those lessons is the lesson of endurance because I was kind of chubby during this time and it was hard for me to endure to the end. I really hope to be able to draw a picture for the reader and be able to describe the best I can how I felt and what I was going through. I always remember the good things about this trip such as my brother going with me but I never really thought about the bad things that happened such as the temperature that we were going through as well as the fact that my brother left early. I feel like this paper is going to be really good because there are so many aspects of it that are ironic as well as funny that kind of lighten the situation but there are also parts of it where you think, “Man I feel so bad for that little chubby kid.”

"Excerpt from Night" (depressing...)

“Excerpt from Night” is simply a very depressing story about a son and his father in an internment camp during the second world war. I found this extremely depressing the whole entire time I was reading it because of the surroundings that were described to me. The whole time I was thinking how horrible it would be to be in that situation and having to deal with the things that little boy went through. The boy having the thought that he would either be cremated or sent to prison just gives me chills and also makes me remember how horrible that time was. After the boy gets chosen to be cremated and a man says, “Poor devils, you are going to be cremated” my heart just sank thinking of what have might have been going through that young boy’s life. Even though this happens the boy is happier than he was because he is with his father. His father was so disappointed because if the little boy would have gone with his mother he would be safe and the father finds so much grief when he realizes this. The emotions that the father and his son felt just make me cringe as they stare into the flames in a pit that they would soon enter. I can relate to this story, not maybe to the extent of what they felt, but I can relate because at times all I was thinking was “this situation would be so much better if my dad were right by my side” and I would feel hopeless without him. All I can say about this story is how horrible the internment camps were and I feel so bad for the families that were hurt by this occurrence. 

Oh personal narratives...

            In the personal narrative, “Kerry Spencer’s How to Write a Seriously Awful Personal Narrative,” I found many hilarious parallels to my life and how I write. An example would be when she starts by saying start your personal narrative by procrastinating and going on Facebook to see who has broken up that night. I find this funny because I cannot count how many times when I had a huge paper to write and I found myself staring at my computer screen chatting with my friends on Facebook. “No one is boring who will tell the truth about himself,” is a quote from Quentin Crisp and this is completely true when dealing with this personal narrative full of irony and hilarity. This is true because whenever we try to write a good paper it is full of words we would never use and also full of thesaurus based vocabulary. It is so much easier to express yourself and say what you would normally say as a person and not as a robot writing a paper.  Kerry also talks about how you should always draw away from what you are trying to get across and having this full personal narrative being about irony, it is funny how she puts it and that is that you need to make everything sound boring so that the reader thinks, “Why the heck did I just read that?!” How Kerry writes this paper completely gives me a visual of how she acts and what she is trying to get across as a person. This then brings me back to my quote on that she is being herself and telling truths about what she thinks as a writer. 

Me in 100 Words

The things I love are very simple but mean a lot to me and these are my family, hanging with the buddies, going to the lake, going snowboarding, watching any football game with my dad and the brothers, and most importantly my savior.

Now the things that I don’t like as much, (hate), are things such as soccer, people who bug the heck out of me, people who bug the heck out of me and play soccer.., and baseball as well.

Things that I like to do are playing basketball, getting to know people and their backgrounds, conversations with my mom and being able to be there for someone. These are just a few things that I like to do.