blog 10

The last blog, finally!!

What did I really learn in this class for this semester?
I learned how to properly cite. That's a pain, im not even close to kidding there. In high school it was all about MLA format but i doubt my teacher ever looked because I always used easybib. I tried that this first semester and it didn't work! I know because after the first essay I cited it by hand, book open and five examples all around me as if the cirlce i formed with exampes would comfort me in my time of need.

I also learned how to write without having the reader get lost in all my thoughts. I'm still working on that. every essay was a challenge. A really big challenge because I get lost in my own thoughts and they're my thoughts! try listening to me tell a story, i'll always go off track. Anyway, I learned my own way of writing an essay. High school was all about the format, the format that didn't work for me and only helped dig my own grave to failure. So, this semester I learned my own way of writing that helped me do well. I really appreciated that freedom. it is until now that im realizing that the 5 objectives listed on the essay prompt were enough to help me. the directions were simple and first i thought i need someone to hold my hand like i was used to but that never helped. now, i know, how to get them done the right way.

Blog 9

The essay about the ad was one of the more difficult essays. I looked through countless of ads and I couldnt find something that i could effectively pick at. so i yelled at myself to stop wasting time and to finally pick an ad. I picked a Tampax ad that shows rosie the riveter flexing with a tattoo on her bicep showing Tampax (the name). To be honest, it was late at night and i was tired of spending days, yes days, looking for an ad that i could write 1000 words about.

at first i thought to myself, "what can i possibly write?"
so, i slept on it since sleeping seems to be the cure for everything these days.

it hit me when i began looking at it. I wrote about one appeal and then another. Then I looked back and analyzed the two appeals more. Once i did that, I saw another appeal and then more just came out of hiding.

the essay took me a while to complete but i analyzed it more than i thought i was going to orginally. I see the effectiveness of the appeals after writing the essay. They seemed so hidden that i was actually surprised. I feel like the people that make the ads are hiding subliminal messages now.

After writing for a day and only have 2 appeals half written i did want to give up and find another ad but since time was running out and my patience for looking through more magazines and the ray of hope was sliming i stuck with the tampax one. It's kind of funny because i didnt even know it was for tampons until i looked at it again. Which makes me think that these ad makers are really sly...

Blog 8

Writing essays can be really difficult most of the time and once you think you're done, you're really not. That is what is the most frustrating for me. When I finish writing an essay I feel like i need to go back and add some meat on the bones.

The essay I really liked was essay 2 the synthesis. At first I thought it was kind of difficult but once i took time to think about what i read i was able to do it. I think i was able to accomplish number 2. I understood the points of the reading and i was then able to write about it. That was a really good feeling. That went along with number 5, creating a voice appropriate for the situation.

number 3: about the drafts and tools to write a complete essay. This class was great unlike high school because KPeters really let us run wild. High school teachers always nagged about the structure of the outline... the outline!!! all the roman numerals freaked me out and it never helped me and it discouraged me to do well because the outline was hard on its own, how would i write a good essay? SO, this semester was helpful because we also wrote about more important topics than.. death of a salesman or some creep story about yellow wallpaper. I feel more accomplished about writing without a mental breaking outline. I learned from my mistakes. I dont need to write a 5 paragraph essay but using TS/CD/CM is a good way to make sure you're staying on track.

While reading through the syllabus I thought I didn't go through self discovery while writing the essays becaues they weren't about me and they were about various topics that had nothing to do with me. Well, that's what I thought. I did go through a journey of self discovery with out realizing it. I did better when the focus of the essay was about something I am passionate about that I didn't even know. Women's empowerment is easy for me to write about because it is something that I would like to grow. I didn't realize that I was like that. Working and traveling around, I feel like I am empowered but at the same time I am looked down upon when working at certain places because I am a girl. Experiencing that and noticing while I write about an ad on tampons or a synthesis essay that talks about microbicides in India really showed me that.

Number 10, realizing that writing is the greatest utencil was something I learned as well. Anyone can stand on a bench and yell their thoughts but that doesn't mean people will listen. But if you write down what you have to say, it is more clear and a more effective way to reach out. I think that's why freedom of press is so important. That is something I learned. Having what you believe published is a great accomplishment and now I want to publish something too. Im not sure what but with the skills I learned to use Im sure it is possible in the future. Also, writing helps make your thoughts clear and after writing a lot it affects your speaking too. You'll eventually know how to place your words so that your thoughts are clear and effective. That is a very useful tool.

Blog 7

The resume went fine with out any major problems. First I looked at it and it looked really boring and i felt it was missing somethings so i went back and tried to sell more of my soul to the potential reader. I got it to be a page and it looked pretty decent when it was completed. I liked working on it because I had to think of my characteristics and how i fit in the workplace.  I also liked the assignment because it is very useful to know how to make a resume that is effective and that will help you nail the job.

Blog six

HUMOR, that's a word that is difficult to define with out the use of a  dictionary. It's kind of like beauty, it's in the eyes of the beholder... in this case in the ears of the beholder. Many jokes or stories are categorized under comedy or extremely humorous but it isn't always. Like films for example. How many movies are "comedies" but don't make people laugh.

Humor can be a personality trait. Being funny is something you're born with, something you can't learn. If it was something people could go to school for then how many Dane Cooks would be wandering the world right now?

There are guidelines in writing that define humor. Like Irony for example.
Dramatic irony
Situational irony
irony.... all forms of it.
I vaguely remember learning this in France. There was a type of humor that involves a hero that is like a typical underdog figure. I'm not sure, the French can be weird sometimes. The point is that defining humor in literature is quite boring. I'll explain why. People in the good old years weren't open with their thoughts so when something was out of place it was funny. Which strangely reminds me of another type of humor. Absurd humor. In the 1940-1960's Eugene Ionesco wrote plays that defined absurd comedy. It involved giving out of place characteristics to it's characters and using English words in an all french play. That was funny. That guy had a gift.

Anyway, as i was trying to say. Humor in literature is not really funny like Drew Barrymore films. Humor that is actually funny is the type that uses real thoughts that people wouldn't say in the social norm. In my opinion that is what makes people laugh the most.

STYLE.
Let me quickly tell a funny story of my adventures in Europe. I'm not much of a stylish person. If I could live in my favorite pair of jeans, I would.. wait I already do. Now, the french are very chic. They are so chic so make up for my lack of chic-ness. Anyway, I remember the day I was heading to Pisa. I decided to have style so I had to raid various suitcases of my unsuspecting friends to put together a wonderful outfit which at last minute was ruined because my friend need my cardigan because her style choice was too... visible in the sunlight which we figured out when we took pictures by the leaning tower and realized with the flash you could see her undergarments. Maybe, that really is some awesome style...

Writing style comes from the author. It is also something that cannot be taught. I personally think that a writers style is their personality on paper. People just have to learn how to broadcast a little piece of their soul onto whatever they write. It makes everything more personal or makes the most prominent figure in New York seem human and reachable when something is written like a person wrote it. Style can be humorous or dramatic and depressing. It really depends on the person and how they wish to show themselves.

Blog 5

Never would I have thought that an essay would take me so long to kill. Imagine that I am a cheetah and the essay is a gazelle. I am wandering through the Savannah on the African continent when I spot a tasty gazelle.... instinctively you would think that I would be able to kill that gazelle in no time but I was stuck on my creeping stage. The stage when cheetahs walk really slyly and wait for the perfect moment to attack. I was stuck there for the longest time. I knew the objective: compare and contrast. I just did not know how to pounce on it. The gazelle which is symbolically my essay ran from me many times until I finally was able to conquer it.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that I did that gracefully like animal planet depicts. This was a messy fight and I'm looking forward to rewriting this catastrophe.

I liked the prompt for the essay, I just didn't know how to go through with it. This time I honestly did not know how to proceed with less caution. I didn't know how to write it with out it ending up being a confusing piece of paper made up of random facts, citations and the other stuff I fill it with. Think of it as a sloppy Joe. The bad kind. Not the Manwich brand but the kind you get at an elementary school cafeteria. That's what I am talking about.

It was not the reading that were necessarily difficult. It is safe to say that the hardest part was the structure of the essay. People say practice makes perfect. I'm not sure about that but I'm sure the more I do essay that have to be compare and contrast the easier they will become to structure. It was difficult to structure the essay when the readings where kind of similar but not really. It's like a Venn diagram that's really slim in the middle. I need more to work with. That added to the difficult factor.

It wasn't too difficult to get started mainly because while I'm writing the introduction I get more of a feel of where I'm taking the essay. It acts like a mental map in my head. It was hard to get past that stage though. The map i constructed mentally was filled with narrow roads that somehow ended abruptly; A crazy labyrinth if you will.

Overall, I'm glad I'm finally done.

Essay 2

When I first read the prompt for the second essay my first thoughts were mixed. One of them was, "oh yeah, I can do this piece of cake" and the other was, "wait, how ARE these related????"... yes with four question marks, each one progressively growing with each second added pondering to the train of thought.
Then it came down to writing. So, I first read all three readings and then just let my brain do the work while i stared at the wall.

I took out a piece of paper and wrote down what I thought the first reading was about and the main emphasis. After, I did the same for the other two and then just thought again. I reread all three and then wrote down what they had in common. I didn't find it particularly difficult after I wrote down the ties between them and just thought about how I could word it. Sometimes I feel how things are related but can't really explain it properly. Once I got my main idea, I looked through the parts of the readings that grabbed my eye aggressively and wrote down the quotes that went with it.

At first I thought, "oh man, how am i supposed to write about three articles without losing focus?" I didn't want my paper to experience the "tree in the middle of the ocean" phenomena. Then I thought about just writing the main things and then adding meat to the bones. I worked information back into the paper to make sure I wasn't losing focus. I felt that it really helped to stay on track. It made the writing process more enjoyable and I actually took less time writing this essay than the first because I felt like I had direction with this essay more.

The mistake I keep making is quoting. I have a habit of quoting things I think are useful so I quote quotes. Big mistake. After this essay's conference, I feel like I learned what to do now. I like that feeling. Other than that citing in general isn't much of a problem. The problem is what I cite. But now I  have the handle on not quoting quotes so I cite the right source. Good deal.

Essay 1

I found that the first essay was kinda hard to write. I'm not sure if it's because it was the first essay I had to write for English class in over 2 years or what but I just couldn't find a way to achieve what I wanted to. I'd like to blame my reading. It was one James Wood's "Victory Speech" which was basically a summary on President-Elect Barack Obama. It felt like I was doing a summary on a summary...it kinda felt like one of those twilight zone episodes when you see a tv in a tv in a tv... a never ending sequence of space and time.

ANYWAY, since I didn't see how any other summary would be easier to write, I went along with this strange case.

When I got my essay back I realized that I did cite the author too much. I think that was the hardest part about writing the essay - finding the balance. Which, by the way, I haven't been able to find. I don't know how to write a summary with less of the author's input. It makes my head hurt to try to figure out how to write about what someone wrote without citing them for everything. I have a lack of words to explain what they mean without using exactly what they wrote all the time. It would be easier if I could just put a hyperlink to the actual essay.

I guess that would defeat the purpose of summarizing. Either way, summarizing seemed like an easy task at first but it was a lot harder than I was anticipating.

Another thing that was hard to do was to think about what to summarize. What the main concepts of the reading was to summarize. It was hard to write about what seemed important when it very well could not be significant at all and how much of it needed to go into detail. When I'm rewriting it, I will definitely have to reread the piece and  think about what still sticks out and hopefully that will make more of a difference. I'll try harder to step out of my skin to see if I would understand what was going on if i was the person reading my summary.

Blog 2

My strengths, my weaknesses... I don't even know where to begin. I enjoy writing prose, things that seem poetic but they're my thoughts uncensored. When I think of my weaknesses, I can't really come up with anything that would make sense. Well, actually, I tend to ramble and lose sight of what I have to accomplish, so really it doesn't make sense.  It takes me a while to think of an essay as one big piece. See, I enjoy writing introductions for the most part and I tend to have one or two thoughts that I HAVE to put in my essay but after that, the essay falls. 

My strengths would include my passion for writing a novel-like paper. I like to write something that can possibly have an emotional appeal on people. My actual writing strengths are few. I have yet to find an actual one.

The essay we wrote in class during the first week of class seemed easy for me. In the end I need something to tie it all together. If I had more time, I don't think it would change anything. I'm missing the mindset or maybe it's the will or more passion as a writer. I think when it's an assignment given to me I can't find ways to explain myself in fear that I won't provide the necessary details to get the grade. If I would have taken it home I probably would have stared at a blank paper wondering how I could explain everything. I bet it would have been better though.

Rhetoric and genre

From the reading at the beginning of the book I was expecting to read about something long and boring but I learned interesting things. In high school composition English class I learned about the use of rhetorical questions as a strategy but in essay writing I don't think I have properly mastered the art. After read the example and explanation I thought about rhetorical questions as an art. The article in Time magazine was interesting. It was a fun read. Instead of writing lots of figures the author found a way to ask a question that the reader would give A short unmeaningful response to. Later he explained the information. I would like to do that in my essays instead of boring the reader with a lot of straight forward boring information.




The next reading was on genre. My first impression was fantasy, and nonfiction because I thought of book genres. After reading about genres as in letters, reports, poems etc. I never thought that webpages were considered as genre. I never took presentation much into consideration. I realized that presentation can have more affect that it leads on. I was a good choice for the writer to give examples on how presentation has an affect on the reader. Also, I haven’t thought about the impact an audience has. The example in the reading was a mother’s reminder note. Since it’s a common thing, I expected it to have short phrases but I have never really thought about how much its intended audience gets out of it. If it was a note that I found on the street I would be left with a lot of questions. I never really thought about it that way.



There were things that I knew in the reading but not the depth of the stuff mentioned. It was less boring that I thought it would be.

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