Final Paper

Here is the link to the final draft of my final essay.

Last Blog

I don’t think I can pick out just one thing that I have learned throughout this course. There isn’t really one big thing that I learned, but many small things that I will find very useful to me in the future. Things such as reading the blogs and news really showed me the importance of keeping up with current events. Then, reading Harris’ book has really helped me with writing papers which will continue to come in handy as I will have to keep writing papers throughout college. There are many more examples of things I have learned in this class but I’ll stop here.

I would say my views of reading and writing have changed a lot throughout this course. When I started this class, I thought I hated reading and writing. I have never been a fan of reading books and writing papers, so I just thought it must be because I don’t like to read and write. But this course made me realize most of the things I do everyday involve reading and writing. So I have learned it’s not that I don’t like to read and write; there are just certain things I don’t like to read and write.

My reading and writing practices have also changed. Now, when I do read for an assignment or something like that, I am much more thorough with it. I take the time to highlight and underline things and take notes. This makes it a lot easier to come back to the text when I need to reference to it. I use to just kind of hurry up and do it to get it done. As for writing, I am able to take other people’s writing and use it as my own better. Also, I have learned new methods from my classmates of writing a paper. Things like how to organize my thoughts before I start writing and come up with ideas.

COMMENTS FOR HANNAH'S ESSAY

I guess between having the whole essay on the blog along with Andrew's comment, it wont let me post a comment so I'm just doing it here. Sorry about the mess up.

This paper shows how a story can be put out there and then different people can have different views on it. Then it can turn into a battle between 2 people back and forth on their shows.

Strengths: Good introduction. You also connected things nicely and had good uses with the quotes.

Weaknesses: I feel like it was just a little too much saying step by step what happened and not enough personal opinion and what you think about the story.

Additional Comments: Good paper with strong intro. Just needs a little more personal opinion.

Essay 2

Here is a link to a very very rough draft of my second essay. The conclusion is not exactly finished but I'll get back to it later.

Taking an Approach

I found this chapter, Taking an Approach, in Joseph Harris’ book to be the most confusing so far. I’m not going to lie, I don’t exactly know what Harris means by taking an approach but I think I get it enough to get through this post. Taking an approach, to me, is very similar to the other chapters of the book in the sense that it talks about using other people’s writings in your own. The only thing that changes in Taking an Approach is that you are now using the other writer’s style along with their words.

So I’m not positive if I have the full understanding of what Taking an Approach really means, but I will attempt to give examples from the New York Times and the blogs I am reading. First of all, one blog I am following pretty much only posts links to other blogs so I don’t think Taking an Approach applies to this blog. The sports blog I am following though uses a more straight forward style by just telling the story how it is but I have also noticed a little bit of sarcasm in some of the posts. Then, The New York Times’ style is more professional than the blogs. It doesn’t have the freedom of the blogs having no editors, so the New York Time’s style is more of the facts compared to the blogs which use more opinion.

What can be gained by Taking an Approach is that it is another way to use another writers writing in your own. What can be lost, and probably the part that confuses me in this chapter, is when writing in the style of another author, you lose your own style. And there is always the chance that someone may misinterpret the style of another author and when they try to somewhat mimic it, they can get it all wrong.

Post Revision

Towards the beginning of the year, we were to do a reading on Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” In this article, after reading and doing my blog post, I answered yes it is making us stupid. I’m not sure why I said that. I don’t know if I was in a hurry and just wanted to get that post done or what, but I remember after doing a few more readings about the subject I went back and looked at the first two paragraphs of that particular post and I thought to myself, “Wow, don’t agree with what I wrote hardly at all.” But it’s mostly only the first two paragraphs I disagree with. In those paragraphs, I was a negative about the whole idea, while in the rest of it; I contradicted myself by being positive, which is the way I really feel about his article.

In the post, I said that the internet has become the substitute for everything and that this is a problem. I would like to counter myself by saying yes it has become a substitute for a lot of things but this is definitely not a problem. Why not take advantage of having something that we can use for almost everything we need in our lives? It is so convenient to us and there is nothing wrong with having convenience in our lives. Also I said it is a problem that everything we need to know is located right at the end of our fingertips. Well that definitely isn’t a problem. If you don’t know something, you should look it up or else you will never learn it. Now, what is a better way to look something up; by going through books and encyclopedias or just searching for it on Google? So I’m not sure what I was thinking when we first did the post on Carr’s article but I am sure glad we got to do this post where I got a chance to redeem myself and fix my mistake.

Countering

Countering is almost the exact opposite of forwarding. In forwarding, the work is used by another person to prove their own point and they kind of send it back out into the public. And the new writing usually isn’t directed back towards the original writer. But countering is when someone reads some sort of writing, and then writes something back towards the original writer, pointing out some things that maybe are controversial to them, or just something that they find unclear. In forwarding, it keeps the story alive and keeps it going. In countering it also continues the story but in a different way. Forwarding usually keeps the story how it is. It implies that the story is right and its ready to be distributed to the world. Countering implies that the story still has problems that need to be fixed, so the story stays alive but in a discussion kind of way. A reader may counter a story that holds a different position than they believe, so they may write something to show their view on the subject, and this can continue as a conversation because the original writer can respond back to continue defending their position.

In my sports blog, an example of countering can be found in a story about the NBA star Lebron James. James plays for the Cleveland Cavaliers but for a few years now there have been rumors about him going to play for the New York Knicks when he becomes a free agent in 2010. Recently, Cleveland played in New York, so the media did all these stories about James playing for the Knicks. The blog I have been following did a post sort of countering that, saying how chances are; he will continue to play for the Cavaliers. The author of the blog brought up points about how he will have better teammates in Cleveland and how they have made a run at the championship while the Knicks have not been close. It also brings up some quotes of James himself saying that he has not made any sort of commitment towards going to play for New York. This is a good example countering because they take a story from the media and call it out on some things that they overlooked.