Thlog #5

Before I begin to drown myself writing my WP2, it is time to share my favorite subjects of learning from this weeks lectures. Wednesday's lecture was a bit different than most lectures, since DP was actually lecturing for a majority of the time. He gave us many important punctuation/grammar tips that were similar to the previous readings. I thought I knew everything about parallelism, the use of brackets and transition words, however, DP pointed out some strategies that I will use in my WP2.

I found the list of terms (in replacement of the word "says") the class composed very helpful because when writing, I often struggle with finding a variety of words to make my paper sound more effective. Now instead of using the online thesaurus, I can refer back to that list. In addition, the lesson about parallelism opened my eyes to how important it is to have properly structured sentences. I already knew that sentences needed to be parallel, for example, you need to be consistent with your verb tense (swimming in the ocean, fighting the waves, sinking to the bottom). However, after looking at the different resumes, I realized that parallelism does not only exist in sentences. In order to have a decent/readable resume, it is important to always follow the same structures throughout. For instance, the dates of jobs must follow the same format each time and be spaced aligned with each other and the color/size of the font must be consistent.

The article "As A Result" in the course reader contained a lot of basic information that college students should already be aware of. However, it really outlined the importance of sentence flow and I realized that choppy/short sentences are just as bad as having random sentences that do not relate to each other. I also learned that transitions do not only connect the parts of your writing, but also add to the strength of your argument. Lastly, in "Style in Arguments" I learned that slang and colloquial terms may bring life to an argument, but they can also confuse the reader. Therefore, it is important to be careful when using slang because you do not want to lead your audience in the wrong direction.
Hopefully after this weeks extensive review of grammar, my WP2 will be flawless.

I like to move it, move it

Moves can be used in a variety of different ways in writing, dancing, singing, playing sports etc. Who would have known that Michael Jackson’s different dance moves such as the moonwalk, would be related to the moves that we are studying in Writing 2? Throughout the articles that we have read so far in our course reader, the authors use many different moves to affect the audience in certain ways. One can find many examples of moves from “They Say, I Say” demonstrated in the course reader, as well as many other moves not included in the appendix.

For example, in the article “So What? Who Cares?” the identified move of “signaling who is saying what” is used many times to help establish its credibility. The author uses phrases such as “What Grady implicitly says here is…” and “Notice that Grady’s phrase…” to portray the point of the article and give examples of affective and non affective writing.

In Navigating Genres, Dirk adds metacommentary by using phrases such as “In other words” and “By this point you might realize”. He often uses this move after quoting long explanations from leading professors/professionals to summarize what was quoted, to provide clarity for the audience.

Dirk also captures authorial action by using the terms “Carolyn Miller argues” multiple times throughout the reading. This move also adds to the ethos of the article by showing the point of view from a respectable figure, and also gives an introduction to the upcoming quote. The diction of the word “argues” has a stronger impact than if Dirk were to replace it with “says,” which also adds to the effectiveness of the move.

 In “Backpacks vs. Briefcases: Steps toward Rhetorical Analysis,” Carroll begins the article very informal using the “introducing standard views” move. I found the introduction to this article extremely interesting, because I was able to relate when she brought up the fact that we are constantly judging the people around us by their hairstyle, clothing, jewelry etc. Carroll states that “daily we find ourselves in situations where we are forced to make snap judgments” which proves that these days everyone develops stereotypes without even realizing it. This move is effective because it shows how real life situations are similar to rhetoric and helps give a realistic introduction to the topic.

It is only obvious that in the article “Why Blog? Searching for Writing on the Web,” Reid uses the move of “establishing why your claims matter”. Reid believes that “a blog is an excellent opportunity for exploring and developing intrinsic motivations for writing.” This move is crucial because the purpose of the article is to persuade students to believe blogging is a great way of demonstrating their work. Therefore, if Reid doesn’t establish why his claims matter, then the audience will consider the article irrelevant.

In Straub’s “Responding—Really Responding—to Other Students’ Writing,” there are many two-word sentence blasters that have a strong impact on the text. An example of the two-word sentence blasters is “She writes. You read.” The author may have used this move to get his point across in a short and concise way, so the audience clearly understands how to properly respond to other people’s writings. I believe this move was very effective because instead of using long/complicated sentences, I was easily able to understand the rights and wrongs.

In “Murder! (Rhetorically Speaking)” Boyd uses a unique move, one that I would like to call the “stop and visualize”. After giving all of the information about the alleged murder, Boyd assigned the reader a task in the middle of the article to write as if they were a detective. Boyd’s intentions were to get the reader involved and to ultimately help the reader obtain a better understanding of rhetoric, which was very effective. Later on in the article, Boyd used a move titled “predicting the report.” Boyd claimed that the writer was “probably thinking hard about jargon” and that he/she “began it much like you did your detective report”. I believe this move was very affective because it helps the writer understand that even though every student has a different approach, most of the information that each student includes is very similar. Boyd included this because it is important to note that everyone approaches rhetorical situations in similar ways.

In “How to Read Like a Writer” Bunn uses the move I would like to call, the “question digger”. Bunn devoted an entire paragraph to asking rhetorical questions about starting an essay with a quote, which I do not believe is very effective. I think rhetorical questions are good to use every once and a while to get the reader thinking, but too many just gets annoying. I understand that the point of all of the questions was to get the reader thinking about the many advantages/disadvantages of starting with a quote and maybe even taking a stance on the topic, but I do not like this “question digger” move.

Lastly, going back to Dirk’s, Navigating Genres, he uses a move named “the isolated bullet point examples”. Dirk uses bullet points to list the names of newspaper headlines, which separates them from the text. I believe this is effective because it would be confusing for the reader if the headlines were separated by commas. The headlines stand out, which make the different genres easily identifiable.

As you can see, the limit to how many different moves authors use in their writing does not exist. Now, it is up to the reader to solve the puzzle and figure out the purpose of these so-called “moves”.

Thloggin'

I know I say this at the beginning of every thlog, but the learning just never stops with DP. My favorite activity of the week was by far the group murder activity. Not only do I love working in groups with other people, but I also enjoyed writing the dramatic email to the tenant garage workers. After the reading in the course reader and performing the activity in class, I definitely have a better understanding of rhetoric now. I officially learned that rhetoric is how you make decisions on what words to use in a certain situation and how you go about presenting those words.

I just remembered the videos we watched in class on Wednesday, so that is currently taking the spot of my favorite activity this week. I like how the definition and idea of "moves" were presented in a non-academic way because it definitely helped me learn the concept better. It was fun to watch Michael Jordan do his signature move, the under and over bank into the basket. I learned that moves are supposed to impact (affect lol) the audience and people use different moves depending on their audience. I realized that we use moves in our every day lives, for example, when I'm dancing at a party I always do my signature moves. Everybody knows its my signature move when they see me and it may even be better than Michael Jackson's moves. Just kidding.

Another important thing to add was that I learned a lot from DP's comments on my WP1. I now know the areas I need to improve upon so I can kill WP2.

PB2A

When asked to compare a genre generating website to a scholarly article from a university’s database, somebody that has yet to take Writing 2 would probably be confused as to how these two sources have anything to do with each other. After comparing a scholarly article on fast food and its affects on childhood obesity in India to the SCIgen website, there are many similarities in their surface-level features. Both have bolded titles to grab the reader’s attention, with the components of the paper organized into categories below. Both begin with a section titled “Abstract” that gives a brief explanation of the source’s purpose followed by an introduction. Unlike SCIgen, the scholarly article “Fast foods and physical inactivity are risk factors for obesity and hypertension among adolescent school children in east district of Sikkim, India” was created by a legitimate author who is a professional in his field. This creates a sense of credibility among the source because the data is coming from a reliable source, adding to the ethos of the article.

In comparison to the SCIgen—a formulated scientific research paper that is extremely hard to understand—the scholarly article conducts an experiment, explains its materials and methods, gives the results and forms a discussion and conclusion concerning the study. The article also gives statistical analysis in the form of two tables, showing the prevalence of obesity and its risk factors. Instead of tables, the SCIgen website usually displays its evidence in the form of graphs. In contrast, the scholarly article performs a study on a topic that is relevant to society (usually a controversial topic), while the genre generating website lacks interesting/important topics, therefore it is almost impossible to relate to.

When taking a closer look at the scholarly article, it is crucial to find the aspects that strike you as most important. First, I think proving the ethos of the article is one of the most important aspects, since it is a scholarly article. Obviously since this article is generated from the library database and has an author with a PhD, one can agree that it is a credible source. The 45 references listed at the end also add to the credibility of the source, proving that the author did a lot of research prior and throughout the experiment. Another important aspect of the scholarly article is that it has a well-developed introduction, because the author needs to prove that there is a good reasoning for the experiment/study. Nobody would consider the article “scholarly” if the experiment seemed irrelevant or unimportant. Another important aspect and convention of the scholarly article is its use of strong diction. There are numerous highly-developed vocabulary words that prove the intelligence of the researcher and adds to the scholarly aspect of the article.

Since this article is based on child obesity, an aspect that I found important was the pathos created by the author. The author states that childhood obesity “increases the risk of subsequent morbidity,” which really hit home to me and made me realize how sad cases like that actually are. This furthered my interest in the study and helped me want to become more proactive with my personal health. I also liked how there was an explanation of the factors involved in calculating one’s BMI, and how it stated the percentiles in which a child was considered either overweight, or obese. Another important aspect of the article was that in the results, it included that boys are more likely to suffer from obesity rather than girls. This proves to the audience that the researcher conducted a wide variety of people for the experiment, so the results would not be biased.

At first, I was scared by the term “scholarly article” and believed that all of its content would be horrifically boring, but after browsing the library database the phrase, “never judge a book by its cover” proved to be true once again.  

thlog time

After submitting my first college paper this week, I must say that I feel pretty great. Writing my WP1 definitely proved that I need to start working on my paper way before its due date. I found it very helpful that I started my WP early because I never felt overwhelmed, and I had a lot of time to go back and make changes. I kind of forgot about my other classes for a quick minute because this paper was so time consuming, but I'm hoping it will get easier as time passes. I really think this paper helped me develop into a better writer because it was stepping out of my comfort zone and expanded my creative side, which are 2 major things that college is meant for.

One of my favorite readings of the week was the "Responding To Other Students Writings" because in high school, I was taught to make corrections all over the author's paper. I really respect the college approach to editing one's paper, which is to ask questions and help the author dig deeper into their argument. I learned to be friendly when editing, but to not just tell the writer what they want to hear. It is crucial to give constructive criticism in order to improve the paper. This can relate to my daily life because when listening to one of my friend's problems, I tend to ask questions about the situation. This helps the person think about what is going on and find solutions to the problem, instead of just telling him/her how to fix it because it is something that needs to be done on their own.

The Learnin' Don't Stop

As another week flies by, the learning continues. This week, we continued to learn more about genre and identifying conventions. However, we did something a little bit different. We used genre generating websites to determine the different conventions of the particular website. For our PB1B, we explored SCIgen, Pandyland, a meme generator, and I found my own song lyric generator. Did you see what I just did there? I used the Oxford comma! Zack would be proud. I'm glad that Z emphasized to use the Oxford comma because in the past, I have always heard that it doesn't matter whether or not the comma is used. After his explanation on why we should use the comma, it makes a lot more sense now that it really is necessary.

As I was writing my PB1B I noticed the similarities in conventions between comic strips and memes. Both genres are supposed to create humor for the audience, and are often very immature. After using the generating websites, I developed a better understanding that although conventions do not follow any rules, a similar pattern of conventions develop throughout different examples of the genre.

In our class reader, the article "So What? Who Cares?" taught me to always identify the reasoning for your writing, and how it is relevant to the reader. If one does not answer those two questions and assumes the reader already knows, the audience will dismiss the text as irrelevant. Overall, the readings and our in class discussions have been extremely helpful and I know that they will help me when doing my WP. That's a wrap!

The Generator (PB1B)

Technology in the 21st century never seems to disappoint anyone. Recently, I discovered that there are websites that are made to generate genres by the click of a button. Whether it is decoding computer science, generating random comic strips, generating comical memes, or generating random song lyrics based on your mood, the internet has different websites that provide these services. Although all are genre generators, each genre has different conventions that make up the generator. The different conventions in each genre generator are what makes each one unique and different from the rest.

When using the SCIgen genre generating website, a random computer science paper is created after typing in random author names. The context of the paper may be impossible to understand unless you are a computer science major, but it is easy to identify the conventions that make up the paper by just skimming over it. First, the title is centered in big, bold letters to grab the reader’s attention. The authors names are placed right below the title in a smaller font. After searching through different authors, I noticed that the format of each paper follows a very similar format and context. Each paper contains an introduction, followed by related work and scientifical evidence or proof. This genre generating website uses logos to prove the credibility of the sources by stating scientific facts. Also, it uses visual literacy, such as diagrams to give the readers a more detailed explanation of the decoding processes.

Another convention of the SCIgen website is that it uses various references throughout the paper and contains a work cited page, which adds to the ethos of the paper. Due to the dull material of the paper, it is assumed that the audience is very limited to the people who specialize in computer science. 

Moving on, the Pandyland comic generator website is more appealing to a younger, somewhat dirty-minded audience who is looking for a good laugh. This website generates 3 different comic boxes with 2 characters in each box. The content of the comic strips usually is inappropriate, with vulgar language. The conventions of the comic strips can be easily identified and include animated characters, text in bubbles and numerous exclamation marks and lingo. Unlike SCIgen, Pandyland does not follow a professional and formal format, since most of the writing consists of phrases and incomplete sentences. There does not seem to be any constraints when it comes to the diction in the comic strips. Visual literacy is a huge component to Pandyland because the characters always have a facial expression that correlates to the situation. The suspense leads up to the third comic box, when the last character drops the final bomb or exposes his reaction to an insulting comment. 

The meme generator is somewhat similar to Pandyland because both have purposes to entertain and provide comedy for its audience. The obvious conventions of the meme generator is writing at the top of the box, a picture in the middle, and the finishing line at the bottom of the box. Every meme follows the same format with the same text font, which makes it easily identifiable. The topic of memes vary from making fun of politics, social media and just random things. Memes are extremely popular on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and other social media websites and each meme has a theme that somebody can relate to. 

Writerbot is a song lyric generator in which you select the genre of music and the emotion you want to go along with it. A title is generated in larger font at the top and the lyrics follow the same format, regardless of the categories chosen. Each line of lyrics ranges from 6-10 words and does not follow any rhyme scheme. When choosing country music with an "angry/boastful" emotion, the conventions include talking about a loss of love, a negative tone, religion and booze. 

After considering what is happening in these genre generating websites, it makes it clear that every genre is comprised of many different conventions. It proves that just by typing in random things, one can find how easy it is to have a certain topic fit a genre. Also, it is evident that a genre's conventions does not follow any rules! Each time a generating genre button is pressed a new product appears, which shows that even though the words are different, the conventions usually remain similar within the genre. However, different genres do not have the same conventions, making each genre unique in its own way.

PB1A-Personal Statement

When applying to colleges, one of the things most students struggle with is writing their personal statement. The personal statement is an extremely broad genre and gives students the opportunity to let the admission counselors into their lives. Students are able to write about anything they want, but regardless of the chosen topic, there is still a trend in the different conventions that make up a personal statement.   

The purpose of a personal statement is to grab the attention of the admission counselors and to explain the person you are behind the good grades and SAT scores. Your only audience is the admission counselors, therefore, it is vital to have a respectful tone. Some students choose to show their humorous side to help win the hearts of the counselors, but still must maintain a professional tone. It is important to keep it professional, but also demonstrate a natural, personal tone to show who you really are. Personal statements cannot exceed 1000 words and must answer the two prompts given. Since the purpose of it is to help one get accepted into college, it must have fully developed paragraphs and well written sentences.

There are many conventions that make up the personal statement genre. Usually, students give a background on their life such as where they grew up and how it helped shape the person that they are, how their family (or a family member) has influenced them or what they like to do for fun. Another convention is story telling. Students will often reminisce on a life-changing event and explain how it has affected them. Also, one’s culture can also be the base of a personal statement. Involvement in school activities such as participating in a sports team, club or organization are also examples of conventions. It is recommended to keep your personal statement light-hearted and not portray a sense of pity. Bragging, complex vocabulary words, talking mainly about yourself and using the word “I” all make up a personal statement. A major convention of a personal statement is its uniqueness. It is crucial to be original, creative, and concise since the admission officers read thousands of essays. They love it when it’s personable and get the feeling that they connected with you through your writing.

Personal statements are easy to identify because students are mainly telling a story or anecdote about their life and relating it to their dreams and aspirations. Students often state what their expected major is going to be and their motives for studying/choosing it. A personal statement also consists of students sharing their interests in life, or maybe even in the particular school that they are applying to. It is important to prove why you would be a good fit for the particular school. Originality is what makes up a personal statement. Portraying yourself in a positive light and explaining why you are the person you are, is also what makes up a personal statement. By the end of the essay, the admission counselor should be inspired and proud from your life experiences, and should want you to be a student at their university.