Blog Assignment #8

When I think about my past as a reader and writer, three teachers come to mind in having the biggest impact on me. These teachers include my 4th grade teacher Mrs. Johnson, my 6th grade teacher Dr. Dick, and my freshman year honors biology teacher (and football coach for 2 years) Coach Overley. Each of these teachers helped me grow in my reading, literary writing, and scientific writing respectively.

My fourth grade year was unlike any year of grade school I had experienced to that point in my life. My teacher Mrs. Johnson expected a lot from her students in terms of how much homework she assigned, the types of projects we had, and expectations for the quality of our work in general. She also expected us to constantly be reading books that matched each person’s specific reading level (based on a test at the beginning of the year), and a lot of them. This was a major part of our grade and we had to take comprehension quizzes on each book we read. Prior to this point, I had not been big into reading books but Mrs. Johnson changed all of that. I was reading 2-3 books a week, and actually enjoying reading. I believe Mrs. Johnson’s high expectations for her students not only raised my reading level and appreciation for books, but also greatly prepared me for dealing with more difficult subject matters and completing more work on a nightly basis as I had to do once I progressed through grade school and into high school.

The second major influence on my writing was my 6th grade teacher Dr. Dick. To this point in my schooling, I had written some papers, but Dr. Dick made it a point to focus on each individuals writing skills and write, write, write. I wrote more papers and presentations that year than I had in my entire life. They say practice makes perfect and I experienced that saying firsthand as my writing constantly improved throughout the year. I wrote descriptive essays, research papers, learned how to make effective PowerPoint’s, and conduct peer reviews. Essentially, I learned many of the writing skills that I would need in order to be an effective high school writer and beyond.

Lastly, my freshman year honors biology teacher Coach Overley, had a major impact on my writing. In this class I had a year long project that was a research paper, a hypothesis, and then an experimentation to test that hypothesis. This was a completely new experience for me because I had never written a research paper on something that I had actually experimented on. Also the manner in which Coach Overley expected me to write the paper was unlike anything I had ever encountered. Everything in the paper had to be cited from a reputable source and pictures and tables had to be formatted to follow proper APA rules. It turned out to be a 15+ page paper, with 2 pages of references. It was one of the most extensive research papers I had ever written. From this I learned how to properly conduct research, cite and and format a paper according to APA rules. This was something I had to do more of in high school, and have had to do this at Purdue. Although at the time it seemed like an unnecessary amount of work, it greatly prepared me for what I would encounter in my future academic career.

Blog Assignment #7

The grant proposal I researched is about Newark Beth Israel Medical Center, a regional care and community hospital in Newark, New Jersey. It was founded in 1901 with a mission to serve all, regardless of a patient’s income or insurance status. The funding from the grant would be used to add a new education segment, Depression in Seniors, to the hospital. This program would reach over 3,000 seniors in the Newark area and help them understand the importance and benefits of health prevention and wellness, knowledgeable consumers and more aware to preventive care. The rest of the grant proposal speaks on the specific goals of the proposal, objectives, budget, and further acknowledgments.

The proposal does not completely meet my expectations for this type of genre. While the grant does explain goals on what they plan to do, it does not go into great detail. This detail, in my opinion, is something that grant providers would like to see in order to hand a hospital $30,000 (in this specific grant). Overall the proposal still successfully demonstrates the summary of the project and the statements on why this money would be needed to fund the project. It also does a good job of breaking down the budget and allocating all of the grant money to a specific role or task. This being said, I think a little more detail in how goals will be accomplished could add appealing and convincing arguments to those who read the proposal.

This is similar to the proposals we are writing in class because the proposal is mostly for an extension of a existing product/service. In this case, the proposal is for a new program that a local hospital could implement to better serve the community around them. In our class, many of our proposals deal with creating an extension of the Purdue Online Writing Lab. Either way, both proposals include the purpose of better serving a community around them by creating an extension of a pre-existing and successful establishment. It is also similar in the fact that it cites other references and acknowledges other works within the proposal.

This proposal is different from our class grant proposals in that our grant proposals take a different form of organization and focus more on related research and trying to justify on why the proposal is needed and should be considered. Obviously, each grant will have a different set of requirements and items that should be covered in a proposal, thus impacting the organization of the proposal, but this research proposal includes explicitly outlined goals and objectives while ours includes biographies, a timeline and a table of contents. Also in the case of the healthcare related proposal, there isn’t a specific need to state why education on depression or preventive care is needed–it saves lives. In our case, we need to more convincingly justify why to spend $50,000 on creating an asynchronous online writing tutoring system for our students to have access to.

Blog Assignment #6

Technology seems a play a rather important role in Lethem’s argument in “The Ecstasy of Influence”. Lethem thinks that the development of our society’s technology is only adding to the idea that very little of what we make is still original. For example, Lethem cites the example of how musicians have access “pre-existing melodic fragments” (Lethem, 60). Essentially the availability of pre-existing melodies because of our advanced technology has empowered musicians to simply duplicate, or slightly alter in some cases, instead of creating original melodies. He also uses an example of pirating DVDs and the ease of doing so thanks to our current technology. Along with this Lethem notes how a pirated DVD is not stolen like a stolen car would be, but it rather violates our “intellectual property” rights.

I agree with Jonathan Lethem in the argument that our current technology makes some creations less original (or not all original in some cases) and easier to “steal” from others. I think the vast power of our technology has opened our eyes as a society to the extreme number of opportunities to be less original. For example in my academic experiences alone, I have felt the stress from educators to be original and not plagiarize works from other people. Ultimately the choice to be original belongs to the individual and how well he/she believes they will be able to get away with cheating the system, and the weight of the possible consequences of it being discovered.

Because of all these changes in various aspects in technology, I do think we are overall becoming more aware of copyrights and plagiarism. I think in today’s society plagiarizing is as shameful and penalized of an act as it has ever been. I say this because of the severe consequences that come with plagiarizing in environments like school and professional jobs. Also the strict copyright laws that exist and the highly public and costly copyright lawsuits that happen imply that copyright protection is as important and highly regarded as ever. Despite of this larger recognition, there will still be acts of plagiarism and copyright infringements in the future. It simply isn’t something that will ever go away completely, but I still believe the areas of plagiarism and copyrights are gaining more legitimacy and thought in the minds of our society.

Blog Assignment #5

I have done a large amount of research in high school. This has ranged from science papers, typical research essays and speech writing. In general, I feel like I have been pretty successful in being able to conduct research and write a cohesive paper that is backed by that research. In each of these different research projects, I have learned to use different mediums in how I got my information. They included websites, online databases, journals, encyclopedias, newspapers and scholarly magazines. For the most part I simply used websites because of the wealth of information in them and the ease of access at anytime.

I liked in our textbook the section on developing questions to help guide the research. This not only helps find what is relevant to your main points, but also save time, effort, and sometimes frustration that comes along with not being able to find helpful information. Something I didn’t really like from the book was the section of chapter 4 that talked about finding a topic. This seems rather unnecessary because every time I have had to do research, a topic has been assigned. It’s as if it is advising a person who is going to write a research paper for fun, which I don’t think ever happens.

What I consider easy about research is finding a large amount of information that is related to the paper I am writing. I have always been able to find more than enough facts and figures, but the difficult part is sifting through that information to find what exactly is relevant to your main points. I also think finding quality and reliable resources can be a challenge at some points. This is especially true for web based sources rather than books or databases.

Blog Assignment #4

I believe I was able to put together a pretty good rhetorical analysis of ESPN.com. Not all parts of my writing came easy though, there were definitely parts that I found more difficult to write than others. I found it fairly easy to identify the purpose as well as the intended audience of the website. Part of this is due to my familiarity with the site, but also these two ideas were easy concepts to understand and “concrete” ideas to me. I also found organizing the analysis easy, going simply from purpose to audience to context (and some design features). The one major thing I found difficult was writing about the context of the site. This sort of “abstract” idea that I didn’t have a solid previous understanding of proved to cause the most headache.

In order to complete my writing process I used a few different resources. In addition to the ESPN.com website, I used statistical websites (with proper citation) about ESPN in order to provide the reader the logos appeal to just how popular and how many different viewers and audiences the site caters to. I also heavily used our text book in order to gain a more solid understanding of the concept of context and see to some brief examples of what rhetorical writing is like. I also was able to use in person references in a peer evaluation and by Ms. Towle. These in person resources were most helpful once I had my rough draft completed in order to clear up any confusing or vague parts of my analysis.

In addition to those resources I used, 2 other major resources would have been a great help to completing my rhetorical analysis. A dream resource would have been a database of rhetorical analysis’ in order to get a clear example of what to include in my writing and in what kind of manner to write it. Just seeing an example would have been really helpful in the early stages of my writing. I also would have like a resource to submit my writing to an online version of the Purdue writing lab and get back comments or answers to questions I had on my writing. Although I did have some in person resources, another review from an English major would have helped clear up any mistakes in my analysis.

Blog Assignment #3

1. This peer review session was different in the fact I was able to make comments directly onto a computer. Also being able to have a set of guided questions was a plus. I have done peer reviews quite a few times in advanced composition my senior year, so nothing really surprised me about the experience.
2. I learned that my writing had very solid organization throughout the paper. I was also able to transition between talking about audience, purpose and context pretty smoothly. I learned that I could elaborate and provide a little more detail in some areas of my analysis as well. As a reader I learned some new organization methods I could have used, and also saw some good examples of describing the design of a website.
3. I found it interesting the vast spectrum of websites people have chosen to review. For example my partner reviewed horse showing-related sites. I had never been exposed to these type of sites, so I found the analysis pretty interesting. I enjoyed being able to see how others had different methods to answer the same analysis questions we had to cover. I did find it a little difficult to relate to the information of the site without ever having viewed it before.
4. Peer reviews are similar to our weekly conferences in the fact we get specific feedback on our writing, but we are able to get a different perspective on our writing which is a plus regardless of the situation. These similarities and differences exist because of the fact we are getting advice from a teacher vs a fellow student and in a slight less professional setting in a peer review.
5. The most helpful part of the peer review was learning what the strengths and weakness of my analysis were. I would be open to doing this again in ENGL 106 or even any other class. There’s never a problem with getting extra advice and tips for your paper.

Blog Assignment #2

Website: http://www.historianofthefuture.com/

1. The purpose of this site seems to be to inform people of the future of mankind, although it it nearly impossible to tell. The intended audience could be those interested in conspiracy theories, or those interested in how we can use present information to somehow predict the future of out existence. The diction of this website is very strong, but it seems like an attempt to give the site and it’s author more authority and assumed knowledge on the topics discussed. There is also some pathos being used trying to pull on the readers emotions to give the site more legitimacy. Visual rhetoric techniques such as sharp contrasted between text and background and in the colors are also being used.
2. The first major problem is that there is no organization of the site. The toolbar menu is mixed in with text and makes it very confusing for the reader. Secondly there are simply too many colors of text being used. It is very distracting to the reader and makes the site in general look like a mess. Thirdly the animation used throughout the site is distracting and annoying to say the least. It also takes away from the little bit of legitimacy the site seems to have. Lastly, the “articles” in the site need to be rewritten in an easier to understand way in less scientific terminology.
3. The various colors of text used make it fairly hard for the reader to focus on one section of the site and be able to completely read through one article. The lack of organization makes it difficult to navigate through the site as well. Also the sporadically placed images and charts prevent the reader from associating them to the writing in the articles. It’s a very uninviting site that beckons the reader to simply press the back button instead of scrolling through the site.
4. Contrast is being used too heavily in this site. Whether it’s the contrasts in color, font style, font size, or just the wording on a black background, it serves more as a distraction that a means of clarification and organization. Repetition is slightly being used in the color of the text, but it doesn’t seem to form a pattern or help in the organization of the site. Alignment is nearly nonexistent in this site. The toolbar is aligned, although in a misplaced location on the site, but the rest of the site’s alignment is certainly not invisible as good alignment should be. Finally proximity is not being used at all by the site, as links, images, text and animations are placed almost at random throughout the majority of the site.

Blog Assignment #1

Purdue experience for my parents:

Food courts for the win

Daily views on campus.

Always keeping up with my studies

Purdue experience for Mitch Daniels:

Trying to stay alive in the dorms

These classes should not exist

Purdue construction never ends

Purdue experience for my friends:

Plenty of places to get involved

500 person lectures are always fun

One of the best rec facilities in the nation

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