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I have more of an apathetic opinion about this essay. The idea of questioning Composition and Rhetoric courses in one’s first year of a liberal arts college might have been relatable to other students, but to me, I never questioned the validity of the courses I was taking this and last semester. I was not thinking about how they could apply to my life, I was blindly following them without any thought as to why I was taking them. I do think that a lot of times, Composition, and Rhetoric teaches you a lot of skills needed in certain career’s and I am glad that I am taking them because now I know how to shift my writing to fit what is needed in different discourses. I think these courses not only teach you how to write, but they are helpful in helping one understand all of the different types of writing in the world, such as the media, or different professional writings one may have no idea how to read. In this article, it also talked about how Composition and Rhetoric helps you with critical thinking and I think that is extremely important. Critical thinking helps one get ahead in their careers because it is extremely prevalent in every career and it is a skill that everyone should acquire at one point in their lives.
Then, later in the article, it mentions how one student eventually found out that his FYC course did help his writing because he had to write a description of a model of an ethanol plant for his senior year. His first-year course had taught him to conform to standards of writing and to remember who his audience was. When anybody is writing important formal papers, it is essential to figure out who your audience is and write to them because that means that you are actively trying to reach them as readers and engage them. Similarly, conforming to standards previously set by others writing in your field is extremely necessary and I am glad that I now know how to do that. In addition to that, one should know how to write a proposal or a plan while not straying too far from the standards. There is a section in the paper which discusses a former student going onto a job at Hewlett-Packard. Writing was a major part of her job, but she did not know the genre or how to write all of the press releases, memos, and emails that were a large part of her job. She did not have help, but she read up on the and researched everything that she needed to know before drafting these documents herself. I am grateful for college and specifically these freshman year English courses because I did not realize that once students go out into the world, they do not have teachers to help them figure out the writing in their jobs.
I loved this piece because it showed all of the real biases in the media while, at the same time, showing that the bias that we usually think of in the media such as political bias are not what really happens. Gladstone mentioned that the media is biased against Presidents and it tends to ignore those on the far left and quote far more conservatives than liberals. I find it funny that she says this because many far-right talk show hosts would definitely tend to disagree, but then they might be just trying to sway listeners to their side. This piece is also very interesting because, like some of you guys, I had not known about any of these biases before I read this article. Out of all of the biases we read about, I think access bias is the most dangerous because the description of it mentioned how easily we can be deceived by it and that is kind of scary. I think that unless we are trying to preserve the person’s sense of security and safety, maybe the press should have to disclose the person’s identity. The other thing about this that is scary, but interesting as to why it happened was the McCain bus section where McCain is substantially moderate during his 2000 campaign, but he then turns farther right when he lost in 2008 because he changed his beliefs even though his initial beliefs were more ethical.
The most ironic part of this piece is about the marines and the dismantling of the Saddam Hussein’s statue. After the marines had gotten the civilians to help pull the statue down, one marine put up an American flag on Saddam Hussein’s face. Of course, as Gladstone says it was immediately taken down because they did not want to look like an occupying force. To me the fact that the American flag had gone up on the statue’s face in the first place showed that they felt like an occupying force the whole time the U.S. military was there. That one tiny action shows the major mistake that the United States made in starting the Iraq war under false pretenses.
Brooke Gladstone is a great writer and she gets her point across very accurately. She does this whether her point is about this issue of biases or the issue of trust in the polls and she does it through her graphic novel’s illustrations along with a minimal amount of text. When our English class is assigned a group reading and discussion like we are doing right now, it seems like a major part of our responses can be predicted if we have Gladstone’s The Influencing Machine as the assigned reading. A lot of the time when we have Gladstone we talk about how easy it is to read and how comics are better than text. It seems to me like we love to have easier reads and they are somewhat of a necessity to us. The disadvantage to that is that when we go out into the working world we are going to have to read mostly, if not all text-based readings. Is it because of our iPhones and our distracting devices that we cannot focus on words for long? I agree with most of you who say that this was easier to read, but shouldn’t we be more prepared for when graphic novels are not an option?
This article was interesting and it related very well to what one part of this class’s purpose is, which is to help us understand how we should write in our disciplines. This article explained why knowing how to write in your discipline is important. I am a science person myself and I do relate to the article because I have a lot of curiosity and the article says that the writers and the scientists that they accompany are driven by their curiosity.
I believe that science writers play an important role in our society. Science denial and science ignorance are a huge problem and one of the ways they can be addressed is through more understanding. Many people nowadays do not seem to care for facts, science, and reason. There is a war on facts in the government, and in the public. What our society has to do now is fight that war on the side of science and reason because science and reason are how we have survived for so long and how we have resolved so many complicated issues. As this article states, science writers explain complicated scientific discoveries, innovations, and experiments in simpler terms and they bring a wider understanding to millions of people. That is what we need to fight the war on science.
As I aforementioned, curiosity is an important part of science and, in my opinion, it should be a part of everybody’s everyday lives. Curiosity is an antidote of close-mindedness. There are too many close-minded people in the world and that is not only contributing to the war on science, facts, and reason, but it also is slowing down America’s progress in the world stage. I have respect for writers like Michelle Nijuis because they have more of a noble purpose to their writing. I also have respect for her when she says that science writers are hardly experts in science and any related fields that they may cover in their books.
To add on to the war on facts, there are many instances of people, who are not scientists, saying, “I’m not a scientist, but. . . . .”. They then go on to discuss their own opinion about different issues that are discovered through or somehow relate to science. The minute they say that they are not a scientist, they lose credibility especially if they go against what the majority of scientists have found to be true. I liked this article and I agree with what Morgan said, how the article is more like a story than an essay. All in all, it was an enjoyable, interesting, and informative read.
This article was really interesting because it talked about ethnographies and I had heard of them before, but I had not realized how extensive they were. They seem really complicated, intense, time-consuming, and interesting. I am not sure I agree with Sarah about how ethnographies are good skills to learn because as long as you are not going into anthropology, when are you going to use them? Of course, I understand that one might be required to use ethnographic writing in an English core curriculum class, such as ours, but most majors would not go into this extensively. I also disagree with Sarah that what this piece is trying to do is to make people aware of human contact going on around them or gain a deeper understanding of the human experience. I think that this piece’s purpose is to inform the college students reading it of the background of ethnographic writing and how it is important in college.
I think the historical background of ethnographies was interesting. It talked about missionaries and how they would go to other countries in order to convert them to their religion. They would inadvertently write ethnographies and bring them back to their own countries and churches. It then went on to talk about how that is what ethnographers now are trying to avoid. I think that is smart and it connects to one of my favorite books, Flags of our Fathers. In that book, it talked about how United States based Christian missionaries tried to convert Japanese people to Christianity and it had adverse effects because the Japanese decided to close their borders. Of course, that meddling in the Japanese culture that the United States did finally lead to WWII because the Japanese then resented the United States. Now modern day anthropologists have a give and take where they give something in return to the population they are studying and they have moved away from the “missionary” format of ethnographies which I think is a great idea.
Sarah, when you connected this article to your sister, I agree with you. Journalism is similar to ethnographic writing. Journalism is a cool profession and it must be a great experience to experience all of those events that happen around the world. Despite that, there is a major difference between journalism and ethnographic writing. The difference is that journalists do not give anything in return. It would be cool if they could do that because journalists often go to places that are suffering from intense hardships and giving those people in those regions anything would be a blessing.
This article was confusing at first, but when I read it over multiple times, it became less confusing. I liked the way Gee started off by talking about how saying something whether while writing, or speaking, is not without a consequent action. That emphasizes the importance of context which is a very necessary concept to understand in life. One must say or write something while being in the correct “social role” to which that thing requires. It makes perfect sense to me since I have taken sociology in the past. The sociology class that I took last semester, Contemporary Social Issues, talked about social roles and the way society classifies us. For example, when one wants to become a teacher, (a social role) they would have to student teach. That what Gee means when he discusses learning a Discourse. It is interesting to me that he tied it so neatly into sociology because language is the most essential part of society. It is how we communicate and it is what makes us human.
When Gee explained discourses and Discourses, it took me a while to understand. Little stretches of language; the discourses are a part of the bigger category of Discourses. That concept is very similar to writing and actions which he talked about before. It makes sense that certain dominant groups in a Discourse would create tests to see whether someone is new or not to that Discourse. People would not want somebody who is new or as Gee puts it, “non-native” to get too involved because they may have a harder time understanding and navigating that Discourse. However, with the first theorem about Discourses, I do not understand why people will not give their “social goods” to those who are not fully in the Discourse. I do partially understand that one has to be either fluent or not at all, even though that seems black and white.
It is interesting when Gee says that teachers should politicize teaching by teaching their students to use mushfake while learning secondary Discourses. However, I do not really see how mushfaking and politics connect. Evonne, you said that you think Gee made the little girl reading the book seem like what she was doing was negative, but I do not see it like that. I see it as him giving an example as to how she is acquiring a secondary Discourse. It describes how a master-apprentice relationship can benefit the child when, after imitating her mother reading a storybook, the child then goes to school, where reading is taught. She looks like a “quick study” emphasizing Gee’s idea of how being an apprentice is extremely helpful. All in all, Gee’s article was confusing at times, but it was also interesting.
The reading that we had to read for today was one of the most important because it told us of the helpfulness of visual aids in everyday life. Visual aids are everywhere and they help many people bring their point in many different ways. This reading discussed things that visual descriptions and verbal descriptions have in common. That is important because, in a writing class, people might not really understand that the same concepts that apply to words can also apply to images.
This article presented concepts that are in both verbal descriptions and visual aids. It also stated that certain visual descriptions such as graphs and charts might even be easier to follow when they are presented visually rather than verbally. That concept is everywhere, especially in a college science class where one might need to read graphs and charts for a science project. The concept that visual aids might be more helpful in some situations also reminds me of the saying, “A picture says a thousand words.” Sometimes a picture with a verbal description is much more effective than just a short explanation which might not help anybody understand a complicated concept.
When the reading goes on to analyze the photos from 9/11 and Iwo Jima, I agree with Danielle because it helped me to understand how to analyze pictures instead of words and, similar to what she said, in my last English class, we just wrote papers. We did have one assignment based on visuals, but the professor did not describe the idea that the infographics that were included in our presentations were visual aids. She also did not describe how visual aids can help describe something better than words. I did not realize this helpful concept until now.
In a later part of the reading, the two photographs, one of marines razing the flag on Iwo Jima, and one of the firefighters razing the flag on 9/11 help to describe the complex elements of visuals. The reading talked about the immediate context, broader context, author, purpose, etc. After that, the reading cleverly used both photos as a tipping off point to describe how to analyze visual things and it made it more enjoyable since I had read extensively on the history of the Iwo Jima photograph in a book called Flags of Our Fathers.
The last section of the reading relates visual aids to the most common visual aids that are around everybody on a daily basis, advertisements. It describes their effectiveness and how they appeal to different audiences, the genre etc. and it all ties back to the complex elements of visuals. This article really raises your awareness of all of the visual forms of communication in this world. It does it in a well thought out way as I have aforementioned. This reading had a little more of a textbook feel as most of the prior commenters felt, but that helped it to be more informative.
Alyssa, I agree with you about the fact that Kerry Dirk’s essay was much more enjoyable to read than I had expected. It was informal and creative. I appreciated it even more because Mr. Dirk easily related genres to different actions each one of us performs in everyday life, on social media, in college, and in the workplace.
Additionally, Mr. Dirk, whilst doing his homework and researching how he should write this essay, evaluated the format of previous essays because he was not entirely sure how he should organize it. Mr. Dirk was showing us that he practices what he preaches. That is important because, as a student, I would like to know that the author knows what they are talking about before I take their words seriously and use the information that they present in my own writing career. Also, when Mr. Dirk uses references from other authors, that further backs up his argument and uses ethos by saying that other authors agree with him on this topic.
As I aforementioned, Mr. Dirk looked up examples on how to organize his essay. That time spent researching was apparently very well spent because, in my opinion, he organizes the essay very well. He starts off talking about a joke that was going around at the time and he explains how that joke and genres relate. He then goes on to explain how he wrote this essay and ties that very well into how genres allow writers to know how to write based upon a predetermined set of rules. Altogether, each idea leads into another in a very nice manner.
I stated previously that Kerry Dirk relates different genres to actions in everyday life. He does that in a very entertaining way so that the readers do not get bored as easily. That, in turn, adds to the informality of the essay. Of the many examples of informality in the paper, my personal favorite is the time when Mr. Dirk uses a ransom letter to explain how well to navigate the situations where different genres are being used. He puts down three examples of a ransom note and only one is proper because the other two do not at all seem like they would be effective.
As shown above, I agree with Alyssa and I thought that Mr. Dirk’s essay was enjoyable to read, was very well organized, and was full of entertaining examples. He clearly knew what he was talking about because he referenced a number of different authors in order to back up his statements. Also, adding to the enjoyableness of the essay was the fact that he related genres to everyday life which was very helpful in telling me how I could use his information on a day to day basis.
