They say I say

This writing was very straight and to the point. While offering some coaching on writing that is fairly obvious, it gave some good instructions and templates on how to make yourself look like you actually know what you're talking about. It does a good job of showing you each of the methods of agreeing or disagreeing how each one can either be your best friend or you're downfall. I broke it down into easy and understandable components, that as long as you try to follow the advice will not fail you. I will find the templates useful as a guideline, and be reviewing it more to try to decide what view point I want to display and how effective each of the different options will be. For each one there will be pros and cons but in the long run there will be one that will benefit my paper better and give it the support that it needs.

Politics

This reading was one of the more difficult ones to go through, it is a little complex in the language but, it definitely does provide some really good insight as to how the english language is deteriorating. The language used now is all to convince someone that what you have to sell is the best, but tricking into thinking we're not buying anything at all ; using flowery words to sound eloquent and more intelligent, when really the person has no idea what they are talking about at all. I read this essay in high school but had forgotten about, and forgotten how impacting that just simply saying what you want to is. There was some very useful information and good tips, even going into how much latin is used in every day speech, but we have come to interpret the meaning to be something entirely different than it's actual definition. I also liked the breakdown of each of the quotes and what specifically needed to be changed, and also enjoyed how he took the simplest of phrases and turned them into absolute jibberish that no one except the writer would have any idea as to whats going on. I didn't feel that he touched on the writing in politics as much as i would like, and how it is just manipulative pandering to the masses, but he did make a lot of simple, well research, and to the point perspectives on writing.

They say what?

"Yes / No / Okay, But" brings up some interesting ideas of what it actually means to make an argument. I can't just say "I think people with Tattoos can be professional." I actually have to dive in and prove why, from my perspective, they can be. At the same time, I need to fully take into consideration some of the messages others have been saying on my topic. Those that are 'against' the side that I'm arguing for may have some GREAT information that can actually be 'for' my views, so I'll need to dig a little bit and interpret what they're actually saying. It's ideas like this that tell me to look deeper into the arguments that are against my topic to find good information to work on, and build my paper around.

The hardest part for me is knowing that I'll be disagreeing with certain points of view. For a lot of my life I've been doing my best to ride the line between two views, seeing both sides, and partially siding with both. This paper is going to test my ability to dive in and hold strong to my ideas on the subject. I'm sure I'll be smoothing the rough edges a bit with suggested phrases like "Although I agree up to a point, I still insist..."

This was a much easier read than beating my head against the English language. The style of writing in this reading is much easier to follow and understand. It's almost like they actually wanted people to learn from it! Both readings will provide great information, but I pulled much more useful information out of this reading.

Sometimes, simpler is better!

They Say I Say

"They Say I Say" is kind is a pretty helpful read.It just explains the ways in which one could go about writing an argumentative essay. I really like the templates that the author offers because even though I may not use them word for word they are a good base to start with. The author presents, what seems like to me, all of the ways one could go about writing an argumentative essay. Not only that they also state the kind of obvious but always good reminders of the challenges that comes with each point of view. The examples that were taken out of other peoples essays really do help because as I'm sure I've mentioned before i am a very visual person. This read was a heck of a lot easier to understand and funnily enough, simpler then Orwell's essay on why we should write in a more simple way. Kind of ridiculous huh?

Politics and the English Language Reading Response

George Orwell's “Politics And The English Language” was, for me, kind of a difficult read. At first I was a bit confused and then when he started quoting different professors and other, I'm assuming, “high” people I was incredibly confused because first of all Orwell just sounded like a grumpy old man complaining about the way people have started using language and all those people he quoted made absolutely no sense to me what so ever. I would have tried reading them again to try and get the meaning of what they were trying to say but I didn't want to frustrate myself anymore then those quotes had already made me. However, a bit less than a quarter of the way I started to see what he was saying a bit clearer. He started listing the ways people, I guess politics mainly, distort the English language and he gave examples. He talked about dying metaphors and how people use the same metaphors again and again. Metaphors like Achilles heel, of which i'm familiar with, and grist to the mill, I'm not familiar with, have all been used to the point that they don't have an affect on the reader anymore. The example that I really connected with was when he said “If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church .” I totally got that. The thing that I found to be the funniest through out this entire read is that Orwell is angry that people speak too eloquently to the point that it's all just a bunch of rubbish. He wanted people to speak in simpler terms. I found his opinion to be one of a kind because usually it's the other way around. I'm definitely not disagreeing with him because sometimes I hear people talk and I hear absolutely nothing. I thought it was just me but thankfully here is an amazing writer who thinks the same thing that I do.

I'm not quite sure how this really goes with class. I'm sure people want clarity in the paper and metaphors that actually paint pictures but what Orwell wants everyone to do just seems almost bad for a college student because we're supposed to try to sound smart. We get praised for that. Plus it would be really hard to write a huge paper if you couldn't distort the English language a little bit because long, somewhat meaningless sentences are what get us our minimum page requirements. Haha.

Orwell's 'Polotics' left me feeling like a broken hammer...

HOLY COW!! could this essay be any longer and more confusing?

As an art major, working with my hands and eyes in a medium that is candy for the eyes, the ideas in this painfully long essay were a bit beyond my grasp. Parts of it I can grasp, but my mind tends to think simpler is best... i can't make contact with my words to have them serve the purpose of making me sound smarter.

According to parts of this essay, in my opinion it's not an unjustifiable assumption (or.... "i think") that as a writer of an essay, I'm supposed to pad almost all of my sentences with useless information. It's phrases like this that confuse me to no end. We're supposed to get to the point, making our stance and supporting our arguments that we've chosen. Aren't we? Or are we instead supposed to figure out new ways to write a sentence so that it winds up twice as long with pretty much zero addition to the meaning of the message? If I were to actually write like this, my entire writing style would be dissolved, putting bars around my voice and sanitizing my writings. Feeling is removed, and it becomes boring when "I Think" is turned into something that, in my mind, pushes the writer up onto a pedestal above the reader.  Maybe that's why I'm having such a hard time with this reading... I'm not the type of person who reads an essay with a dictionary on hand to look up words, nor am I the type of writer who's going to use words that require being looked up. If I can't define them with in the sentence/paragraph, I wont use them. Using them would only prove to the readers that I'm full of crap because my stile would be thrown for a loop by such a foreign word.

 As the essay concludes, the 6 rules stand out as an ironic message to me. The long-winded exploration into the English language and it's decline is summed up in 6 simple rules. I think I missed the point, but I learned a few new words along the way. Like the feeling I can only remember from a dream, feet moving as if I were walking through molasses up to my knees... I made it through the essay.

In conclusion, the length of this reading, and the font-size was NOT candy for the eyes? It was more like being hit against an anvil, only absorbing some of the meaning via osmosis... even though it was definitely more educational  reading this paper, compared to sleeping on it. ;) I'll stick with my simplistic meanings and explanations in my writings as they portray my feeling and voice to the reader. With out that, i wouldn't be much better than a word processor that spat out random facts. Voice and feeling is what keeps a reader reading, isn't it?

They Say I Say-Yes/No/Okay/But: Matthew Curtis' Reading Response.

I found this reading much more informative and useful than Orwell's essay, but Orwell's essay did make me think quite a bit, so I suppose it served its purpose. I've written an argument essay before, but looking back on it now I feel as though it's lacking something and I think I might have done a bit better if I had read this particular passage beforehand. I know it's okay to agree or disagree with someone, but without being able to explain why, your argument can sort of spiral into confusion. This reading offered suggestions on wording to use to help support your statements, and I think some of them will come in handy in my own paper for this class. When it talks about the "duh" move, I found that to be something that, while it may get your point across, it does seem like an asinine thing to do. On a whole though I found this reading to be very informative and I'll refer back to it when writing my own paper.

Politics and the English Language-Matthew Curtis' Reading Response

What a read this was! As I read it, I thought to myself what George Orwell would think of the way the English language is used these days. The "text speak" that so many people use has infiltrated into daily use, not only in writing but also in the way we actually speak. The text talk of today is quite the opposite of the passages that George Orwell quoted in his writing. It seemed to him that bad language was accomplished by using big words that make the passage more confusing than it is, as well as using certain words or phrases that made it seem that the writer had no actual knowledge of what they were writing about. I particularly liked his views on the word "democracy", in which he states "...not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides." In reading this section it again made me think of the modern times that we're in and the use of the word "democracy" when referring to countries that the western world has interests in. Orwell himself states in this writing that "It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it." I was amazed at how his depictions of politicians speaking publicly seemed to be the same as it is today. When he wrote “When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the same familiar phrases…one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being, but some kind of dummy.” It made me think of the arguments that George Bush and Tony Blair made in going to war in Iraq and how eerily similar it was to Barack Obama, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and British PM David Cameron speaking about all the reasons the United Nations should support military action in Libya. The same lines repeated about “defeating tyranny” and stopping mad men from killing their own people. It made me wonder if there’s a special book that has been written just for people in power to use in times of crisis that has key phrases in it that they use. It also resonates back to Orwell’s time when the world was at work fighting the Nazi’s and then shortly after that, Communism. I was confused at some parts, I admit, especially when he refers to words as being “Latin”, as in the following passage:

The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details.

As someone who is not an English major and doesn’t have quite the grasp on word roots as Orwell does, I found some of his arguments to be pretty confusing to the point that I wasn’t sure if I should agree or disagree with him. Overall it was an interesting essay to read, but I think I walked away from it more confused about the English language than I already had been.

Argument Essay

Going through the e-text there wasn't anything too new, it did have some good websites to experiment with. For my topic at hand the Curious Researcher was not as helpful, but probably like most people I was able to find a plethora of information in the editorials. I found some really good information about kids being vegetarians included detail than I have been able to find so far. Definitely some good resources that have a lot of potential, just maybe not as much for the specific topic of vegetarianism. Otherwise perusing the sites were very informational

Editorials for the win... but I dont feel like a winner

It's possible that my topic is too specific, but I'm having a hard time believing that to be the case. The CQ Researcher was fairly useless on my subject of 'tattoos', as was the 'opposing viewpoints' suggestion for my topic. I don't know why this surprises me, but it does. The third suggestion of searching through editorials actually proved quite interesting. It brought up a few ideas that I hadn't thought of yet, or maybe just hadn't drilled down to that level yet... Even the TED link at the very bottom of the lesson gave me an idea of another lead in/idea to play with.

Some of the digging helped with generating ideas, but I'm still struggling with picking an actual argument. I was hoping the reading would help a bit more in that respect... time to keep digging!


Source:
"Talk About Geting A Haircut." Editorial. Edmonton Journal  30 Jan. 2011: A12. Print.

Argument Essay Reading Response

The e-text module for the Argument Essay didn't present any new ideas to me for my research. Although I had never heard of the CQ Researcher before, when I typed in various keywords from my topic, the only article that came was one about extreme sports. I didn't consider rock climbing an extreme sport, and apparently this article didn't either. The only mention it had that was specific to rock climbing was talking about the dangers of falling, which only encompassed about 3 lines of the article. The rest of the article was mainly dedicated to cage fighting and MMA fights, which are definitely extreme. Climbing might be considered extreme by some people, but the risk for injury and even death is very low and almost non-existent when compared with MMA fights. I did find a good article on the ProQuest site, but I don't think it's something I'll be able to use for my essay. It was mainly concerned with the government raising access fees to National Parks, with a specific focus on Denali National Park in Alaska. The Boise State Library, however, has always been a wealth of information when I've needed to do research. I found a dissertation written by someone from Griffith University in Australia that I hope will be useful. I requested the item through a loan so I hope it gets here in time. From my research that I've done throughout the semester I already quite a few sources that I can use, but I would like to find some more, and the Albertsons Library online search is a great tool that I will continue to use during the remainder of my time at BSU.

Source:

Ashman, Elizabeth. Rock Climbers and Their Environment : Site Selection, Substitution and Rule Obedience. Diss. Griffith University, 1998. 1998. Print.

Google Docs through BroncoWeb - Re-Formatted!!!! :)

• Log into BroncoMail
• * http://broncoweb.boisestate.edu/ - click on “BroncoMail Login” on the left hand side of the page.
•  Use your broncoweb username and password to log in

• Access Google Docs & Creating a document
•  Once into your email, click “Documents” in the top left of the page… very top of the page…
•  Will open a new window
• Under the “broncomail” Logo, click the “Create New” drop down
• Select “Document” – this will open a new tab, or a new window depending on your setup on the computer.
• In the top-center of the page beside the “Google docs” logo, is a square text-box for you to title your paper – type what you want it named in this box.
• from here, you can copy & paste your existing work into the document just like you would do for any document/application on the computer.
• Once you’re done, or just want to save it, in the top right of the screen is “Save Now”
•  You won’t see much happen, other than the box will change to “Saved”
•  When you’re done in Google Docs with your document, make sure it’s saved (google will auto-save it for you every few minutes, just in case something happens.) once it’s saved, you can close the window

•  Opening your document again after it’s saved & Closed
•  If you’re not in Google Docs yet, log back in like you did earlier.
• Click on the “Home” or the “All Items” links in the left-hand column of the page.
• In the main area of the window you’ll see the document you created earlier.
•  Just click on the document name and it will open up for you.

If you need any more assistance with this, hit me up via email: jimcauthen@u.boisestate.edu, or jcauthen@gmail.com . I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. I hope this helps! :)