(CM 1145) The Importance of Writing a Blog

Last semester in CM 1120 I had to write ten blog posts. They had to be about the poems and short stories we studied in class. I personally didn’t like this assignment and I procrastinated while doing it. I had four months to do ten blogs, and I left it to the last minute and ended up doing them all in one night. My mark could have been better and I know I am capable of more. My problem was I didn’t understand the importance of writing a blog.

Blogs may seem like pointless assignments and a waste of time, but they are much more than that. They allow you to discuss your personal opinion and feelings towards something. Although the English blogs have to be completely “English based”, they still allow you to express yourself. It is your own personal journal and other people can read your words and give you feedback. After writing the blog you have to edit, format, and make it look nice by adding pictures, quotes or whatever else you desire. I gained a new appreciation for blogs because they helped me grow as a writer.

As of right now, I have eight blogs done in CM 1145 and I think that is a great achievement, especially if you compare it to last semester.

(CM 1145) Book Review

      My reaction when I was told to write a book review for class was sheer horror. I had never written one before, well I mean I did write book reports in elementary school but that was ten years ago. While I was writing my book review, my feelings began to change. I forgot about the assignment aspect and I focused my attention on the book itself. After doing this book review, I gained tremendous respect towards Elie Wiesel and his memoir “Night”. It takes place during the 1944 War, best known as the Holocaust. Elie writes of his life during this time and all the tragedies he had encountered. He went through several liquidations and selections, he watched as babies were thrown into flaming pits alive, and he had to watch as everyone around him perished. He was torn from his mother and three sisters and he never saw them again. It was just Elie and his father. Their relationship is stupendous in my eyes. Elie gave his father his ration of bread several times, and this is amazing because that was rarely seen in the concentration camps. Bread was the way of life; it was the only way of life. Also, while fathers and sons turned against each other and abandoned one another, Elie stuck with his father till the end. Even though his father was growing ill every day, he stayed by his side. If that doesn’t show Elie’s unconditional love for his father, then I don’t know what will.

     Elie Wiesel is a magnificent man; he survived the War of 1944, that itself displays strength and courage. He didn't go against his morals once, he stayed true to himself and he didn't lose faith. I believe Elie survived so that he could tell the world about the cruelty that took place in the concentration camps, that way it would never happen again. Whatever the reason is for Elie’s survival, it is not relevant. The important thing is that out of the six million Jews that died, Elie survived. I wish that I could be half the person that Elie Wiesel is; he is now and forever, one of my heroes.

“The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.”  

-Elie Wiesel

(CM 1145) The Einstein of Happiness

I read an interview today called “The Einstein of Happiness” and it really stuck with me. A woman named Patricia Freeman interviewed Allen Parducci, a fifty-seven year old professor of psychology who is also a happiness scholar. He wanted to test the theory that “every man is a suffering machine and a happiness machine combined, and for every happiness turned out in one department, the other stands ready to modify it with a sorrow or pain.” Now the interview itself isn’t what fascinated me, what caught my attention was the research he gathered.

He said that if people want to be happy than they have to stop thinking in the future. They can’t keep thinking that they would be happier if they had a bigger income, or if they married a certain person. Instead, they should learn to delight in what they have and look forward to things that happen every day. I agree with this completely. People today are so consumed with having top-of-the-line stuff that they are missing out on the important things in life. People need to be grateful for what they have because there are individual’s in this world that have nothing at all. Parducci said “if I made a million dollars, would I be happier?” He said he had friends who have made that kind of money but it did not make them happy.  People think that having expensive things will make them happy, but money doesn’t buy you happiness.

Parducci met a women who was dying of cancer and he said that she was the happiest person he had ever met. The six months before she died was like a party every night and when Parducci asked her how she felt about death, she replied “I know I could die any time, but I’m very happy.”  I find this woman amazing. She knows her days are numbered and she still has a smile on her face.I find it crazy how she is dying and yet she is happier than several other people in the world.

Parducci thinks that people make themselves out to be happier than they really are, because there’s an implication that there’s something wrong with you if you can’t arrange your life to be satisfying. I found myself in this exact position last year. I had been dating this guy for two and a half years but I wasn’t happy, and everybody knew I wasn't happy because I looked depressed every time they saw me. People would ask me “why don’t you smile?” and “why are you always sad?” After a while all the questions and comments got to me, and I started feeling more unhappy. Eventually I had to make myself believe I was happy with this guy when I really wasn’t. I made myself out to be happier than I really was, because I was afraid there was something wrong with me since my relationship wasn't satisfying.

TIPS

• Happiness can’t be bought or learned, it has to come from within. 
• Don’t live in the future, live for today and cherish what you have. 

(CM 1145) Emotional Appeals

I love writing emotional appeals! This is my favourite part of CM 1145 so far. You can write about anything you want as long as it provokes emotion.  Perhaps the reason I enjoy this is because, for once in my life I can make my reader feel something other than boredom. I had an assignment to do a few weeks ago where I could either write a logical, ethical, or emotional appeal. I chose to write an emotional appeal in the form of a story. My topic was something that is seen as morally wrong, but I wanted to convince my audience otherwise. The topic I am speaking of is abortion.

I started off my story by asking the question “Is it morally wrong to have an abortion?” Most people say yes because a human fetus is a human being with a right to live, making abortion morally the same as murder. I told a story in the eyes of a fourteen year old girl who was sexually abused by her step father since she was seven years old. Her biological father had died in a car accident when she was five years old, and after a year of being a widow, her mother decided to start dating again. That is when she met Joseph Lee Walker; they married a year later. Joseph was drinking a lot one day because he had just lost his job at a law firm where, ironically, he prosecuted rapists and child molesters while he himself was molesting his own child. He took his frustrations out on his step daughter, and six weeks later she found out she was pregnant with his child. Her mother thought she was promiscuous and had no idea the father was her own husband. Her friends abandoned her because they didn’t want to associate with “sluts”. She had to walk through the halls at school while every person she passed stared with disgust. She didn’t know what to do, she did not want to keep the child but she wass afraid of what people would think. I ended with, “What if your child was sexually abused by a family member and got pregnant. So, I ask again, is it morally wrong to have an abortion?”

I personally am so tired of people saying it’s morally wrong to have an abortion. I am pro choice and I wish society was too. It is nobody else’s business whether a person decides to have an abortion or not. People think abortions are the “easy way out” and that people who get them done are poor, lazy drug addicts. This may be the case for some people but it is wrong to characterize everybody with this label. Some people are financially enabled while others were forced into the situation. What about people who were in abusive relationships and want out? What about innocent women who were raped on the street and left with a baby? Think about your mother, or sister or even your own child. If they were raped and got pregnant, would you stick them with this label too?

What do you think? I would love to hear your opinion about this topic.

Is it morally wrong to have an abortion? 

(CM 1145) Collaborative Writing

Collaborative writing is when you’re in a group with your fellow classmates to create an essay. Each student is assigned something different whether it is the introduction, thesis statement, or conclusion. For me, I was put in a group with three other people and I was assigned the introduction and one supporting paragraph. Once we wrote our parts, we had to send each individual section to our teacher and she then combined it all into an essay. It was our job to edit the essay, so we decided the order in which the edit would go. I was in charge of the third edit and to be honest, it was incredibly difficult. After I was finished editing it, I had to send it to my other classmate who was in charge of the final edit. She then sent it back to our teacher and we received a hard copy of it, and as a group we sat down and went through it line by line, fixing any mistakes.  Once we finished that, someone had to go back and fix the mistakes electronically, and in this case that person was me. It was than my job to send the final copy of our essay to the teacher.

I was excited for this assignment, it seemed like a fun and unique way to combine everybody’s writing styles. After editing the essay, my opinion changed. Everybody has a different way of writing and explaining things, so when it came time to combine four different perspectives into one essay, it was brutal. Some paragraphs were shorter than others and each one was written differently. I would rather write my own essay because than I would be in charge of the entire thing myself. This assignment made me nervous because I had to put faith and trust into my classmates. They had to do their part and do it well; if they didn’t, everybody in the group would pay the price.

I’m not entirely sure what this assignment teaches us. Maybe the point of it was to get students to work together and trust in each other. Perhaps the purpose was to emphasize that everybody has a different and unique writing style and that no style is wrong. I did learn one very important thing though, I learned the definition of team work. 

(CM 1145) Research Papers

Research papers are my number one weakness when it comes to English. They require so much attention and dedication! They require so much information, and that information has to be used effectively and properly throughout the paper. The MLA format helps guide you while writing your paper. Perhaps the reason I dislike research papers so much is because they have to be done “right”. They must follow the MLA format specifically, and if they don’t, then you will lose marks. I know because this happened to me last semester.

If you are unsure of what I mean and if you don’t believe me when I say research papers are tedious, then let me take you through some of the things they require:

• You must never make a title page for your paper unless asked otherwise.
•  In the upper left hand corner of the first page of your paper, you must list your name, your instructor’s name, the course, and the date. (double space when you do this).
• Double space again and center your title without underlining, italicizing, or putting quotations on it.
•  In the right hand corner of the first page put your last name, space, 1. Continue this after every page indicating the appropriate number.
• To cite an entire website you must follow this format: The purdue OWL. Purdue U Writing Lab, 2010. Web. Date of access.
• If you are quoting something exactly than you must indicate the page number of where you received that source and the authors name. For example: Romantic poetry is characterized by the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” (Wordsworth 263).
•  For short quotations enclose them with double quotation marks on both sides of the quote. For long quotation marks you must omit quotation marks, and start the quote on a new line with it indented one inch from the left margin while double spacing the entire time.
• The final page of your paper should be the Works Cited page. It too must have your last name, space, number(?). Double space all citations and indent the second lines of citations with five spaces so that you can create a hanging indent. For actually citing a reference there are specific guidelines that you must follow. I recommend that you check out this website: owl.english.purdue.edu

 If you check this website out than you will notice that some of the examples I used came directly from there.

As you can see, writing research papers takes a lot of time and preparation. I wrote one for CM 1120 last semester in one night and my mark reflected that. Do not take them lightly, they are the devil assignments. I personally dislike them because of how tedious they are. I lost marks last semester because my works cited page didn't follow the MLA format exactly. You can forget one tiny thing, and you will be penalized for it.

One piece of advice, do NOT procrastinate, because if you do, your mark will reflect it just like mine did.

(CM 1145) Purpose and Audience

My class and I did an activity on purpose and audience last week and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Our teacher handed out two pieces of paper that had an intended audience on one sheet and an argument on the other. Our job was to somehow link the argument with the audience we were given. My audience was a grade six class and I had to argue the fact that eating meat should be banned. Now at first I was confused and I couldn't think of any way to link the two together, but then I started asking myself questions: What do they need to know? What do I want them to understand most? And how can I interest them in my topic and to understand my argument?

After asking myself these questions I started thinking about how young and impressionable my audience is. They are children; they don’t understand the ways of the world yet. My strategy going into this activity was to scare my audience. I came up with a bunch of ways to convince this grade six class to agree that eating meat should be banned. Some of these ways are:

•  Children love animals, tell them that every time they bite into a piece of meat, they are helping kill innocent animals
• Show them videos of animal abuse and slaughter houses
•  Bambi is a deer, would you eat Bambi?
• Turn the situation around and put the children in the animal’s shoes. What if you were an animal and someone was trying to kill and eat you? Does that make it right?
• You can get food poisoning from meat, such as raw chicken
• Children sometimes have pets at home; if they happen to have a pet rabbit that they love dearly, ask them if they would eat it. Have you ever had rabbit stew?
• There are only so many animals in the world and they can only reproduce so fast. We, as in everybody in the world, are slowly reducing the animal population by killing and eating meat.  By 2090 some breeds of animals could be extinct due to our meat intake. (It could happen, you never know!)

I think my strategy was perfect because my audience is extremely impressionable at that age, and by making them aware of these things sooner in life, it will ultimately affect them in the future and hopefully they will do something about it.

“Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.” -Thomas Edison

(CM 1145) Grammar and Punctuation

My class and I have been working on grammar and punctuation. Now I don't know about everyone else in my class, but I for one am horrible at both. In order to make an essay or any form of writing sound professional, it has to be grammatically correct. This includes: commas, quotation marks, semi colons, parentheses, italics, capitals, periods, hyphens, apostrophes, and so much more.

A comma is used before a co-ordinating conjunction that joins independent clauses. It is used after an introductory adverb clause and it is also used to separate items in a series.

Quotation marks are used to identify the speaker or writer and when you introduce a quotation, you have to consider using verbs other than “says”. Distinguishing between short and long quotations is crucial. It is also important not to introduce a long quotation into the middle of your own sentence. You must always remember to quote exactly!

Semicolons are used to link independent clauses not joined by co-ordinating conjunctions, and they should join those independent clauses to things that are closely related in meaning.

Parentheses are used around subordinate material, and what is in parentheses is usually less essential to the meaning of the sentence.

Italics are used to italicize the name of a ship, plane, train, film, radio, television program, CD, play, or books.

Capitals are used to quote sentences within a sentence, but not for a quoted phrase. Use a capital for a rank or title preceding a proper name, or for a title substituting for a proper name.

Periods mark the end of your sentence, and they prevent run on sentences.

Hyphens have several uses: to attach certain prefixes to root words, to tie compound adjectives into a single unit, to join some compound nouns, and to indicate a span of dates or page numbers.

An Apostrophe is used to indicate the omitted letters or numbers in contractions, and to make digits plural. Also the most common way to indicate the possessive of a singular noun is to add an apostrophe followed by an s.

Now this may not sound very difficult, but I have only listed a few things to help make any form of writing grammatically correct. There are still several more out there that I haven’t listed. I personally find grammar and punctuation incredibly difficult and that’s where I tend to lose marks in essay’s and other writing assignments. My teacher decided to give my class an assignment on punctuation that had to be handed in at the end of the period. The instructions were to insert periods, question marks, quotation marks and also capitalize pronouns and words at the beginning of sentences. Quotes had to be italicized and we were not to change any words. When I received this assignment I was terrified because I knew I wasn’t going to do very good. I did the best I could and when I got my mark back, I wasn’t surprised by it. With my fifty-seven percent, I learned that I should focus more on grammar and punctuation so in the future I can get a better mark.

To anyone out there that cringes whenever they receive a grammar or punctuation worksheet, I just want to tell you that from personal experience that it is incredibly important, and it will help you receive a better mark in the future.