Glenn's Garage

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1278510/Depression-Its-just-new-trendy-illness.html

This is an article from the Daily Mail, it covers the topic of depression and is very unsuccessful at convincing me that depression is just a trend and there is no real meaning behind it. This piece starts off with an analogy that seems all too forced to come off well. This sense of not connecting with the reader sets forth an underlining tone for the rest of the piece. As we continue through the piece, the writer begins to divide its audience, angering those who believe in the seriousness of depression, and continuing to anger the middle class by stating depression is their issue. Then says that they believe in the existence of depression but that it does not exist in the lower class, it’s called poverty. If we look into the piece at a local revision level there are a few of mistakes and wrong words used throughout the piece to add to the fact that the piece is poorly conceived and constructed. But, I think one of the biggest components that makes this piece of work unbearable for me to read is the author’s word choice. She chooses to use many words that invoke emotions into the reader but they seem to come off as too harsh, and her attempts to justify her words seem to hit flat and only fuel the fire. The ending seems to completely revoke her ideas that she had already brought up of depression existing, and there is one question that she does not answer, if losses of loved ones, divorce, not feeling loved, or anything of this nature cannot invoke depression, what can? Overall, I believe the thing that irks me the most about this paper is how blatantly wrong she is and how her words are not consistently supporting her argument in an effort to not seem so harsh.

One thing I can relate this process to is photography. Photography takes a lot of work to get down, and you can always improve, there is no person that has ever said they have mastered photography because you simply can’t. But when I was first getting into photography I was really bad, no better than the average grandma with an iPhone. But as I got used to my camera more and more my photos have increased in their beauty. I had to learn that sometimes you may think you have the perfect shot lined up but you gotta keep shooting the object or scene from different angles and then when you come home to upload choose the best. Most of the time, the first photo is not the best, at the beginning it took a lot of shots to finally get the best ones. But because I have practiced so much nowadays I don’t need to take as many photos to get the right one. I’ve learned that I have to continuously practice and practice to get good at the craft and when it comes to individual scenes and photos multiple takes are the best, because maybe the first time I missed something that I could see when I changed up something like my position or the angle.

https://youtu.be/z06KpCG4oBI

 

Say Everything by Emily Nussbaum

http://nymag.com/news/features/27341/

 

I chose this article because I believe it brings the issue of finding purpose and people’s identities/ dual personalities into light in a personal way. This article takes the topic to a personal case study level, making it more relatable and seemingly more realistic. I want to focus in my paper about how people are personally having trouble connecting, a large sense of social disconnect, losing the ability to converse face to face, and hiding our true personalities online where anyone can find them. I believe this article can help because I can paraphrase the stories they tell to explain my point with specific life examples. But I can also take specific quotes that I like from the article to quote in my paper to give more power and opinion. The end of the article brings up a good point that I want to address to, is that technology and the social media lives we live are a revolution and we can’t get stuck in the past as technology grows forward. I find Nussbaum to be a good and intelligent writer who is very unbiased about bringing forth information which is good for a source since this allows for the information to be fairly presented and can be used to argue either side of this argument. The final thing I may use this article for would be to talk about how the internet affects our interactions with other people but specifically with employment opportunities since we mostly converse with future employers via email or phone instead of in person contact. Because it is hard to get rid of everything on the internet we forget of the stupid things from our past that others might find, especially when employers search for us and the whether or not they decide to ignore it, that I find is a very interesting concept that I want to go about exploring.

 

The Machine Zone by Alexis C. Madrigal

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/07/the-machine-zone-this-is-where-you-go-when-you-just-cant-stop-looking-at-pictures-on-facebook/278185/

 

I chose this article because of its unique view on the social media realm, that it is sucking our time and energy away. I want to use this article to talk about how with all the distractions in the world people are losing time to be spent finding their identity and their purpose and filling this time with nonsense like cat videos. This article can also be used in the same vein as the Nussbaum’s article talking about how social media has stripped us from our privacy and split our personality in half, having our physical personality a mere watered down shadow of what we truly are which we share on social media. Or we use social media to hide who we truly are disguising our true identity for only our friends and other close ones to see but others see the “best side” of us online. But mostly I want to talk about how distractions have led many to delaying their purpose-finding and identification. This connects well with what I want to talk about, the separation of physical communication and true personal understanding that is slowly being eradicated in the young generations of today.

After doing this exercise I realized I repeat a few words a lot in my writing. But one thing I am good at not repeating is transition words at the beginning of a sentence such as: but, however, in fact, moreover, in conclusion, yet again, etc. I found that after looking it over I do not repeat the same transition words more than twice, where I was thinking I might have done it a lot. Words I did repeat however were ones that tied thoughts together in a sentence such as and, I wrote the word several times throughout my two pages and in total throughout the whole paper I wrote it 88 times. I also noticed that I wrote the word that, a lot as well, and in most cases I found that the word was not necessary to the sentence flow. So going forward I will work to remove the amount of times that I say: and, as well as: that, to cut down on the amount of unnecessary words and create short cohesive sentences that pack more of a punch.

Before:

In today’s society, anxiety and social awkwardness is at an all time high, with technology reducing the amount of social interaction today’s youth is having more and more people are afraid of face to face confrontation resorting back to technology to avoid a situation. Have you ever gone to meet someone to go do something, or gone on a date with someone and every time there’s a gap in the conversation one of you reverts back to your phones? Now more than ever people have been avoiding underlying issues when it comes to interaction. Young people today have lived most of their life surrounded in the internet, they have experienced more life with it than without and currently there is nonstop stimulation. If you were to walk down the street today people are more involved in their phones than they are with the world around them, it seems almost strange to people if someone doesn’t have the latest social media, or is in the dark about the latest celebrity fiasco.

After:

With technology reducing the amount of social interaction, anxiety and social awkwardness are at an all time high in today’s society. More and more people of today’s youth are afraid of face to face confrontation, often resorting back to technology to avoid a situation. Have you ever gone to meet someone to go do something, or gone on a date with someone, and every time there’s a gap in the conversation, one of you reverts back to your phones? Now more than ever, people have been avoiding the underlying issues when it comes to interaction. Young people today have lived most of their lives surrounded in the internet. They have experienced more life with it than without, and there is currently nonstop stimulation. If you were to walk down the street today, you might notice that people are more involved in their phones than they are with the world around them. It seems almost strange to people if someone doesn’t have the latest social media, or is in the dark about the latest celebrity fiasco.

Technology has created a societal norm of multitasking without an understanding of its consequences and misinterpretation of its benefits. Multitasking, if done in a correct manner, can help focus and efficiency. With that goal in mind many try to multitask without knowing that they are simply just rapidly changing their attention between the two things. Research has shown that effective multitasking has been mastered by Buddhist monks, there understanding of multitasking has enlightened their minds and given them more focus and efficiency. One writer, Sam Anderson, wrote a paper on multitasking and its effects on the brain and tasks at hand. In the piece he writes:

Over the last twenty years, Meyer and a host of other researchers have proven again and again that multitasking, at least as our culture has come to know and love and institutionalize it, is a myth. When you think you’re doing two things at once, you’re almost always just switching rapidly between them, leaking a little mental efficiency with every switch… the brain processes different kinds of information on a variety of separate “channels” -a language channel, a visual channel, an auditory channel, and so on -each of which can process only one stream of information at a time. If you overburden a channel the brain becomes inefficient and mistake-prone (Anderson 4).

Many are in the belief that by doing two things at once they are helping themselves save time by doing the two simultaneously. In fact the brain is becoming less effective and will spend more time than doing both things separately…

Revision Strategy

My overall goal in this paper revision is to make my argument flow and really wow my audience to my side. Many of the comments I have been seeing from my paper were that I need to work on connecting my ideas together to get a better flow. What I need to work on first however is splitting up my quotes so that they can be examined better. I have too many block quotes currently, and as Suki commented I might be better off by cutting them apart to analyze line by line specifically. Then I want to include more evidence on the actual brain biological and psychological effects such as classical conditioning. I said I was going to talk about the psychological effects of distraction, multitasking, and lack of attention, yet I barely did in my paper and I hope to change that in the next revision. I want to include an overarching theme of separation as Professor Emerson suggests, to give my whole paper a general theme to go on that I already have but bring it more present by organizing it that way and explicitly talking about it. After doing all those revisions I will finally end with the local revisions changing grammar, sentence structure, and spelling mistakes.

My Learning Log

 

Before this class I would write a paper and then wait a while, go back to it after a day or two and do local revisions then pass it in. I would not do any global revisions at all and only fix the small things like spelling mistakes or grammar issues. But now I do a global revision before I do a local revision, at two separate times never at the same time. As seen here in my writing I changed my concept and approach from:       to this:      I hope to eventually get to the point where I revise multiple times before sending in the paper, doing global revisions enough until I don’t wish to change any more of the writing. I now understand the importance of global revisions to my paper, sometimes I would write something that I thought at the time was logical and fit in with the rest of the paragraph that I was writing. But then I found that when I went back to revise it did not fit in with the rest or required its own paragraph so I could talk about this new topic.

 

I have been pretty good at summarizing other people’s ideas and thoughts, I learned how to introduce a quote pretty well. But what I need to still work on is the analysis of a quote, how to completely dissect the quote into the bare bones and use it to help my argument. However sometimes I need to fix how I analyze a quote as I did here, from: So the solution to this issue is not to talk and fix it with those involved but those who are not supporting them.  to this: The concept that is trying to be made is that everyone in society is involved in the future and creating a new life narrative, the older generations are making it hard to progress with their noncompliance. But by recognizing a need to change like that I was able to become less harsh on my interpretation of the text and created a more cohesive argument that was clear and less biased. Quotes are probably one of the strongest writing skills I have so I do not believe that I have to change that much about my writing, just simply more revision of my writing will help me change for the better.

 

Active reading and critical reading have been a part of my English repertoire for a while since I first learned them a long time ago. They are very useful skills when it comes to writing papers that require quotation from other people’s work. Analyzing the reading to find the ideas and pinpoint the part where they talk about it specifically is important to creating an argument. Using critical reading you can find out what the author is trying to say and use it to your advantage either as a way to support your argument or to discredit theirs depending on you use it. I want to be able to get better at annotating the readings, being able to write things that are important to the reading while I am reading it so when I go through I have written down places that I now keep spending time trying to find every time I want it.

 

I have been trained pretty well in MLA and we as a class have worked hard together figuring out how to write works cited for the work we have already done and the sources we are supposed to use. However, one thing we have not worked on at all is using sources from our own repertoire, not using the same two sources as everyone else but going out there and using sources that were not a part of the required sources so that we may customize our sources to the argument that we are trying to present. We have not worked on also, the small little things of MLA such as where to put the period at the end of a quote or all the little things people forget like page numbers and works cited or the proper list of things at the top of a page. I also want to learn how to better create a works cited and make sure that it is annotated correctly.

 

I feel that the only issues I have had with grammar and punctuation and spelling was with things that have been controversial and different from teacher to teacher. Like when it comes to where the period goes at the end of a quotation I learned differently than what we are taught here and also when it comes to contractions I have always been taught that contractions are fine, they are a part of English vernacular and used so much in our current day and age that it should not be a big that someone uses it’s instead of it is. These are the majority of the mistakes that have been found in my essays but there are the few spelling mistakes. The mistakes that I glazed over in my first write of the paper but are caught when I get to local revisions so they are not an issue when it comes to the final product. In this case I do not need to learn more to fix my writing, spelling has always been a strong suit of mine and I don’t believe that I need to work on it more than I already do constantly.

This medium could be very useful however I don’t know what we will be using it for. I could see how sharing each other stuff like our writing in our shared space could be beneficial but there seems to be issues happening already. There is a lot of technology issues that we are facing, like trying to navigate how to do things or post, or comment. Also, if people don’t do it on time it isn’t very helpful to do, since you don’t get feedback right away like we do it on paper.