Month: October 2017

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.

I plan to argue that modern technology for the most part has harmed brain development and weakened the overall knowledge of today’s youth. New technology such as the internet has brought forth “multitasking” which Restak and Anderson talk about at length. They state it as something that hinders the mind and it’s capabilities unless used in certain contexts where it can actually be beneficial. Then I want to go into depth about how psychologically the mind handles multitasking. Next, I want to discuss how internet and other technology of the modern era has given our brain less stimulation and need to retain information, quoting Restak and Anderson for backing. Finally, I want to talk about how socially technology has affected human interaction and how many people have become socially awkward or gained anxiety through lack of in person communication. It seems more and more people talk through their phones and less face to face which affects brain function and social construction.