Letter to future student

Dear English student,

I promise this isn’t going to be a letter about how much this class is going to suck and you will have to cry yourself to sleep at night. That being said, I don’t mean that this class is going to be a piece of cake. You are genuinely going to have to try to get A’s on your assignments in this class. When you write your essays, you can’t just half ass it and expect to do well. I know that it hard to be personal with your writing, but it really does help if are. The material will come so much more naturally to you and the essays won’t seem that hard to write. Now for the textbook, yes, you will have to buy it and yes, you will have to read it. You have to write blogs on about all of them and he will know it if you’re BSing it. Sometimes it’s going to seem like busy work and you are reading them for no reason, but they do have a point. When you write your essays, they will help you understand what you’re writing about. Trust me. Now, about the professor, he’s actually pretty cool. He’s not one of those people who is super anal about what you do and he will be pretty lenient about assignments. If you are willing to be personal with him, he will be personal with you. Now, does this class sound that bad? Trust me, you will be fine.

                                                                                                                                                Sincerely,

                                                                                                                   An English student who survived

Overview of the semester

I have always had a positive relationship with writing and English in general. It was how I sort of relaxed and expressed my feelings. It has not changed that much over the semester but over the past couple of years, it has changed dramatically. I have learned how to write papers more efficiently and clearly without over simplifying it. This semester, the most helpful part of the class was the peer review when our papers were looked over by other students. To me, reading other people’s paper and offering advice helped me write my papers and gave me example as to how I should and should not write my papers. The least helpful part of the semester was all of the reading from the text book. Even though some of the articles were interesting, I felt like it was busy work and it didn’t really help me learn how to write my paper. However, I didn’t mind doing the blog post. They helped me reflect on what I read and helped me retain what I learned from the article. With Pecha Kucha, I have mixed reviews. On the positive side, it taught me how to present effectively and only giving the important or interesting information. I learned that less words and more pictures is better. However, I really didn’t like the time constraint for each slide. I felt like I was rushing through a lot of the information and I didn’t get to provide even better, more interesting information. Altogether, this semester has been fun. Mr. Conaway is a super chill professor and it made me feel more comfortable writing about personal experience in my essay. I really liked this class.

Research Intro #2

“Until one has loved an animal, a part of one’s soul remains unawakened.” ― Anatole France

In this country, we often take animals for granted. We see them as objects that we can kill of our pleasure and that don’t have the ability to do anything great for this world. However, animals have done much more for the world than you would ever think. Besides being great companions and interesting creatures, they have changed the scientific world and have modernized it from the stone age. Now today in present day, the scientific community uses animals as test subjects, scientific models, and donors. We have learned that humans and some animals such as pigs have many things in common that can be switched between bodies and still work. This has revolutionized how and where we can implant organs into people that would otherwise wait months of a new heart or liver. We have also found that some animals, such as dogs, are extremely sensitive to chemicals put out in the air that would suggest that a human has an illness or problem. These are often used to help people who suffer from epilepsies know when they will experience an epilepsy and hopefully prevent it if caught soon enough. It is unbelievable how we, as humans, have completely overlooked how much animals really do for us on a daily basis. If we come to understand why animals are so important in our society, then I believe that the amount of animal cruelty and neglect would decrease because who would honestly want to hurt something that could potentially save them in the future.

Research Intro 1

When was the last time you told you cat or dog “thank you?” They, along with countless other species, have helped keep your family and friend’s health and safe for longer than you would think. Sure, they calm you down when your stressed or make you get exercise when they want to go for a walk, but have you ever stopped to think how much more they have done for the medical and scientific community. Animals are often test subjects in scientific experiments or sources of products that are used in medicine and medical procedures. Because their bodies tend to be more sensitive than humans, if there are any negative effects cause by drugs or health products on the animals, than they know that the product is not suitable for human use and the product must either be abandoned completely or refined so that little to no negative side effects are experienced. Animals are also used for their products that they naturally produce or have in their body such as the blood of horseshoe crabs which is used to detect for potentially dangerous bacteria growth in vaccine and other medical products. However, many people question how ethical it is to possible put animals in pain or kill them for the benefit of human beings. There must be a balance between human’s welfare and animal welfare, otherwise the practices are not efficient. Without animals, we would probably be decades behind what we have already scientifically discovered.

Does Race Exist Analysis

In “Does Race Exist?” by Michael J. Bamshad and Steve E. Olson, they speak about what make race a thing and what makes a person belong to a specific group. When most people think of race, they look at the color of a person’s skin and where they come from. However, simply saying someone belongs to a certain race because of where they come from or the color of their skin is somewhat incorrect. In this article, the authors argue that certain elements in you DNA, called Alu, contain pieces of information that can be compared to other individuals to see if there is any relatedness. What they found is that certain Alus make characteristics specific to one group, but does not separate groups simply by skin color. For example, they found that people from India shared Alus with people from Europe and Asia because of the constant contact that they had with each other either through trade or invasion. In conclusion, there is no real race. People may share similarities, but a race should not be formed simply based on skin color or recent origin.

While this article was very interesting to read, it does have a few things that would make it a little difficult for the reader to understand. First, most of the article has to do with science and facts, leaving no room for any opinions or overviews, so the reader is left confused reading on. From the way that the article is written, you can tell that it is written for an audience who has studied this or is a little bit more educated. If they were to write this for a wide variety of people, they should speak with less scientific words. If they do not want to use simpler words, they should define what they are talking about or break the material up into more understandable topics. If the writers want a larger audience, they should also add pictures and maps to the article to give a better context about what they are talking about. With this revisions, the article should appeal to a much larger audience who will actually find the topic interesting.

Comparison of Cosmos and iGod

Nicholas Carr’s iGod and Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos have many similarities in the way that they present their topic and what their topic is. First, they both talk about science and how it can be used to either help of hurt human kind. In Cosmos, Tyson speaks about light and how it has been used throughout human history and how it was first discovered and used by the people of the time. In Carr’s iGod, he speaks more about what has happened with artificial intelligence closer to our time and how it is evolving. In his article, he discusses how a major search engine like Google first started and their goals to make knowledge and intelligence easier than ever to obtain by putting machines inside the human brain. This would allow for easy access to information and facts to every human being. Both articles also present the downfall of knowing too much information. In Cosmos, Tyson states how scholars were buried alive and books were burned because the new emperor of China wanted to prevent people from thinking. In iGod, Carr speaks about how people were terrified out the idea of having machines implanted in their brain and computers being smarter than humans. People tend to be afraid of what is unknown, which is why increasing knowledge in the world is important.

Although both articles focus on similar topics, they are not completely alike. In cosmos, Tyson is more engaged with the audience and is almost speaking down to them as if they are less than him. However, this is because the average person does not exactly know how light really works and how it was first discovered. In iGod, Carr speaks to the audience as if they already know the information which can almost be seen as a disadvantage. The audience first needs to understand the context of the words to understand the article. Carr also uses a lot more quotes from tech geniuses and notable people which assures his credibility. Tyson mainly speaks by himself and occasionally brings in some historical characters. However, his credibility is a little bit more questionable in a historical sense as he is not an expert in history. Altogether, the articles are quite similar and both serve a point to inform the reader about the technological advances in the world.

Black Holes Analysis

“Black Hole” by Michael Finkel is a very strange and interesting article that talks about something that people don’t really know or care about. He uses multiple tricks and tools to entertain the reader and make the information applicable to the everyday person. He first starts with a statement about Albert Einstein and how he was wrong about not believing in black holes which definitely gets the reader’s attention because Finkel is basically proving a world renowned genius wrong. He also does a very good job with keeping his paragraphs short and sweet with the perfect amount of information that is interesting and stimulating to the mind. Most people don’t really understand or know about black hole and wouldn’t really bother to research how they work or what they are. In this article, he makes it very cynical and entertaining. He writes about how much energy is released from a star, such as the sun, as it turns into a black hole. To put it into perspective, they talk about billions of atomic bombs going off as being a few minutes of the energy of the sun. As a reader, that fact that he almost jokes about planets dying keeps me reading and wanting to learn more about how black holes’ work.

Finkel essay also follows one of Huxley’s three directions which goes toward the objective, historical factual, the concreate. In this article, it is very factual and definite. He includes information about when books were first published about black holes and stars as well as what technology was used back then to make those discoveries that would lead to the publishing of the books. He also uses direct measurements about how far away certain stars and black holes are away from our planet and how they will eventually affect us in the long run. I find this to be interesting because it is amazing how somethings that are so far away can have a profound impact on how we live our lives and how our solar system functions. This is why Finkels article does so well with attracting the reader’s attention and keeping it for the majority of or the entire length of the article.