I chose to read chapter seven titled “So What? Who Cares?” from the book They Say/I Say. This chapter discussed the ideas of how to properly include facts and statements that are relevant and important to your overall argument. They addressed these topics by first talking about the significance of mentioning different facts into your writing. I found this section helpful because when I write, I often find that sometimes I just write facts when sometimes they don’t serve a purpose for supporting my argument. For example, when I used a scientific study to support my thesis, I found that I was including other scientific facts that did nothing but increase the word count. Also, using the templates that they mentioned within the chapter, could help me introduce other sources that I used besides the assigned readings that we had. The “so what” section of the chapter described how it is important to directly describe the significance of the different sources and how it supports your claims and overall thesis. In my paper, I plan to make the connections clearer and linking these ideas back to the argument that I was making. Using what I learned in this chapter and specifically identifying the purpose of introducing different facts and other sources to support the thesis.
Category: Blog- ENG110 (Page 1 of 2)
One of my goals for the revision process is to improve the summaries of the different sources, which was suggested by my peers. Right now, the summaries and paraphrasing of the main points of the sources are too long so, I need to condense them so that they get right to the point. This would also help for reducing the word count for my essay. Also, I plan on improving my naysayer paragraph and relating it back to the thesis at a higher degree. To do this, I plan on adding a personal connection like my peer’s suggested to help achieve this goal. I think that this will be my biggest challenge because I felt that this paragraph was weak because it goes against my overall view and might be difficult to relate something personal into the opposing argument. If this is too challenging, I will reach out to my friend in another English 110 class to read over my essay and provide feedback for how I should fix this problem. If this doesn’t work, then I will reach out to Professor Emerson and ask for advice for how to connect this naysayer paragraph with my overall thesis.
Peer Review- 150 Word Note Writing Prompt 3
Overall, I think that your essay was very strong, and your body paragraphs were clearly addressed by your detailed claim sentences that related back to your overall thesis. One of the things that I thought you should work on improving is fixing is the second body paragraph which related Luke Bryan’s song with Beck’s article. Although the purpose of the paragraph was good, the relationship between the sources could be strengthened. Also, after fixing this, it could help relate back to the thesis which would improve your paper. Something else that you could fix to strength your essay is improving the connection with an individual’s autobiographical reason with music. Besides this, I enjoyed the different multimodal elements you added to your paper like bolding and italicizing sentences, adding hyperlinks and different images to help the reader interpret your essay in the way that you intended. Overall, your ideas in the rest of your paragraphs maintained a good connection to your thesis and by fixing the issue that I mentioned would help improve your essay.
Multimodal Statement. This includes how you plan to incorporate other media into your final essay. Include links and/or descriptions of media that you hope to use in your final essay and describe how these choices will work with your alphabetic text to better communicate your overall idea.
In my multimodal essay, I chose to include various pictures that will help support my overall idea of how memory plays a role in forming a narrative about our lives. One of the images that I chose to use in my essay is this image from this magazine article titled, “How the Brain Creates a Timeline of the Past”https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-the-brain-creates-a-timeline-of-the-past-20190212/.
I feel like this image can have many different interpretations, but the way that I interpret it as is that the bird represents the memories that we are currently making and the path that it leaves behind shows past memories. Also, it shows how people remember episodic memories, which are usually autobiographical events or experiences in a person’s life. These episodic memories are often different for each individual and often involve inaccurate facts. I included this image where I was mentioned episodic memories in the second paragraph of my essay because the paragraph related a study done by Donna Bridge and Julie Beck’s article, “Life’s Stories”.
Also, I used an image of my Dad in my essay because I used the interview I did about him for evidence in my paper and inserted an image of him into my essay. This picture helped my overall argument because it shows how my Dad remained determined and achieved his goal of obtaining a higher education, despite the comment that he heard about him in high school.
Lastly, I want to use this image in my essay to help support the overall idea of our memories being tied to the way that your brain can categorize the different types of memories and how Strawson mentioned how having a poor memory could affect the way that you remember your life stories. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/11/04/663668407/neuroscientists-debate-a-simple-question-how-does-the-brain-store-a-phone-number Also, the image shows how the brain contains many different ways that we can store our memories and can use our memories to form connections with past events or experiences in our lives to create an idea overall theme.
Using these different multimodal elements like bolding certain words, changing the size of the font and using pull quotes in my essay could help evoke emotions in the audience while reading the essay and can help strengthen my overarching argument.
As I was reading Galen Strawson’s article, I found that I didn’t agree with some of the points that he was making. For example, he stated how he doesn’t think that ‘autobiographical narrative’ plays any significant role in how he views the world and thinks that it is mostly influenced by his upbringing. Although this could be a valid argument, I feel that experiences could help you learn and could help create an overall deeper understanding of yourself. Also, he made the point that even though he has a poor memory, he still has a respectable amount of knowledge about his life. When I read this, I felt that telling stories would help him to remember events in his life that he may have otherwise forgotten. Whether it would be a story that he would want to repress or share a good memory, that story still plays a role in his life story. I know that he later makes the point to live life in the present without worrying about the past, but without reflecting on these events in your life you wouldn’t learn from your mistakes.
Although I didn’t agree with some of his points about the results of not remembering stories, there are benefits to not remembering. For example, he stated, “poor memory protects him from a disagreeable form of ambition, stops him babbling and forces him to think for himself because he can’t remember what others have said”. I thought this was an interesting idea because when I think of narrative, I think of personal stories that shape your identity, but disregard the fact that there are also negative events occurring in your life that you don’t want to remember, but sometimes do because of sharing.
For myself, I feel that I haven’t been impeded by my life story because I haven’t had a diverse amount of experiences yet. Although I have had a few impactful stories in my life that would play a significant role in my life story, I obviously will expect more events to occur as I get older.
In the article “Life Stories” by Julie Beck, she mentioned many different aspects that play a role in the way that we tell our personal stories and how the way that we tell stories to change as we get older. One of the notable assertions that Beck stated in her article was that she mentioned: “not only are there individual differences in how people think of their stories, there’s huge variation in the degree to which they engage in storytelling in the first place”. This quote stood out to me because I was able to create a connection to myself. It reminded me of how my friend and I share stories with each other and how the way she tells the stories that we both experienced is different from the way that I tell them. Another quote that I found interesting in her article was when she stated, “the way that people recount experiences to others seems to shape the way they end up remembering those events”. This reminded me of the idea of how people could experience an event in their lives but then recount that experience with incorrect facts, which Beck mentioned later in the article. This idea is interesting because like I mentioned before, when my friend and I retell each other stories from high school, we sometimes notice that one person remembers the story including different facts than what actually occurred. The last quote that caught my eye was when Beck mentioned how in Alder and Pasupathi’s studies how “people need to see themselves as actors to a certain degree…other people play a big role in shaping life stories”. I liked how Beck combined the two studies to come to the conclusion that other people also play a big role in an individual’s life story. I reacted as a believer to this quote because an individual’s life is influenced more by their relationships with others and isn’t just based on the individual’s own decisions.
For this exercise, I used the first writing prompt that we did that was about metaphors. I found that I use “for example” and “for instance” regularly because these phrases appear in almost every paragraph that I have written for this particular piece. Also, when I am writing for other classes like biology, when we have to write lab reports these phrases are almost always in my writing. In one of my paragraphs from this last essay we wrote on metaphors, I found that I used the word “also”, and pointer words like “this”, often to connect my thoughts together as well. I feel that I use these specific phrases often because they help me get my point across simply and allow me to supply examples to support my claims in an easy way. One of the passages that were hard to follow in my essay was the concluding paragraph. It feels like I didn’t thoroughly connect my thoughts and that they are just random sentences placed next to each other. To make it easier to read, instead of mentioning the word “metaphor” in almost every sentence, I could have made it easier to read by relating the sentences to each other and building off of them to construct a better conclusion. Also, adding words like “therefore” or more pointer words like “these” and “this” could have helped connect the concepts that were discussed better.
Blog post #10: Share your choice quotes that support your debate stance and list at least 2 items of supporting evidence
For Inviting Art into The Scientific Process.
Creating analogies to better understand science:
Pinker Article Quote: “A consilience with science offers the humanities countless possibilities for innovation in understanding. Art, culture, and society are products of human brains” (Pinker 10). By allowing art to be integrated with our education, it could make certain topics easier to understand and grasp by creating analogies. For example, in biology, my professor strives to make the many different comparisons of scientific ideas like comparing competitive inhibitors of enzymes to someone inserting and breaking a stick into a lock. This way of learning allows us to create imagery of the scenario in simpler terms.
Yo-Yo Ma Article Quote:
“Only when those meridians or pathways that connect the edges to the middle are open will a life-form survive, and even prosper. Only when science and the arts, critical and empathetic reasoning, are linked to the mainstream will we find a sustainable balance in society” (Ma 4). In this quote, Ma describes how there needs to be a combination of the arts with science to create an equilibrium where they can both be integrated equally, and ideas can be shared through both topics. If these two topics or any topics, in general, didn’t overlap, many ideas would still be unsolved today. For example, Lehrer mentioned in his article how some ideas in neuroscience were unsolved, but by combining art with science they were able to be resolved.
Lehrer Article Quote:
Involving the arts with science can lead to new discoveries:
“Its goal will be to cultivate a positive feedback loop, in which works of art lead to new scientific experiments, which lead to new works of art and so on” (Lehrer 7). By involving art with the scientific process, it could lead to new discoveries to be made and could allow scientists to think outside the box. By creating a “fourth culture”, science and art can be combined, and both can be used to explain theories and create different questions. By forming new questions, scientists will be able to conduct different experiments and find new truths about the world and its functions.
The two authors, Steven Pinker and Jonah Lehrer, both argued their views on how science should be integrated with the arts and how the arts could ultimately prompt new discoveries to be made within the field of science. Pinker in his article “Science is Not Your Enemy” described the idea of how science is necessary for society to find out the complex processes of life. Also, he mentions this issue by stating, “The commitment to intelligibility is not a matter of brute faith, but gradually validates itself more and more of the world becomes explicable in scientific terms” (Pinker 4). In this quote, he describes how scientists are able to discover more and more about the world and could help humanity explain things that we couldn’t before. These complex discoveries could be made by scientists with the help of other influences such as art. Lehrer also believed that incorporating science with the arts is an essential way that new topics for discoveries are made. He even went to the lengths that even metaphors could help lead to new ideas. He states, “The power of a metaphor is that it allows scientists to imagine the abstract concept in concrete terms so that they can grasp the implications of their mathematical equations. The world of our ideas is framed by the only world we know” (Lehrer 5). He implies that the use of metaphors has allowed humanity to advance this far and making these simple comparisons has led to many new discoveries to be made. They both agree that science and the arts could help answer complex questions that we have not been able to answer yet and could help society advance.
Pinker connection
In the future, I have not yet decided whether I want to become a dentist or an optometrist, but I know that both of these fields will be difficult and will involve utilizing many different ways of grasping the topics like using sculptures, diagrams, and comparisons to fully understand these topics. “A consilience with science offers the humanities countless possibilities for innovation in understanding. Art, culture, and society are products of human brains” (Pinker 10). Using comparisons and metaphors will be very important to me as I continue to advance through my education and hope that they will be taught to me to simplify complex topics in my science classes. This is already starting to occur in my biology class where my professor always tries to create comparisons or analogies that are related to the topics we are learning. For example, he related the ideas of potential and kinetic energy in the cell to a drawing of a strength tester carnival game so that we would be able to easily understand the topic by relating it to something we already know. I hope that I will continue to make these connections and comparisons to aid my education in the future.
Jonah Lehrer’s main argument in his essay was that he believes science and art shouldn’t be seen as two separate ideas, but instead should Throughout the text, he listed many specific examples and related art pieces by artists like Picasso to the Bohr model. He used these examples to create imagery and allow the readers to think that the arts provide visual representations of scientific ideas even if they aren’t intended to. Also, he mentioned how these art pieces can allow scientists to think of new ideas and make new discoveries. Along with this, he also described how metaphors can be used to simplify ideas and could help us better understand topics that are complex, even though they might not be accurate representations. Art allows scientists to think of what they couldn’t see before or break larger ideas and view them in greater detail.
Glossing:
Synapse: The point at which a nerve impulse passes from now neuron to the other, allows communication with the target cell
Epiphenomenon: A secondary phenomenon accompanying another/caused by it
Holistic perspective: Taking different factors into account to get a larger image of culture
J
