Category: Blog- ENG110 (Page 2 of 2)

My annotations feel like they are improving, and I found that I am making more connections. I still feel like I need to work on asking questions while reading.

1. The essay, “Necessary Edges: Arts, Empathy and Education” by Yo-Yo Ma was published in January 2014 on the World Post blog. I noticed that Ma’s bio included many of his accomplishments including the fact that he attended Harvard University and won more than 17 Grammy awards. These achievements show that has the experience to be addressing these ideas in his essay.
2. My purpose for reading this text was to learn more about how meaningful it is to incorporate art with education in general and that it should be done more frequently. In the piece, Ma described how it is valuable to include art because it can help you develop balanced thinking. I agree with Main his stance because I was involved in the band program from elementary school until I was a senior in high school. His stance on this issue is relatable. I also think that it is important to acknowledge that art is involved in many of the topics that we already learn but aren’t directly told that they are related.
3. Throughout the essay, Ma stressed the importance of how art being integrated into education (STEAM), should be implemented more. It could create balanced thinking and help influence the student’s creativity. By being exposed to art, it could also help people become cultured and want to learn about other countries.

Glossing Words

Virtuosos: Highly skilled in music or another artistic pursuit

Meridians: The center or middle

Lewd: Crude and offensive

After reading Lamott’s essay “Shitty First Drafts”, I noticed that her descriptions were similar to when I was writing my first draft. I found that I could really relate with what she was saying about writing a lot for the first draft and it being unorganized, then returning later to polish the writing and removing unnecessary sections. It is better to write as much as you can think of for the first draft because revising and editing later will help condense and bring out the main points of the essay.

Revision Plan
Goal: My goal is to reorganize my essay and add more of my own thoughts and opinions while reducing the summaries of the three authors.

To revise, first I plan to work on shortening the summaries that I wrote to describe specific studies or quotes that I used from the three authors. As my peers stated during the peer review, I agree that it would be better to spend more time adding my own thoughts and add more quotes to develop the thesis in a better way rather than summarizing too much. I think that this will be a challenge for me because I think that I will have trouble deciding what information is actually relevant or not and get straight to the point.
After doing this, I will read through my essay and try to reorganize my essay so that it flows better. I will do this by printing out my essay and then labeling which order I think that the paragraphs should go in. By taking this step first it would be easier to rearrange the essay on the computer and then have the computer read it to me, as suggested by a classmate. By having the computer read my essay to me, I could also find sections that don’t make sense and correct those mistakes as well.
If I find a challenge that is too difficult to solve on my own, I could go to SASC to receive feedback and help from a tutor or I could ask my friends for their opinions on my problem.

Global edits are important in this stage of drafting our papers because it allows us to receive feedback on our ideas and see if they actually support the thesis statement. Also, this method of editing helps to see the big picture of the essay and find if the thesis statement itself should be changed to fit the arguments made in the body paragraphs of the essay. When I was using global editing, it was hard to comment on paragraphs as a whole and not trying to make local edits, which I have been used to doing since high school. It was also a challenge to not comment on sentence structure and sections that may have included awkward wording. Instead, I focused on whether or not my peer’s claims made in the body paragraphs were actually supported by the evidence that they gave and if they clearly stated their own opinions or elaborated on their views.  It is better to make global edits over local edits at this stage because the essay is still in progress and locally editing sections doesn’t make sense because sections could even be deleted from the essay during the revision process.

Many people assume that the main purpose of metaphors is to be used in a literary or academic setting to compare different thoughts and ideas. In reality, metaphors are used throughout our lives and are spewing from our mouths all the time without us even noticing. Whether it is describing a story to a friend, singing a song or telling a doctor our feelings, metaphors can help convey stronger feelings than the literal meaning of words. Metaphors help us generate comparisons between two unrelated ideas and help us create imagery to learn a hard topic by associating it with ideas that we already know. They could even help us get through hard times as mentioned in Dhruv Khullar’s article, “Trouble with Medicine’s Metaphors” and can impact the way we think and perceive the world overall as James Geary and Michael Erard stated. It is common to dismiss how metaphors really impact our lives since they are deeply ingrained into the way we think since our childhood.

Metaphors are used throughout our lives without us even noticing. They are presented to us in many different ways whether it is through the media, in songs or even in conversations with our doctors. They can also have many different meanings and can be perceived by each individual in different ways. The overall impact of metaphors is often ignored and not recognized by many people. For example, in Dhruv Khullar’s article” Trouble with Medicine’s Metaphors”, he describes how two groups of people were presented with different metaphors and were told to find a solution to the same problem. Both groups created different solutions but denied that it was due to the idea that their solutions were influenced by the metaphors. Even in medical situations, the use of metaphors with military terms can negatively impact our outlook on our health and the way that people choose to view their illnesses. People in the medical field should be more aware of the usage of military metaphors and the negative impacts that they have on their patients.

“The Trouble with Medicine’s Metaphors” by Dhruv Khullar was a fascinating article about how military metaphors are commonly used within the medical field and can create better understandings than literal words themselves. Throughout the text, Khullar describes how the use of these specific metaphors by patients could lead to them creating bad thoughts and blaming themselves for not being able to win their “fight.” He points out that when this language is used by patients, their quality of life is negatively affected as compared to those who thought more positively. On the other hand, he also mentioned how some patients who used military words had a more positive outlook on their treatment by thinking of being resilient and having the determination to beat their illness.

While reading Khullar’s article, I didn’t realize how often military terms and metaphors are actually used in the medical field and how figurative language is more meaningful in this case. I also found that he had an overall negative opinion about the use of military terms and how patients fighting an illness would be hiding their true feelings and leading to an overall poor quality of life, which I did not agree with. Throughout the passage, it seemed that he was trying to show how metaphors could lead to this way of thinking by mentioning a study done comparing solutions people came up with to “help solve a city’s crime problem” There were two groups that were presented with different metaphors and they both denied the idea that the metaphors shaped their different ways of thinking. I thought it was interesting how Khullar used this study to relate back to his idea of how people think about their illness in a military sense, whether it is in a positive or negative light.

See Through Words: “The challenge for the designer is to generate lots of pseudo-mistakes, some of which can be used for thinking and that have the power to stick around.” I chose this quote in particular because it shows how metaphors are created to generate new ideas and relations between things that people would not often associate.

The Trouble with Medicine’s Metaphors: “Metaphors allow doctors to develop a common language with patients, and offer patients an avenue to express their emotions and exert agency over their conditions.” This quote had deep meaning behind it because it showed how significant metaphors are and how they can help people to better understand a situation.

Metaphorically Speaking: “Whenever we solve a problem or make a discovery, we compare what we know with what we don’t know.” This quote relates to the idea given in the prompt because it describes how humans create associations with ideas or concepts that we are already familiar with and relate them with things that we don’t know to get a better understanding of the new idea.

I noticed that when I read Erard’s essay for the second time, there were a few ideas that seemed to make more sense and I was able to clearly understand how these ideas connected to the essay as a whole. One of the sections, I realized was reoccurring later in the essay, was the idea that people do not understand the meaning of the metaphors and don’t know what the true meaning is until they are told or figure out the meaning themselves. In the second section, he stated, “you have to direct people’s attention. You have to give them furniture to sit on that makes your architectural choices unavoidable.”  Also, the idea that people’s cultural backgrounds would also play a role in their interpretation of metaphor is very important to their understanding like in the metaphor that compared childhood resilience to flowers.

Another idea that I discovered after rereading the essay was the idea about how using metaphors for mapping involve using specific or symbolic ideas that could also think about how the metaphor could affect people’s emotions. While metaphors as a category focus more on broad ideas and relating those to something specific.

Glossing the text helped me grasp several concepts that I would have missed if I had only read the article one time. Once I glossed the text, I noticed that I was able to understand the purpose of a sentence and overall paragraphs better because I was able to understand new words that I didn’t know the meanings of before reading the passage. One of the ideas that I found in Erard’s essay was the Enron fraud scandal. Enron was an energy corporation and they were found using fraudulent accounting practices. By glossing the text, I was better able to understand Erard’s reference to it in the essay and how people already have images in their mind when one word is said.

One of the sections in Erard’s text that stood out to me was the paragraph on the metaphor about childhood resilience that compared an orchid to a dandelion. This metaphor evoked different emotions depending on who the reader was. I thought it was interesting how the public who had children viewed the metaphor as being offensive to their children, while the journalists thought that the quote was meaningful. Because of their difference of interpreting the quote, it made the author rethink about the metaphors that they were creating and how they could improve it. I liked how the author was able to describe this problem and show how metaphors have to be carefully crafted so that the same meaning can be understood by everyone. Erard also described what metaphors are by using other metaphors to explain his ideas. He proceeded to give examples using different parts of a home and explained how metaphors have to be created keeping in mind what the emotional responses of people would be, as well as is making sure that they will understand the meaning behind the metaphor without it being misinterpreted.

Another section that I noticed was interesting was the section about Sam Glucksberg and how he mentions the idea of ‘dual reference’. While I was reading this, I made a connection to James Geary’s TED talk, “Metaphorically Speaking” because there was a section where he discussed the idea about how sentences can be literally false but can still be metaphorically true. Words can have different meanings and perceptions based on what context they are viewed in.

When I was first introduced to the ePortfolio, I thought it was interesting how we would be able to create our own websites and would be able to learn about all the features to be able to create other websites to share with professors or future employers. One of the positives about using the ePortfolio would be that we can share our ideas as a class without being in the classroom.