Final Blog YAY!! :)

I surprisingly had a really good experience in this class. I absolutely hate writing papers, and thought that I was going to hate this class. But I ended up liking it for the most part. The fact that Ms. Brown let us pick our own topics on what to write about was really cool. She really made me look at writing in a different way other than just a bunch of boring research papers. I also learned more in depth on how to write different types of papers, and how to be more creative in my writing. The class was very informative on a lot of different things. Some of the stuff about parenthetical documentation was really helpful because I honestly had no idea thats how it was supposed to be done (the right way at least). Some of the papers we wrote were unlike any papers I did in high school. I had never written a review before so it was kind of neat to be able to do that. I have written plenty of papers like the profile one, but never really used the 'dominant impression' aspect in them before. I like the way she set up the course by giving us relatively simple papers first and then easing us into the big Argument paper at the end. I liked how whatever we were talking about in class always related to our upcoming paper as well. It's very frustrating when a teacher just throws a huge paper assignment at you and doesn't offer any advice or help. Now, writing is still not my favorite thing in the world, but I feel like I have more confidence in how and what I write after this course is done. Thanks Ms. Brown :)

Random Blog

Being sick is absolutely no fun. There are some good things that come from it however. Because I work in a childcare center, they usually let me off work when I am sick. I don't want to get any of the babies sick, although they are probably the ones who got me sick ;). But that is probably the only good thing that probably comes from it. It is probably a bad thing though because, even though I got off work I still need the money! I also miss the little kids too :(.

This is absolutely the worst time of year to be sick as well. It is the end of the semester when we all need to be finishing out strong. You have no energy and feel awful, but have a load of things to get done. And in my case, when I get sick, it usually lasts for a long time. Well, longer than it needs too. I skipped my first college class ever the other day because I was sick, and it's probably going to cost me.

I'm going to stop complaining though because I am sure you don't really want to read about me being sick. I needed an extra blog and was frustrated so I figured I would write about it. I will try and make my next blog more interesting for ya ;).

Blog 6 - Arguing Without Fighting

2. When we did our first round of debates on the prostitution topic I thought the opposing sides argument was not going to be any good at all. However, they really showed that they did research and gave some excellent points. While my opinion stays the same, I still I found it interesting the arguments that they came up with. I had never really thought about some of those things before.

I actually thought the Casino debate was really really interesting. I think that both sides gave really really good arguments for whether or not casinos help the community. Before the debate I kind of stood in the middle, but was leaning more towards the side that they were harmful to the community. After the debates were over I still stood in the middle about the whole thing, but also came to a conclusion. I think casino's are harmful to the individual and not necessarily the community. I would not go out gambling, and drinking a lot of alcohol because I know that it can cause harm to me an others. It can cause harm to any individual. But after the debates I think that casinos contribute more to the society financially than I originally thought. So casinos may not be all bad. Both side gave really good arguments, however, and I can see were they are both coming from.

Controversy

I think the topic of prostitution it is not a very good thing to debate on. It is a pretty widely held view that it is not something that should be legalized. It is disgusting, degrading, and can cause more problems than one would originally think. With this topic it is hard to find a clearly defined line between different views. I think that if we debated about something like religion in schools, welfare, or drilling it would be better. These are issues that people have strong opinions on and can take to two clearly defined sides on. People havd very different strong opinions on these topics. In my opinion, they are more interesting as well. I think that the topic of casinos is an ok topic too. Although I do not know much about the subject, I feel that it might be easier to make two defined sides on this subject more than it would be for prostitution. I am still fine with debating about prostitution, I just think another topic might be more interesting.

My report is most likely going to focus on the Middle East. I am going to write mostly about the conflicts going on in the Middle East ( specifically countries like Israel and Iran) and how it will affect our future. I picked up this book the other day called The Epicenter and it talks a lot about this kind of thing. I will probably use this book as one of my primary sources. This is something i just recently became interested in so I am still struggling with the exact direction i want to take this paper. I will probably finish reading this book to learn more and also do research about the topic. There is A TON of information out there so it is really hard to narrow it and connect it all. I do not have an idea yet for primary research. I thought about doing a survey about people opinions on the events in the Middle East, but I don't know exactly how to ask them the question first.

I think that at first glance a lot of information out on the web can seem empowering. It is really nice to have all kinds of information right at your finger tips. You can find out just about anything whenever you need it. Say you heard about something and you weren't really sure what it meant, so just for you own personal information, you go onto the internet just to get a basic understanding of your topic. This is one thing Wikipedia is good for. For example, if someone had no idea what a "blog" was, they could just whip open Wikipedia and get the basic idea. If you are looking for just a basic idea of something for personal use, the web can seem very empowering.

When it comes to school, and I am doing a project or paper that requires research, I tend to find the web overwhelming. It's nice to be able to go onto Google and have thousands of options to choose from. A lot of options, though, can be dangerous because sometimes its not good when you have to much information. Once I start digging deeper, and comparing websites I sometimes find that different websites will have slightly different information. When this happens it is hard to figure out which website to trust. The good thing is is that there there are ways to find out which websites are credible and which are not.

Blog Entry # 2:

Writing your profile:

I did my profile on Pele. Pele was a huge soccer star in the 50's and 60's. Although I already new a lot about his accomplishments, there were still a lot of them I was unaware of. I learned more about at what points in Pele's life time he did certain things. The thing I learned and found the most interesting about Pele, was more of his personal life. I read a lot about how he grew up in a very poor family, and how how coming from that has turned him into a huge legacy.

While I was writing this profile I discovered that I write a lot better when I am writing about things that I enjoy. I really wanted to make the reader understand the impression I was trying to give off about Pele, so I wrote the paper one sentence at a time. That could be a good thing or a bad thing. I have done papers like this before, but I had never really heard of them as being called a "profile" or giving off a "dominant impression." It was kind of cool to really focus on the impression I wanted to give instead of just focusing on the facts.

I started writing my profile by just doing the introduction. I didn't do any research on that part because I wanted that part to be just about the things that I already knew. After that I started to read a lot of things that would back up what my introduction said. After I read a lot of different things, I started to write the paper. The one thing I think that hindered me a lot in the paper was that I over analyzed everything. Like I said, I literally wrote it one sentence at a time. I also felt like I left a lot about his life out of the paper, but I was trying to focus mainly on creating the impression. There is also a ton of information on him to write about, that it was very hard to keep it to 3 or 4 pages. One other thing I probably did wrong was all of my citing, I didn't really understand completely how to do that. Over all I think I accomplished what I wanted to, which was give off this impression of "greatness."