Buckley for President 2016

I wonder how the election would be different if Trump and Clinton spoke in the debates the way the women in Nevada spoke to each other.

I would not call myself a Trump supporter, but I will be voting for Trump come November 8th. I wouldn’t say I am embarrassed to say I am voting for him, but I also don’t overly advertise it. My reasons for voting for Trump are sound and justifiable to me, as I am sure Hilary supporters have reasons that are sound and justifiable to them. I do not shy away from election conversations with peers, however. Most disagree with my views, but usually at the end we can agree that they both suck, just who sucks less is different in everyone’s mind. Last night in study group, however, we had a non-regular join us in the study room. He randomly sparked a conversation about the future White House with saying “No one in here is supporting Trump, right?” I looked around and then raised my hand. He stared at me and somewhat scoffed. He asked me why and how I could possibly do that. Except he didn’t want to know why or how, he was only interested in telling me how and why he was voting for Hilary. The conversation didn’t go on long, and I feel like any other controversial topic with him won’t either.

But at the end of the day, I am voting Buckley.

I Don’t Suck After All

Lol I can literally write a rhetorical analysis with an ease of some sort, but can’t use the right font for my header… that sums up about my whole life.writing so sorry …….

Anywho, super happy with the grade and happy that you viewed the paper and column the same way I did. I worked really hard on this paper making sure the “commentary” part of claim -> evidence -> commentary was sound and so I am happy to see “strong commentary” written in multiple places.

I have really really loved writing these last two papers actually. I enjoyed this one a lot because of how much I enjoyed Friedman’s column.

As far as errors I haven’t seen much of a pattern. My sister did some major grammar editing for me on this paper though which helped me to eliminate my bad habit of having 51604854 line sentences.

Lastly, I am glad “[my] paper gives [you] hope in humanity.” <3 You give me hope in the education system; you’re the best and I have much love for you and really appreciate everything you do for me.

 

Btdubs

Side Note: I don’t even know what I’ve been posting where lately so sorry ’bout that ………

Anywho, the rhetoric triangle helped me a lot. It showed me that although it is a research paper, I don’t have to shy away from any sense of pathos. Some logos are pathos within themselves and that is okay. Also it was encouraging to hear that my intro didn’t suck. So yay me. Boo me because my sources do suck and I actually need to really focus and use one search rather than typing my topic into google. Damn you, sophisticated technology.

Intro, Original and Revised

We Can’t All Be Winners In the Real World:

An Argument Piece on the Dangers of Participation Trophies

Do participation trophies show signs of danger for today’s youth? Are levels of narcissism increased in children who receive participation trophies? Is this a bigger issue than just parenting style? Are rewards for just showing up enabling our youth or harming them? In today’s society, we can’t all be winners, therefore we shouldn’t teach our kids this. Participation trophies should become a thing of the past because of increase in undesirable traits, dreaded lesson that winning is everything, and little room that allows for failure and mistakes that ultimately drive improvement.

 

It’s the end of the season, your team didn’t win a single game, but you still all line up on the field and wait for your name to be called. Your name is shouted, you run up to our coach with joy as he hands you a gold piece of plastic labeled “Participation Award.” You go home and put it on the shelf next to the 10 other pieces of plastic that all say the same thing. Shouldn’t awards symbolize accomplishment? Is showing up something to be celebrated? Do participation trophies show signs of danger for today’s youth? Is this a bigger issue than just difference in parenting style? Are participation trophies enabling our youth or harming them? In the real world, you don’t get a promotion for just showing up to the office, why should we teach our children that simply breathing is enough for an award? In a capitalist society we can’t all be winners, isn’t it wise to prepare our kids for that now? Shouldn’t the value of hard work be taught over the ability to do the bare minimum? It is time for those “trophies” on the shelf to be thrown in the attic to do the only thing they’re good for: collect dust. Participation trophies cause an increase in traits such as narcissism in today’s youth as well as teach the dreaded lesson that winning is everything. These fake awards also leave little room for failure and mistakes in our little one’s lives and it is those very things that ultimately drive change, improvement, and advances. What if Edison has received an award for his first attempt of the light bulb? Perhaps we would still be sitting in the dark.

Timed Writing

There is a lot of opinions out about participation trophies. However, opinions don’t help me much. Participation trophies are highly controversial and really depend a lot of parenting style. Thus, I feel a lot of my sources contain too much opinion. I would like to dig deeper and find more legit studies about what giving kids trophies for showing up actually does to them later in their life, as well as what it does at an early age. The era of trophies for breathing is fairly new which makes these elongated studies difficult to find. My sister is a fourth grade teacher, though, and I am going to ask her to record responses from her students when only the “winning” team receives an award.

Unit Reflection #2

What even is a rhetorical analysis? Why are we doing this? Can I just not? All are thoughts I was thinking with the introduction of this unit. We did rhetorical papers in high school, but all I remember is that a “writer does not use ethos/pathos/logos, the writer appeals to ethos/pathos/logos” (random AP teacher junior year). Can I write a paper on uses vs. appeals to? How do I even choice a column? What the heck Mrs. B.

Picking an article was the hardest part. To find something you were interested in, written in a way that you could critique, and somewhat enjoyed was not an easy task. I really did not want to do anything on the election so that narrowed my choices down quite a bit. Once I picked my article I become somewhat immersed into it. My article was about what the human population was doing to our Earth. Friedman argued that without drastic action, and soon, the world as we know it will cease to exist. I started pointing out things in my everyday life that related to the article: the gas you see come out of the exhaust of the OUT busses, plastic in the trash can instead of the recycle bin, and news about another endangered species getting closer to extinction.  Unfortunately, the analysis had to be on “rhetoric”… whatever that is.

Rhetoric. The more you say it, the weirder it sounds. Regardless, I still had no idea what it meant. Ethos, pathos, and logos are words I have heard time and time again, but it is so hard to remember which one is which. I finally got it drilled into my head that ethos is credibility, logos is logic, and pathos is emotions. I always thought my problem was mixing them up, but even when I knew which was which, it was sometimes still hard to distinguish if the writer was using ethos or logos. Even after distinguishing between different rhetoric techniques it still became difficult to add in the commentary part of the paper. What do I say? Comment on what? He’s the writer, not me. I was not feeling confident at all in the paper, but the post review email made me feel much better and give me the strength to finish strong. Or at least I hope it was strong…

I think the two most helpful parts of the unit were the introduction gallery walk and an in depth editing session with my sister. I did not get too much feedback from peers, but reading other students’ papers really helped me. I saw a lot of techniques that I liked and would not have thought of. The weekend before the paper was due, I went to my sister’s house and she ripped it apart. I figured the process would be discouraging, but instead it was uplifting because I felt the progress we were making.

All in all I actually really enjoyed the unit. I feel now when I read articles I can look at it in a more academic way and critique it in a more profession and scholarly manner. And I feel like “claim -> evidence -> commentary “ will be forever imprinted into my brain.

Midterm Reflection

How is life?

LOL.

I went to McDonald’s last night at 1 in the morning for ice cream and chicken nuggets. This is the point I’ve reached in my life.

I woke up this morning and opened my computer to continue to work on my paper and cried tears of joy when I saw that I must have slept wrote a whole paragraph last night because here there it was, done, but I had no recollection of doing it.

I am also super sad because I got a 94 on my math test which made my grade in the class drop from 102 to 99 …. this is what college has done .. I am upset I no longer have a 100 in college algebra.

But here’s the video that prevents me from jumping off a bridge :

 

Rhetorical Analysis Timed Writing

Rhetorical Analysis

So what? So what if I drive my car to my neighbor’s house instead of walking? So what if I leave the water running when I brush my teeth? So what if I buy make up and food that has palm oil in the ingredients? What difference could my little footprint really have? A lot. New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman writes a column on the alarming rate in which our natural recourses and spectacular wild life is decreasing. In the day and age of gasoline guzzlers, unrecycled recyclable waste, and poaching, Friedman points out that humans “will become just another bad biological experiment” (Friedman). The Pulitzer Prize winner, National Book Award recipient and Oxford scholar appeals to pathos and uses juxtaposition to convey to his reader the imperativeness of not waiting a second longer to do something about saving our planet from the only real monsters there are: ourselves.

Friedman uses juxtaposition to convey the state our world is in. He compares the real world to the world of the screen that today’s youth lives in. He strengthens his argument by making comparisons that everyone can relate to such as saying “dumping Amazon words for Amazon.com words”. This hits home with the reader as it makes the reader evaluate priorities: is internet shopping more important than our earth?

In this column, the writer appeals to pathos. The reader’s emotions are tapped into when they consider the actual state of our planet. Through facts that make the reader think and the talk about the children of the world, the reader is forced to see the errors in their own ways. The nonchalant tone Friedman uses when he says “O.K, so you don’t care that your kids may never see an elephant” implies that the attitude of humans have become this unconcerned with the wellbeing of the planet we call home.

 

Things To Do:

  • each paragraph needs claim
  • use transition from claim
  • after claim come in with evidence
  • use transition after evidence
  • strength analysis; what is the effect on the reader
  • increase substance of paragraphs
  • change intro claim to include logos as well
  • transition to each new paragraph
  • citations
  • cry

 

;aksdjvn

I hate when all people comment on my stuff is “this is good” “nothing is wrong with it” I DON’T BELIEVE YOU

Anyways, I liked the way Solomon introduced his paper with an outside quote that related to the column.

I think I need to build more ethos for Friedman that is relevant to this particular column.

Also the comments on NYT are super helpful and I am going to use them to continue the paper.