Critical Thinking and Reading for Revision

Candace Tregler

English Vo2

 

Critical Thinking and Reading for Revision

 

In The Everyday Writer by Andrea A. Lunsford in the Chapter “Critical Thinking”, she talks about different ways to think about things. On page 109 she has a Game Plan chart for reading critically which gives you a step-by-step outline on how to write a good essay. “To understand fully as possible the arguments of others, pay attention to clues to cultural context and to where the writer or creator is coming from.” 115 In that quote she is talking about recognizing cultural contexts. To understand you need to put yourself in their shoes so you can get a better idea of what they’re trying to get across in their writing. This chapter really gets you thinking about essays. It shows you how to better understand them, pick out the main ideas, and set them up properly and a lot more.

“Reading For Revision” in The Craft of Revision by Donald M. Murray is all about test readers and responses. Test readers read over you your work after you finish and help you see the mistakes that you might have not seen before. Pretty much anyone can be a test reader wiriting colleagues, genersal readers, etc. The only issue with test readers is that it’s hard to find good ones that will actually help improve what you have writen. When it comes to responding we’re lucky and have many ways to get the draft to the readers such as by mail, email, meeting up, and by phone. This chapter shows you how to be a better test reader and to respond better to what you read then you are the test

(Page 2)

reader. Test readers seem to be very important because it seems like most writers get to

close to their work and have a hard time realizing when they make a mistake so the need someone to go threw and help them fix those problems

Vocabulary:

Bombard

- to attack or batter with artillery fire.

Argumentative

- fond of or given to argument and dispute; disputatious; contentious

Underlie

- to lie under or beneath; be situated under.

　

Questons:

 

What if you think the test reader is wrong, but they really aren’t?

Work Cited:

 

“Critical Thinking and Argument”

Everyday Writer Andrea A. Lunsford 4^th Ed

Boston: MA, 2009 105-146 print

“Reading For Revision”

The Craft of Revision Donald M. Murray 5^th Ed

Boston: MA, 2004 32-43 print

Reading on Writing #5

Candace Tregler

English Vo2 

In both Section 5 “Language” from The Everyday Writer and Chapter 5 of Craft Of Revision “Rewrite With Genre” they both explain to you in a a very simple way how to improve your essays.

In Section 5 “Language” from The Everyday Writer she explains how to define your terms, organization, assumptions about gender and more. All of these things plus more combines to help you write a good essay, story or book. When it comes to writing terms you should always ask people to explain the point to you if you don’t understand exactly what they are saying. For organization “As you make choices about how to organize your writing, remember that cultural influences are at work here as well: the patterns that you find pleasing are likely to be those deeply embedded in your own culture” (204). When you write an essay/story you need to make sure it’s organized so that when someone else reads it that it makes sense. For assumptions about gender you need to make sure your being clear about whether someone is a girl, boy, man or women. Over this entire chapter really helped me make sense of how to write a clear essay so that the language makes more sense to the reader.

For Chapter 5 of Craft Of Revision “Rewrite With Genre” is all about what the title says, about genre. “Genre or form is the lens throught which the writer sees the subject and reveals it to the readter” (75). When it comes to genre it provides meaning, the essentail narrative and much more. Genre provides meaning to what you’re writing “in the same way a hour, a barn, an apartment block, a supermarket gives meaning to lumber and nails, steel beams and cement.” It is basically what holds together what you’re writing. It’s essential narrative because as a reader we study the many types of natative in a story, novel, etc. When it comes to being sucsessful writing we must be good with making and hiding the narratives. Reading this chapter gives you a better idea of natatives and just genre in general and explains to you in a very helpful way to write them better. It’s a lot of reading, but you get a lot out of it.

Vocabulary:

Chaos

- a state of utter confusion or disorder; a total lack of organization or order.Wallows

- to roll about or lie in water, snow, mud, dust, or the like, as for refreshment

OR to live self-indulgently; luxuriate; revel OR to flounder about; move along or proceed clumsily or with difficulty.

Denotation

- The explicit or direct meaning or set of meanings of a word or expression, as distinguished from the ideas or meanings associated with it or suggested by it; the association or set of associations that a word usually elicits for most speakers of a language, as distinguished from those elicited for any individual speaker because of personal experience.　

Work Cited:

“Language”

Everyday Writer

Andrea A. Lunsford 4^th Ed

Boston: MA, 2009 201-233 print

“Rewrite With Genre”

The Craft of Revision

Donald M. Murray 5^th Ed

Boston: MA, 2004 75-118 print

Women

Candace Tregler

English Vo2

Women

“Never Just Pictures”, “Latin Women”and “No Name Women” All three of these essays wonmen about women and the struggles of their culture. “Never Just Pictures” by Susan Bordo is about women, girls and some men and boys who suffer from eating disorders. She mentioned that models have been getting thinner since Kate Moss showed up around 1993: “Is it any wonder that despite media attention to the dangers of starvation dieting and habitual vomiting, eating disorders have spread throughtout the culture?” It’s not suprising at all since people have presure then ever to be thin. When a lot people see super skinny models it gets into their head that they would look better if they where only that skinny. This issue starts when many people are kids. Barbies and G.I Joes most likely have a big impression on these kids. These make them think its normal to be skinny and perfect like Barbie or tall and buff like G.I Joe, and they grow up thinking they should look like that with the help of the media drilling it into their heads as well.

“The Myth of the Latin Women: I Just Met a Girl Named Maria” by Judith Ortiz Cofer is about how some people act differently toward her. She says that since she is Latin many people refer to her and other Latin women as “sizzling” or “smoldering” and how they use thoses words that should be used to descride food to describe them. “As young girls we’re influenced in our decisions about our clothes and colors by the women, older sisters and mothers who had grown up on a tropical island where the natural environment was a riot of primary colors..” She says that because of how they dress makes many people think different of them, but that’s just what her and many people of her culture are use to. Its understandable for her to be upset, many women wouldn’t like to be refered to with words that are normally used to describe food or camp fires, but then again some do.

“No Name Women” by Maxine Hong Kingston is about a story her Mother told her, about how her Father use to have a sister and what happened to her. The story is about her aunt who, while her husband was away trying to earn money, slept with another man and became pregnant. The day she was about to have the baby the whole village came, slaughtered all their animals and destroyed everything they owned because of what the daughter, her aunt, did. After that the family disowned her, calling her ghost and saying she never excisted. At the end of the story she has her baby in a pigpen and then goes and drowns herself in the familys well. While telling the story the mother tells her to never tell her father she knows the story because he will say he has no sister. When the story ends you never find out what this women, who was Kingston’s aunt’s name was, but you can’t help but feel sorry for her.

Vocabulary:

Pummeling

- A knob, as on the hilt of a sword.

Prevailing

- Predominant.

Reasserting

-To state with assurance, confidence, or force.

Proxy

- the agency, function, or power of a person authorized to act as the deputy or substitute for another.

　

　

Questons:

 

Why can’t the media have healthy models and learn to set a good example for the next generation?

Why did the Women with no name kill herself instead of moving elsewhere and starting a new life?

　

Work Cited:

 

Bordo, Susan “Never Just Pictures”

50 Essays

EB Samuel Cohen 2^nd Ed

Boston: Bedford, 2007 85-92 print

Cofer, Judith Ortiz “The Myth of the Latin Women: I Just Met a Girl Named Maria”

50 Essays

EB Samuel Cohen 2^nd Ed

Boston: Bedford, 2007 112-119 print

Kingston, Maxine Hong “No Name Women”

50 Essays

EB Samuel Cohen 2^nd Ed

Boston: Bedford, 2007 238-250 print

Why Don’t We Complain?

 

Candace Tregler

English Vo2

Why Don’t We Complain?

In Why Don’t We Complain? By William f. Buckley he talks about how people now a days don’t voice their opinions “because we are all increasingly anxious in America to be unobtrusive, we are reluctant to make our voices heard, hesitant about claiming our rights; we are afraid that our cause is unjust, that it is ambiguous.”

He talks about a time where he was on a train and it was below freezing outside and inside the train it was 85 degrees. He mention how everyone who was on the train was completely silent as the conductor walked down the aisle and collected everyones ticket. He wondered why no one said anything to the conductor about how hot it was. Another time that he talks about is when he was at the movies with his wife and the movie was out of focus. He told his wife that it was and she just told him to”Be quiet”. Threw out the movie both of them where hoping someone who worked there would realized the movie wasn’t in focus or that someone in the back of the theater would go to someone who worked there and get it fixed.

The main idea of the short story is that people don’t voice their opinions enough and really should learn to speak up and say what we’re feeling. That if people learned to say things more that the world would be a very different place.

My opinion is that he is very right. I think people should learn to complain more, in certain sitiation atleast, because it might make things a little better.

In Stephanie Ericsson’s The Ways We Lie she talks about many different types of lies like white lies, facades, irnoring the plain facts, deflecting, omission, stereotypes and cliches, groupthink, out-and-out lies, and dismissal. “We lie. We all do. We exaggerate, we minimize, we avoid cofrontation, we spare people’s feelings, we conveniently forget, we keep secrets, we justifity lying to the big-guy institutions.” She talks about how once she tried to go a whole week without telling a lie, and she said it was paralyzing. She came to the realization after doing this, that its nearly impossible to avoid lying.

“The white lie assumes that the truth will cause more damage then a simple, harmless untruth.” She say that choicing to tell a white lie is ultimately is a vote of no confidence and that be aren’t confident enough in the truth to tell it.

Out-and-out lies, “Of all the ways to lie, I like this one the best, probably because I get tired of trying to figure out the real meanings behind the things.” She says atleast I can trust a boldfaced lie, which is a lie with no truth to it what so ever.

The main idea of this is that basically everyone lies. Whether is a little white lie or just a flat out boldface lie. It could be about taking out the trash or spreading a rumer. Lying is people basically being uncomfortable with the truth and trying to avoid it and like Stephaine Ericsson I agree that there is just no avoiding it. People lie everyday several times a day and they usually seem to do it to avoid something or because they can’t handle the truth themselves.

Men, Women, Sex, and Darwin

Candace Tregler

English Vo2

9/1/2010

Men, Women, Sex, and Darwin

“Men, Women, Sex, and Darwin”by Natalie Angier’s talks about how Darwin wasn’t exactly right about all women.”…Darwinian sense, who am I to argue with him? I’m only proposing here that the hard-core evolutionary psychologists have got a lot about women wrong about some of us, anyways, and that woment want more and deserve better than the cartoon Olive Oyl handed down from popular consumption.” She talks about how Darwin says that women are usually most attracted to men who are financally stable and will be able to protect them so to speak, which to an extent is true.

 

The meaning of this essay is that Natalie Angier doesn’t completely agree with Darwin. She thinks that hes right about some women being this way, but there are women, such as herself that aren’t. She thinks that not all women are looking for a strong, financally stable man and not all women need a man and I completely agree. Now a days women don’t need men to suport them because us women are more independent then ever.

Stephen Jay Gould’s “Women’s Brains” has a lot of quotes about women threw out history. One of them, which is by George Eliot, says “Some have felt that these blundering lived are due to the inconvenient indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has fashioned the natures of women.” I’m not totally sure what he ment by that, but it seems slightly insulting to women. Most of the quotes I guess you would call them seem to be insulting to women. For example “We might ask if the small size of the female brain depends exclusively upon the small size of her body. Tiedemann has proposed this explanation. But we must not forget that women are, on average, a little less intelligent then men, a difference which we should not exaggerate but which is, nonetheless real.”

I think “Women’s Brains” and “Men, Women, Sex and Darwin” have some simularities. They both have to do with women, obviously and how they think. I personally didn’t really enjoy reading either of these, because I found some of it, well a lot of it insulting.

In Like a Splinter in Your Mind Chapters “Tumbling Down The Rabbit Hole”& “Virtual Bodies” Laurence goes into detaile with The Matrix. He explains how Thomas Anderson was just a normal person before he meets Morphs and became Neo, which was his computer hacker name. He talks about a French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician named Rene Descartes, who is famous for taking skeptical worries seriously. He says “If belief could be doubted, Descartes withheld his assent from it.” He was “As The Matrix film illustrates, there are even worse possibilities than simply living in a dream.” He says that The Matrix computer-simulated dream world.

The two chapters basically explained a lot of the events that happen in The Matrix and made things make more sense then just figuring them out on your own. These two chapters confused me a bit, but found it interesting. I like how he made sense of a lot of things.

Another Year Another Pound

Candace Tregler 1

English Vo2

11/14/2010　

Another Year Another Pound

 

 Have you ever just stopped for a second at a mall, theme park or any place with children and nodiced that a lot of the kids you see seem to be bigger then you where as a child? Now a days more then ever kids in America and other countries such as Mexico and Canada are having an increase with health issues and their weight. Every year childhood obesity is getting worse then the years before it. Over the past 30 years childhood obesity has more then tripled. Kids aren’t born obesse many things add up for kids to get to the point of obesity, such as fast food, processed foods, and technology just to name a few. Because of these examples and many more kids can develop many problems with their health such as diabetes and it also effects them emotionly as well.

Fast food is definitely one of the big reasons that kids get to the point of obesity. With these establishments being so cheap, delicious and quick to get it really is no wonder so many kids develop health issues from eating there. Because of its convenience to get and how cheap it is it makes it the perfect place for kids and adults alike to stop for a cheap quick bite to eat when you don’t have time to eat at home, go to a resturant or you’re just low on cash. With fast food being so unhealthy a quick morning breakfest, lunch, dinner or snack from a drive-thru fpr your kids or you can really impact their health as well as yours.

With the big corpotations taking over most small businesses, more and more foods are becoming processed and filled with ingredients that you probably have no idea what they are and how harmful they can be to your health. The issue is that some of these products are ones kids enjoy the most, such as fruit roll ups, toaster strudel and especially the potato chip. In the book The Botany Of Desire there is a chapter called “Potatoes” in this chapter it talks all about potatoes, where they’re from and how companies are changing the genetic structure of them to make them taste better, grow bigger and keep away bugs and molds. Potatos chips or otherwise known as “the monster of the snack food industry” are first made by washing the potatoes then skinning them. These potatoes are them cut to 1/20^th of an inch then the potatoes are carried to the fryer while being washed and dried. After being fried a conveyor lifts the chip out of the oil. The workers salt, season and inspect them before they are packaged and sent off to stores. Potato chips are one of the most fattening snack foods kids can eat next to french fries. French fries are the unhealthy way to eat a potato. Most places take off the skin, which is the only nutritious part of the potato leaving the rest of it to be fattening, yet very delicious.

Another huge reason kids are becoming obesse is because of technology. T.V, computers, video games and many other things can all add up to make kids even lazier. Fewer kids are going outside to play sports, skate board, swim and other health activities and more of them are spening time inside playing video games that are very addictive such as Call Of Duty, Halo, Sims etc. More kids are also spending more times just sitting around watching shows on the T.V to catch up on the latest Spongebob episodes or other show. There have been some games that have been coming out lately that you have to move around to play, such as Wii Sports and other games like it, but it really doesn’t compare to getting out in the sun light and exercising, Because of many other technologies like the microwave kids will eat the unhealthy microwave meals instead of a home cooked meal.This is an an extreme issue that the U.S and other countries like it are facing along with other countries in the world.

When a child gets diabtes they have to make some serious changes with their lives or it can threaten their life. These kids(along with adults and animals as well) who get diabetes they have to check their blood glucose levels on a regular basis to make sure it’s at a normal level serveral times a day. The normal scale for kids is 80 to 120. When it gets below 80 they need to eat a carbohydrate and a protein to ensure that their levels will return to normal. When you’re diabetic you have very poor circulation. Some kids even have to get special shoes to make sure their blood flows right. They also heal at a slower rate. If a diabetic gets a sore they need to pay special attention to it because it could result in a serious infection which could lead to them having to get an amputation. Yet another thing they suffer from are kidney problems, which is another thing they need to keep special attention to.With all the medical risks there are when kids are obessed there is also another huge issue. When a child gains weight, is obesse or just looks different from the other kids they’re much more likely to get picked on by other kids. Kids have the tendency to be extremely honest and straight forward because they haven’t learned to sensorwhat they say yet or the significance of what they’re saying is going to do to the other kid. As a result of this many kids who are overwight or different get picked on, getting called rude words and names such as fatty, fatso, lard, cow, etc. Getting picked on at a young age definitley has a huge effect on which or who these kids grow up to be. Some become bullies themselves, some become shy, some even act out in drastic ways, but there is also the kids that just ignore it.

Over all childhood obesity is an extremely big issue and shouldn’t be taken lightly. It is something that is 100% preventable. Everyone, whether a parent, friend, aunt, uncle whoever should all make sure no child should have to deal with being obesse and dealing with all of the horrible risks that come with it.

Work Cited:

http://www.cdc.gov/HealthyYouth/obesity/

2010, Web

Information about the effects of diabetes.

http://www.officialfrenchfries.com/docs/production.html

2010, Web

Information about french fries and how they’re made.

“Potatoes”

The Botany Of Desire

Pollan, Michael2001 Boston, MA print

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rainbow tye-dye cake I made

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