Th;log 9?

This week our group presentation were due. While I learned many things about sentences (my topic), I am not so sure I learned very much about anything else. I guess I was just too nervous with how I well of a job I will do with presenting my part of the PowerPoint. However hedged language may have stuck with me (haha). Basically what I learned about hedged language is that you want to use it whenever you don't want to sound arrogant/unprofessional about a certain topic. It entails making your claims less “harsh” by including words that give the chance for some Leeway in the discussion. For example, you might hear someone say, “Breaking bad is the best show ever!” However, if you want to correctly state your opinion, you should say, “ Breaking bad may be the best show ever!” I was actually curious whether or not this rule applied to every claim. Zack clarified that you use hedged language whenever you are talking in more of a soft science area (politics, psychology, the humanities), however you will state with one hundred percent certainty your claim in any hard science (calculus, biology, economics). Other presentations such as the apostrophes and semicolons were fun and interesting too, just for some reason the only presentation besides my own about complete and incomplete sentences was the hedged language one.

Song of the week: Not today!

Переводы

I learned that a lot of the things that I see today are translations. Basically everything that I’ve read is a translation of some kind. By taking information form one source and changing it to fit into another genre, you get a different delivery from the same information. This is kind of cool because it gives the opportunity for much more expanded thought. For instance, you can take a new technology you heard that they were working on in an article online and integrate it into your new sci-fi short story that you’ve been working on for the last 3 weeks. This is great in the sense that you can apply pretty much anything from any genre into something you can use for another purpose. Are last WP was completely focused on making translations from various sources, in our case it was a scholarly article. I translated my article into a children’s book and cooking recipe. This was rather easy because I knew the common moves and conventions of the genres I was translating to. Children’s books are always ‘dumbed down’ from the younger audience, but at the same time an important factor of the book’s is to keep the attention of the kids, so that was the hardest part. The recipe was basically using the same format with some obscure ingredients for the animals, so that was pretty easy to. The thing I used to connect these pieces were the topic of the scholarly article I choose, which was the diet of animals. Basically the most important thing I have learned from the past couple weeks is that conventions and moves of genre’s are like building blocks, and if you have the basic information, you can insert it into the frame, and you have yourself a new piece.

If you like music, maybe you will enjoy this, like me.

Pb3a: Finding out what lions eat.

                Everyone likes cats, right? If not you probably like dogs. And if not them either, maybe some like ferret or something. The point is that all sane people like animals and enjoy some type of furry or scaly creature. I would like to make my Pb3a into a translation of the scholarly article about the diets of animals “Carbon isotopes ratios of bone apatite and animal diet reconstruction,” into a nice playful story book for children and an interesting recipe for some adult’s pets.

                 Kids grow up dreaming of playing with lions or dolphins or even elephants. Likewise many adults would love to have a pet lion too. I always just imagined me feeding my pet crocodile the leftover broccoli that I didn’t like under the table when my parents weren’t looking. Now that I’m older I think to myself, “What do crocodiles actually eat?” I’m 110% sure that many other kids have asked what certain animals eat, and many parents probably said the simple answer of meat or vegetables.  But with my interpretation of the scholarly article by Sullivan and Kruegar, I’d present their knowledge of animal diets into almost like an educational picture book. This would have like pop-outs and bright colors and short sentences that almost every single 4^th grader wants to read in his free time. The whole purpose of this would to educate the children about actual animals or plants their favorite animals eat. This could be accomplished with sentences like “Carl the crocodile crunched on his crisp tiny crustaceans,” or, “Larry the lion loves licking his fresh lamb.” Anything that uses simple rhetorical elements such as metaphors or alliteration because they attract the attention of new readers.

                 For adults I’d have to take another approach to the animal diet. When people think of their animals they think of how cuddly and fun they are to play with, and for an animal to be active, they must be fed well. I was thinking of making like an article from Pet smart or something that gives recipes for great meals for their fluffy cat or beautiful dog. Something I might write would be like, “Add two cubes of salmon meat for your little precious cat because it boosts flavor while adding the extra nutrition they need!” It can even go further and talk about how the proteins increase muscle mass or even give a nice sheen to the cat’s fur. This would aim for the adult audience, pretty much no discrimination in age because all ages have furry little creatures that they want to take care of to the best of their ability. The whole point would show the connection between the animal’s natural diet and what you can feed them to give them the best quality of life they can get—which is what every pet owner really wants.

To create an effective piece for a certain audience, you have to pay attention to what they want to hear. Kids aren’t going to want to hear how the color and thickness of your animal’s poop might allude to a sickness that they have. Similarly adults already know that lions eat meat and giraffes eat leaves.  So I plan to make a story book about what animals eat for the children and an a recipe for pet food for adults.

Thlogging

WP2 was due this week and I have never been so confused in my life. But at the same time I realized that I learned a lot about moves—yet again. This time however It was different. This time I finally understand how moves can impact the writing and emphasize their own unique style, which in this case is their discipline under which they study. In our projects we were tasked with comparing two different disciplines and a news source and discover the similarities and differences between them. I discovered that when you look very closely at two disciplines they differ in the fundamental way that they interpret their data. The reason this is important is because it relates to their style. And one’s style is solely based upon a collection of moves that they make commonly. In Cumming’s paper I commented on his analysis of his data and how it was tailored to his practiced discipline (following the regular conventions of the discipline wink-wink). Finally we saw how everything meshed together into one big new style of writing, the news source I identified. This news source borrowed conventions from the scholarly article from Cumming’s research while salting the potato with their own. This is what makes up news article’s genre. Even though they all cover the same topic, they all have different approaches and audience that ultimately affect their conventions, moves, and motives.

By the way, the song of the week will be known for centuries. 

Bob Ross' sick moves

So the moves that were contained in the videos were very soft voices—well except for family guy—and everyone was talking to you as if you were new and had no understanding about the topic. It is an instructional video so that actually makes a lot of sense. Something about Bob Ross’ videos that I noticed is his adjectives; I never knew that trees could be happy. But then again his happy little trees are his moves. With Walt Disney’s video expresses the individual styles of each painter on how their idea and interpretation of each of the subjects effects the resulting paintings. It’s almost like when you write about something, you include your own moves and interpretation that affects your analysis and portrayal of what you see.

Online class journal

One aspect of my paper that I feel as if I did well on this time was my organization, I struggled really hard last time with it because i wasn’t really sure where everything was supposed to go. I might still be rather off with my organization, but I feel better than last time.

The comments I received yesterday were rather critical, but I think they really helped me. Carly asked if I really thought my title is interesting--not sure if the title is that important-- but I felt like when i gave it a new title the attitude of the paper almost changed. Bernice also commented about my organization a couple times which helped remind me to really review my paper to see if even I feel like it’s worth turning in.

Thlog 5?

So I realize this is rather late and I am lucky to receive even half credit, better late than never I guess. Last week was a whole buffet of just different types of moves that authors use. We went through so many different examples and definitions of rhetorical terms such as parallelism and style. Parallelism has to basically with structure of the writing. It helps the passage to actually flow better when your points are not thrown around everywhere. Something about style that I found out tied in with last week’s emphasis was moves, they are what help define a person’s signature or style. Which is pretty much the whole emphasis for the past two weeks in class. One thing that I found interesting and actually entertaining while demonstrating the effectiveness of moves is the resume activity. For example we looked at Charlie Cheesecake’s resume and clearly saw the ineffectiveness of the moves he made, while Bradford’s was a knock out of the park resume. Different situations call for different moves, just as you don’t put someone’s arm in a sling because they have a headache. And you are not going to hear Kanye rapping about what he ordered for lunch at Subway, it just doesn’t flow. Moves defined this week too with almost secrecy; you could definitely tell at the “styles” we were working on were actually a series of moves that have been meshed together.

By the way, if you haven't listened to Adele's new song, you need to: Hello