Journal 1
- If David Foster Wallace was here there would be a couple of questions I would as him. One of those questions would be what other animals have you thought about writing something like this about if any of them. Another one would be if he was going to do a follow up as an update now that there is new technology to either help/ disprove his case. I would also like to ask him if he continued to eat lobster after this or not because personally now I will think about this next time I eat lobster especially since I am a marine biology major.
- With a written discussion there is no communication at all unless it is posted online where the author allows comments and responds but now a days on the internet people have very strong opinions so that might not be great. Questions would have to be anticipated to try to not leave the reader with any doubt or questions. When you are writing, in order to anticipate questions you need to think about the article like you didn’t write it but also you need to think about the details that might either confuse people or parts that you don’t feel are supported enough where people might have different opinions. With that in mind you also have to think about the other side of what you are saying so that you can answer the opposing opinions questions.
Journal 2
Most of the time when I do a writing project I never really outlined it or anything, it was often just start typing starting with the introduction through to the conclusion. I never really wanted to put in the effort to plan out each paragraph if I could just type what I was thinking as I go. The first draft of a paper is mostly just my thoughts all put together in some sort of order just so I can reach the word count and if it came out to the point where it makes sense, it’s less work for me for later. There were a few times where the teacher made us do an outline before actually writing the essay and it never really helped me. It actually felt like it was making it harder for me to come up with things to write about because I would rely on the outline too much and then if I needed more words then I would struggle to come up with more content. If we never did peer review I would only read over my essay once or twice before having enough of the essay because I really did not like spending time on english. During my junior and senior years of high school I had the same teacher 3 times for both junior english, senior english and public speaking so I knew exactly what she was looking for in my essays and I didn’t spend a lot of time on revision after a while. It has never been as much of a problem that I didn’t revise my papers because I always got grades I was satisfied with so I would say my process of revision worked. If I did end up getting peer reviews or comments, depending on if I trusted who said them and if they made sense I would just change it for the sake of changing it and wouldn’t worry about it.
Journal 3
In this chapter a lot of it was generally stuff I already had been told but not put into practice as efficiently as I could. I didn’t realize how important the quote was other than a requirement for your grade on a paper, so when I read that a quote is supposed to be something that supports your argument a certain way, something about that clicked in my mind that made quotes seem more important than I originally thought. There was another point where they showed examples of how you can both introduce a quote and agree with the quote that you chose with examples from the book and that is going to be helpful in the future because up until around junior year I would always say the author states and then just put the quote in after it and I never really thought twice about it. When I started to change that to where I would mix in maybe one or two different words for state but I never ended up changing the sentence structure of sentences around the quotes I put in my essays. I related a lot to when they talked about how as you start to write your essays you think you have a great quote and then it turns out to be not what you were expecting and then you have to go back and find a new quote and that made me understand what they were talking about at that part because that is what I did throughout high school. It was helpful to read this because I have always struggled with quotes and since I got tips and things to change should I ever include quotes again it will come in handy to have known this. The explaining quotes thing was also something I struggled with so reading about that gave me ideas on how I could improve that.
Journal 4
Page 5 Paragraph 2
She goes on to talk about the fantasy of this replacement of meals like soylent could possibly become. However she compares it to ambrosia which in Greek mythology is the food of the gods and whomever eats it becomes immortal. She also goes on to talk about other things in television shows and made interesting comparisons to soylent as something that could be really cool and part of our fantasies but also that it can be scary in some ways referring to a scene from the Matrix.
Page 7 Paragraph 1
This shorter paragraph talks about how soylent tastes and what she says is really interesting. She said that soylent has a familiar taste to it and that at first thought it has a doughy taste which I am not sure exactly what that means. She also described the blandness as comforting which is interesting because normally when you eat something you want a tasty food that you enjoy and you normally don’t enjoy food being bland or not being seasoned enough. The comparison to Cream of Wheat to me is kind of unsettling because you normally don’t see people eat it unless they are older and you never hear that Cream of Wheat is absolutely amazing either. I am surprised that they described something with as many calories as a granola bar as super filling too.
Page 9 Paragraph 2
This paragraph is about doctors, their opinions of soylent, and the debate about whether its a good enough substitute. She says that the main debate about whether or not is to have phytochemicals which are found in plants and that they aren’t necessary for survival but they are important for health and I believe that there aren’t any yet in soylent so it is lacking in that aspect. The biggest concern is that these phytochemicals are able to lower chances in diabetes and prostate cancer which were the two examples given
Journal 5
Entering the conversation introduced many new ideas for me and also providing templates as examples really helps to understand the point they are trying to make. I found the part about the adding others peoples points to prove your own really interesting how the example they gave about the people not understanding something and then he phrased it another way and then people thought about it more. Adding others’ points helps spark debate so that not everyone thinks the same way muhc like in sports when arguing if one team is better or not or if a player us better, you bring up other people’s arguments that support your idea and how you might make them think. Another part that was interesting was when they talked about how they talked about if you don’t have controversy at some point in your writing, then at some point your writing might fall flat and become boring. That is interesting to me because when I think about why I am writing an essay or some other form of communicating my point like a powerpoint, other than if the essay is for a science class where you really need to just state facts, I always see it as trying to get someone to think about your point of view and that if you do not do that then it seems as though you don’t succeed with your writing. When it comes to writing, you are trying to prove a point that you thought of which is your thesis and if multiple people are writing the same essay, while their thesis might be similar, it is not the same exact thesis because someone else might have a slightly different point of view, so no one can have the exact same opinion which means that they might not agree sparking controversy.
Journal 6
Journal 7
The best comments my peers gave to me for peer reviews had to be the ones where they told me to add quotes from the pieces of work that we quoted to strengthen my point that I was trying to argue. This is because they actually really helped by even telling me the page number but also because those quotes really worked well too with that specific part. They could have just gone and said add a quote here to relate to your piece, but they went above and beyond by saying the page number and what the quote started with. I think the best comments I gave were the ones where I told them if they were coming off as too pushy or forceful with their opinions because these essays are us trying to persuade someone to agree with our essay or have the reader question their thoughts on the topic not to tell someone how they should think. I think stuff relating to the thesis and how to strengthen our thesis was something we all should have looked over better so that we could help improve on the one thing that we need to be very good to make the essay make sense. I don’t think there were any things that I felt needed to come up in the comments that weren’t. The only thing I could think of is how the flow of the paper was because if the paper does not flow then it won’t be as good as it could be. Peer review in high school was not good because people don’t care as much as they did now and then all the comments were more just gramatical things.
Journal 8
I thought it was very interesting to read about what I already kind of did when stating the others opinion on it to include then and then try to persuade them into thinking like you do. I did not think of starting that argument with something like a quote or in other words a relevant anecdote. I never thought of arguing a widely supported topic however because I never would have thought about going against the normal when arguing something so widely supported. I never would have thought about opening a paragraph with an excerpt from a debate to spark thought in the reader however and it’s really interesting because that is such a good idea and the only way i ever learned of another way to open a paragraph or an intro paragraph was with a question or with a popular reference that would draw the reader in. Other than that i never put much thought into other ways to start a thought in an essay. When discussing something complex I never thought of revisiting something I said earlier because i never wanted to sound repetitive because i always assume that the reader remembers everything and that i don’t need to revisit something until the very end. I never thought about dropping an idea into the essay paragraphs before I address it because in the book it says it gives the reader time to think about that thought before you address it which makes sense in terms of letting the reader develop an opinion and ponder on the thought, but again i feel like if it’s just a sentence then they might forget about it and then they would be confused later on in the essay ruining the force that would make them think the entire essays main point.
Journal 9
I think I spent the most time revising how i worded things because when I first wrote this essay, I was really just trying to get all of the ideas that I had in my head down onto the paper so that I would not forget anything and then later on I would go back and fix where I needed to fix things. I also spent a lot of time trying to make sure that everything I had down made sense in terms of my thesis because when I just write down what comes to my head, I often get off track at some points so I had to go back and fix that. This drafting process was a little different than in high school because in high school when we drafted and the peer reviewed we never did it online or had a talk in person about what was wrong on the essay. It would be just get a draft done, have someone around you peer edit, and then switch back. The thing about that however is that people often don’t care as much as they should and they just go through and look at the sentence structure errors instead of the larger picture that you want to make sure makes sense. I thought that this class was going to be a lot harder and more challenging based on what other people have said about English here, however this was a lot easier once I sat down and focused and stopped procrastinating it and then I breezed through it to get it done. Needless to say I am still worried that the essay is not great because english has never been an easy subject for me so I worry a lot more about it than my other classes. If the other essays are something like this, then I won’t be that worried about this class going forward.
Journal 10
Page 7 Paragraph 1
This paragraph talks about how processed food has become a staple for all of our cooking and for me this paragraph is complex and complicated. This is because at home and at restaurants, there is a lot of pre made food in forms of how meat is made because it can come premade like sausages for example and how a restaurant is not going to slaughter the pig and then make the sausages themselves, and how there is a butcher who probably does that for them on their own. But there is a lot of places that get very fresh food that they all prepare themselves and watching a lot of Gordon Ramsay shows has made me realize how the best food is not the ones where it is all premade for our convenience. There are some perks of the processed foods, however I don’t necessarily agree that these processed foods are made to liberate ourselves from the cooking because there are people that can tell if it is fresh or frozen and how people like fresh food more.
Page 8 Paragraph 2
This paragraph is interesting because it talks about how food production and creation is different from how people did it way back when and how our grandchildren will be amazed that we even made food for ourselves. I don’t necessarily agree with this statement because pre made food is not as good as fresh food especially if that food comes out of a freezer. This could also be related to Soylent because people think that it is great because of how much time it saves and the convenience of it, however the fact that it is not real food and that it doesn’t have the same feel to it as real food does not seem like it will catch on with everyone in the population. Unless everyone in society becomes very lazy and does not want to make food at all or learn how to make food, I feel like this won’t be a problem going forward.
Page 10/11 Paragraph 4/1
This paragraph talks about how food shows have shifted more from cooking food to watching people eat the food and how Pollan does not see how this as interesting in the slightest. I don’t agree with this at all because sure a lot of cooking in a show helps you follow along and then you can try and make it for yourself, however it’s far less interesting than seeing these cool restaurants make tasty looking food and maybe adding something to your list of places to visit if you are ever in the area. There’s a different aspect visiting a place and feeling the vibe of the place than just attempting to make something yourself and failing miserably. Plus if someone does not have every ingredient or if they don’t have a way to cook something like if you need a deep fryer, then you have to go out and buy it from somewhere or just sit there and wish about that thing, but you are also learning about different foods without sitting through an hour long episode about how to make one meal.
Journal 11
In this chapter, right off the bat I felt like this was something very interesting because it talks about how in class, mostly high school, when we analyze the text, the teacher tries to make sure everyone sees the thesis that they believe the writer means, and pushes everyone to accept it. Then the conversation continues and some people feel like they are confused or still don’t quite believe it and that is exactly how I felt at times in my classes later on in high school. It is also interesting how they say that by changing the initial question, students change how they think about many different things. That’s a good point that I never thought about before. I never thought about the fact that for authors it can be hard for them to introduce something that is not being discussed. Thinking about it, it seems like it is actually really hard to do, because often it could be forgotten or the reader just does not know and then in that case it is hard for people to follow and then you have to include context and that could be a lot of information that is added to the piece of writing and then the piece might seem to take a turn that the author might not intend to do. When they talk about the harder passage where the reader might have trouble understanding the passage due to the word selection, and then they say it follows the they say I say pattern, it is hard to realize at first and I still don’t completely understand it but i can kind of see it which is very interesting because it makes me think about how many other times I could have missed that pattern in other readings that I struggled with.
Journal 12
For my peer reviews, overall I had next to no local comments and they were all global. I did not look into as much detail as I thought that I could do at the sentence level for local and then just ended up skipping all of that to look for. In terms of the global picture a lot of my comments have been about evidence and how people can back up that evidence with either counter arguments or introducing a point that they might not have thought about or that they could add to help the paper get better. Between paper one and two other than one being shorter than the other one so there weren’t as many comments about it, in the first paper there were almost all evidence comments with few ideas or organization comments on them because I felt like the quote part of the piece is what really makes an essay strong because otherwise you are just rambling on about your opinions and then you lose all credibility. I think that I could have added more comments about organization in the first essay and looked a little closer on the ideas section of the paper so that just because the evidence is very important, so is everything else because the argument has to make sense for the quotes to make sense. Paper two I didn’t look into the evidence as much because it was still early on in the paper’s stages so most of the time people want to just get their ideas down on the page so that they don’t forget about them later and then find papers that help support their argument. For next paper, now that we have this almost cheat sheet for peer review I think that comments will be more spread out between every topic and that people will take a closer look at what they are reading.
Journal 12b
First of all just hearing this conversation and having to listen to it is almost creepy in a way because when you talk about the dead it can always be a touchy subject because everyone everywhere experiences it at some point. We all have our own date set in the future of when we are going to die and our friends and family also have that which will come up eventually. When they started talking about cremation in the open with music playing, I always picture that Star Wars scene with Obi-Wan’s master being cremated. And when you go on to talk about how that there is the corpses ashes flying at you as you cremate it alone it’s pretty creepy. The fact that the people have so much power over the body is mindblowing in and of itself. The idea that some people can bury their loved ones on their own without a coffin is something you really never hear and as they discuss it there is a creepy feeling I get when I hear that. The fact that someone can just leave a lifeless body of a loved one in the house for a few days after they are dead and see their loved one lifeless and know they aren’t coming back but you still see their body is something I feel no one would ever do because it would be so painful to have their dead body be the reminder of them to you. I did not know that there was a school program for this line of work and I feel like that is a really creepy major to tell someone that you do. I would also question your mental stability if you choose that as your major.
Journal 13
In this essay I felt like I did not put in as much effort in between deadlines of the parts of the projects. This might have been because of spring break or just lack of motivation but there was definitely less time spent on this project than the last one. In terms of using sources, I realized when we were proofreading in class that I forgot to quote Pollan which was a huge mistake and I just kept saying Pollan said this and Pollan said that without any proof which is something you definitely should not do. So there were no direct quotes from that, however in terms of the three other sources used I feel like the spread of the usage and how much I quoted those was around the same length. I ended up leaving a good amount of work for the last day which I intend to fix in the next essay so that it won’t be as mistake filled as this one. I feel like I could have found better sources in the archive too to make my point even stronger when arguing why Pollan was wrong. Other than that I feel like there is nothing else that I could have done to make this essay better, but I realize my mistakes and intend to make changes for this final project. I think that while there was a lack of quotes from Pollan that other than that the argument is still relatively strong. And that the position I took and the argument I made supports my thesis. I also included a reference to me and my favorite food to build a connection to the reader that shows I am not just saying these things and that I actually feel this way about this standing that I took against Pollan.
Journal 14
This article was very interesting to me because it really made me think as the the article went on about how we do a lot to animals that we might not think anything of, like if there is a spider or something, we want to kill it. We don’t think about it at all how we might want to kill it because we don’t want to think about it or have to worry that it is still around if we are scared of the spider, but we don’t think that the spider might feel some type of way when we start to attack it and what not. But as this article went on I found it really interesting learning about this belief and makes me almost want to believe in it because I am found of animals and all and that the reason I am here at college is because I don’t want to see the world ruined and I want to respect the world that we leave in and all it inhabitants, but we can easily forget about that from one day to the next and then we go back and never think twice about that one bug or bird that was just killed or the animals that we eat everyday. That may be because of the way we were brought up or it may be because we care more about ourselves and not think the animals understand the world like we do. Whatever the reason, this article opened my mind up to these thoughts and I feel like I want to look more into this belief because it is very interesting considering that these people at the bird hospital care so much about the animals around them like they would if it was another person that walked in and was injured.
Journal 15
Page 1 Paragraph 4
This paragraph helps his argument because it gives the reader a real life example of this moral struggle that we have between food and friends or nature. The fact that she gave in that quickly shows that she was more willing to eat the food than protect the animals that she was so concerned about when she first started going vegetarian. This moral struggle shows what everyone thinks when they go about choosing what they eat and how they think about their interactions with everyone everyday. This is why this paragraph helps support his point.
Page 2 Paragraph 3
When Jim in this example of a real life scenario, he gives up everything once he puts his head down and thinks about if what he is doing is right or not. Doing the job that he did was too much for him and he could not handle it based on his own morals and values as to what he thinks is special and right for him to do. Once he started giving up all of these things, it took another step to the point where he ended up knowing that his bird was going to die if he let it out into the wild since it did not know how to hunt.
Page 2 Paragraph 5
When Carolyn began working for the manatee and feeding it everyday, she became emotionally attached to the point to where she gave up vacation so that the animal would not eat unless she was there which shows that animals in captivity do not know how to get their own food and rely on someone to give them their food. Unless the animal was previously in the wild or a stray like my dog, they don’t have knowledge of the outside world and their animal instincts would only take them so far.
Journal 16
This time through going through The Lobster piece again I seemed to realize more than before going through it. This time reading through it after reading the other pieces like Animals Like Us and What the Crow Knows I realized the gruesomeness that it seems like it is more than before. It seems like the animals are brutally murdered more and there is a lot of agony that goes along with cooking lobsters. Before when I went through it all I think that I could cook a lobster with minor guilt but now going through it I don’t think I will ever be able to do it again because it is such a disgusting thing to me. I will still eat lobster but I will never cook a lobster again. It also makes us humans look even more like pigs and people who have never seen what western civilization looks like. The fact that people are okay with going to these fests with such a murderous vibe to it makes me kind of sick and that they would sit through the disgusting environment to eat a lobster around a bunch of sweaty people who they don’t know just so that they can eat a murdered creature that was killed in front of them and that they can get even more disgusting as they crack in to a lobster and have their juices go everywhere when they break a joint. I mean I still got the same type of feel from this piece the second time that it over exaggerates the gross nature of it but it still sends a pretty extreme message to the reader that can make them rethink what they are thinking about this event.
Journal 17
This passage is very interesting because of the fact that I feel like I already try and do this when I get really engrossed into a piece. I am a very anxious person sometimes when it comes to big things like this or even just talking to someone because I am very shy when it comes to that. But the fact that some writers wake up in the middle of the night just to reconsider an opinion that someone might have shows a level of commitment to their piece but also a little bit of craziness in them for it. The prompts that they give us aren’t prompts that I seem in love with because they seem so boring and they don’t address the reader enough for me to include in my writing because in my writing, a lot of the time i’m just trying to make sure I have that emotional chord struck with my reader. This whole passage seems a little repetitive for me because of the fact that my junior year english teacher was very critical about making sure that you explain both sides and making sure you don’t have holes in your writing because of the fact that it was a bias in the media class. So we had to make sure that you were not bias when talking about an argument and you had to give examples of counters and such to ensure that you got a good grade in the class. Other than that I was not too interested in the rest of the writing because of the fact that it was too repetitive for me from previous stuff that I had already learned.
Journal 18
Question 1
I think that the big thing that Foer is losing that bond and memories between him and his family if he gives up the meats. That meal can really help build a bond between two people like my mother and I and lasagna. The memories have something to stick to in order to remember them better because of the fact that everytime he sees that food, he will remember something from before because of it. He is gaining the fact that he is able to make different memories that could possibly mean a little more to him than ones gained only during meals. Because of the fact that he spends less time at the meal and it is not as appealing because meat is generally the main course at a meal he can look elsewhere for memories instead.
Question 2
I think that the question that Foer presents is one that is generally easier for me to explain. I think that just because all of these meals aren’t the same, does not mean that the meal still is not good. We have have different types of food all the time that are the same name, but might have something a little different to them. Like my mom’s lasagna could be very different than someone else’s and I can still enjoy it just that same amount as them. Pleasure is relative and everyone has what they enjoy the most and it spreads to more than just food. From hobbies to types of car, pretty much anything, everyone experiences pleasure differently. Some might like to be the center of attention and others might want to be the last thing from it. It is really just a comfort and then pleasure concept. If you like it and are used to it then you might enjoy it more than someone else.
Journal 19
For this project I feel like I have put more thought into what I want to say and what articles I want to use because the last project we did, I did not put nearly as much time into sources than I should have and because of that I don’t think my argument for that project was good at all. The fact that I take breaks for the drafts and when each one is due, I don’t think I am having as easy a time as I would if I just wrote down all of my thoughts and gotten a draft done right then and there because I forget what I want to say and lose focus. I have to counteract that with making sure I go back and go over what I already wrote so the whole essay makes sense. Other than that, I feel like working on this essay requires more focus but I think that I am doing alright with it right now.
For paper one, I got all of my thoughts down and then went back though for quotes and making sure everything made sense and I think that I did fairly good with that during paper one, but it was also the easiest of the three projects so that might have something to do with it. Paper two I did not make sure my sources were as strong and as a result I think that that was the worst of the three papers, but remembering that I did that on the last paper makes me remember it for this paper so I don’t make that same mistake again. In terms of content, paper two was the hardest to get my thoughts together, but my thoughts are coming through a little clearer for this last one.
Journal 20
Journal 21
For this revision process, I wanted to really make sure that my argument and what I really wanted the reader to know about what I thought made sense and was clear. I ended up going through and really trying to change things around so that the reader was not confused because that was the comments I got in peer review and so I ended up moving where I introduced the other articles that I use in my essay as well as adding quotes that help support my thesis better. I also tried to narrow down what I wanted to say in my thesis because people were saying that it was very broad which could include a lot but it was not straightforward and clear so I reworded it. After that I made sure that all of my quotes were really supportive of my thesis so that the reader would not be confused or lost. After changing all of this I changed how I explained my quotes and really dug deep to make sure the reader understood everything clearly. That was a lot of the feedback that I ended up receiving which was to really make sure that I was clear to the reader that I really wanted them to understand what I was saying because a lot of the time I am just writing down my thoughts until these last couple of drafts where I go back and go over what I said. It was like this for my thesis too because I wrote down my ideas of where I wanted to take this essay and then get what I wanted down. Obviously for a draft, changes are made and the paper should get better as the time goes on and making sure the paper is clear and concise is a large part of that.
