Essay

I would have posted my essay last night but it was late. Here is the LINK to it.

Pulling Your Hair Out.

I haven't gotten a full draft for my essay yet. I'm working on it and really thinking about it. I know the draft was due today but I have just ran so many ideas together and different thoughts that I have no place to start at. I'm working on an outline and should have a draft done completely tuesday.

Has anyone heard about the New Mexico woman's soccer player. I'm posting a link to her article on the NY Times, to the story on ESPN, and this odd video on the huffington post. This is going to be my story for the essay. It's been all over the internet and the blogs.

Taking an approach.

Hello Everyone. Sorry I missed class today but I'm still not feeling to well. This is my post from yesterday. I didn't have an internet connection or access to the internet so it is late plus my sickness didn't help anything whatsoever.
As far as taking an approach goes. It sounds a lot like a compilation of forwarding and countering to me. With forwarding you present your own ideas on a subject, while in countering you use the "Yes, but" method. Taking an approach is using a persons thoughts and ideas yet improving and expanding on them. There is no longer restating the same ideas as was seen at an elementary level essay. It's like using another person's ideas to prove your points and beliefs. I'm not an expert on this situation like Harris is but what I have picked up is the fact that it is expressing the ideas of another using your own ideas and thoughts on the matter and expanding those ideas, or it is the process of using the ideas of another person to contribute to your own ideas. I know I'm rambling on and on but I really can't find to much to say on the subject. I thought it was pretty straight forward myself. I can't really wright to much on a subject that I find as simple as this one was to me. I really can't say to much about the subject. However, I did realize when reading the article though how much a good writer will do this and not even realize it. I did it mostly through high school and our teacher never called it "taking an approach." We just did our work.

Revising Iliteracy

Either Hedge is really angry with the American people or he is right. I don’t know if enough people are paying attention to him but we should all read his article “America the Illiterate.” Let’s face it we as a population are just about retarded. There are people out there that can’t do simple math to balance their checkbook, with a calculator I might add. I’ve seen it! There are also people that at a grocery store try to use a coupon on the wrong bottle of detergent. They’re excuse is that it looks like the one in the picture. That may be true but there is always a size or special scent that people can’t see in the picture. I worked as a cashier for a small chain of grocery stores in my home area and I can’t tell you how dumb the average population is. This grocery store that I worked in wasn’t in the best neighborhood, but I’m not saying these people were the scum of the earth either. These people were average middle class Americans. They all probably had a TV in their family room and a car in their garage. As Hedge defined the illiterates, these people probably couldn’t understand a loan contract from their bank but surely enough voted for Obama because they fell for simple mind games in his campaign. These illiterates are the mindless zombies that do the same thing every day following the time constraints put on themselves because they want to watch CSI at 9:00. I’m not the best reader in the world and admit that some things in hedge’s article I didn’t understand. This includes many of the complex words. However, I do have the mental capacity to understand what he was saying by trying to understand the words using in text clues, and thus I was able to read the article and find his message in it. Unlike Carr who thinks we as a people are being made stupid by Google, Hedge turns and says that we are stupid because we are entertained at a middle school level and choose not to challenge our minds so that we think at a higher level. We prefer pictures because it’s easier to understand the picture than read the words under it. Next thing we know we’ll be ordering our food from pop-up menus, far out dude.

Now I know I'm not going and doing what the prompt had exactly asked me to do and revised this blog and reposted it but I think I rather post it again to let you read it and then talk about it. Know I have come to the conclusion that in this previous article I was a little harsh of my brothers and sisters of the stars and stripes. People are really smart and can do a lot of amazing things. I understand that after a long hard day at the factory and shop that not to many people want to go home and think to hard. People want to go home and relax and give their minds a break. I understand. I really do cause I try to do the exact same thing if I can. The brain is like a muscle though. You need to continuously work it and use it or you could eventually lose your mind. I have two great examples of that in my life. My father's mother and My mother's grandmother. They are roughly the same age, and were both house wives for most of their lives. The biggest difference between the two however is what they did with their spare times and what they continue to do in their lives and their mental status. My father's mother, Althea, is as sharp as a tack still. She spends most of her time now is spent doing crosswords, sudoku, and other mind challenging games and puzzles. My great grandmother doesn't know the time of year any more. She thought it was thanksgiving on her birthday which is July 12. She has spent most of her life watching her stories. Now I'm not saying this is indefinite proof because there may be a lot more to the differences between them. Maybe I was right that the people are illiterate. They have lost the ability to use their mind in order to complete certain tasks because they haven't used their mind to do so. It's always been mind over matter, but what if our minds don't work?

Countering? I thought it was qualifying.

The whole time that I read the article by Harris on what countering is, I had this little voice in the back of my head going "This sounds a lot like qualifying." I'm not going to lie but it really does seem like that. When you counter you don't argue against or for and opinion but yet you regain credibility for the opinion as you improve upon it or qualify with the opinion. Countering isn't necessarily arguing either nor is it total agreement. Qualifying and countering are the same thing and I'm used to calling it qualifying so I'm going to continue to. I'm not qualifying with Harris here though, I'm giving it a new name. As for the blogs that I read, I'm not so sure either of them really give examples of countering. Profootballtalk.com is really a blog that allows the collection of all information that is pertaining to the national football league. As for instapundit.com, the guy never has his own opinion to anything but as I discussed in the previous blog does more of a forwarding of ideas and opinions. He adds a couple of ideas to a piece that he puts on his blog via a hyperlink to the article. Now this is more the continuation of an Idea. He is not qualifying because he never agrees with an opinion or tries to match it but puts up his own idea of a subject. If he were to qualify with a piece at all he would have to take a position in relation to another opinion in an article rather than give his own opinion to a subject. The difference between the forwarding and countering is that the new opinion refers to the subject of a piece in one and to the opinion in the piece on the subject in the other.

Harris has his very lovely idea of forwarding of ideas. Many different people transfer an article or piece from person to person and forward not only the article but also their own opinions of the article itself. Forwarding in itself is a never ending conversation that spans from person to person in an endless chain of ideas and thoughts that continuously has links added to it as it goes from person to person. I have been following the blog instapundit. Now this blog is not really written by Glen Reynolds but rather is put together by him. The blog is a great example of Harris' idea of forwarding. The major thing he does it post links to multiple articles and pieces on his page and uses small paragraphs to add his ideas. I'm not sure if people can post comments on the blog or not but on many pieces that are posted by Reynolds there is an option to comment on the article. The forwarding idea can be good in the fact that is a conversation allowing people to communicate over the internet. However, most of the time when a person does post a comment that is where he/she enters the conversation yet ends their involvement in it. Ideas go on and on but the person and authors origination the ideas don't. This is one of the biggest problems with the forwarding concept. Instapundit is an example of this forwarding and here is one of the articles that he recently forwarded. Be careful of the website though. It's for guys.

blogs sphere

I don't know exactly what I'm going to say in this blog mainly cause I think I'm over complicating the topic here. How are the blogs and NY times articles I'm reading functioning as a press or news sphere? Truly I think the only reason that blogs are part of the press sphere is do to the fact that people go out and look for blogs that are going to bring them the latest and most interesting news. Not only that but the news and information they might fine is related to topics that they mostly want to hear about. I chose two blogs. One was Instapundit which is a strongly conservative blog and I chose it exactly for that reason because I rather here about topics that are more conservative than here about the ideas of liberals. I also chose Pro Football Talk do to the fact that I love football. I pay a lot of attention to the sport and know a lot about it. I'm no expert but in my never ending quest for knowledge I certainly love this blog because of the insight it provides into NFL teams and the league itself. Using blogs as part of your news sphere can be a problem though. Let me ask who the author is. The writer of the blogs could be some average Joe that doesn't know what the hell he is talking about. Knowing the credibility of the author will give credit to the blog and the writings.