October 12th,

12-7am- Sleeping

8am- Wake up go to class

9:05-10:20am- Introduction to Comparative Politics

10:45-12:00pm- Introduction to International Relations

12:00pm-2:00pm- went home to prepare to visit family in Buffalo

3:00pm- met up with my cousin to drive to Buffalo

3:00pm-11:00pm- Drive to Buffalo

11:30pm-1am- hung out with my other cousins in Buffalo. Went to Sleep

October 13th,

11am- woke up in Buffalo, NY

12pm- my family and I went to family brunch and got really good wings.

2pm- We went to my Uncle’s friends house who was hosting a Craft-Beer Tasting Event.

7pm- We went back to my cousins house and relaxed.

9pm- I went and visited my friend who goes to SUNY Buffalo with my cousin, we went to a party in his Villa complex. I slept at my friends house and went back to my cousins the next day.

 

 

 

Time Log:

Saturday:

11 am. – Woke up and met up with my friend James to sell my car, drove to Eastern Long Island

1 pm.- Arrived in Eastern Long Island and sold my car, met with car salesman which caused a change in my speech

3 pm.- Came back to Great Neck, and hung out at a park since it was hot out.

5 pm- Went for dinner with my Mom and my sister

7 pm.- Went back home to change before going out.

10 pm- Met friends at the train station

11 pm- Arrived at the club we wanted to go to.

2 am- Left the club where we were.

3 am- took the train which was packed back to Long Island

Sunday:

12 pm- woke up

12:30 pm- drove to Jack Dempsey’s bar in Bayside, Queens to watch the Dolphins game

1 pm- Arrived at Jack Dempsey’s, enjoyed game with my dad

6 pm- Left Dempsey’s, went home and did school work at the library with my friend

8 pm- Arrived at home and ate dinner with my mom, she made meatloaf

10 pm- Watched Curb Your Enthusiasm

11:30 pm- Watched Rick & Morty

12 am- Sleeping

 

I think that throughout my weekend I encountered a wide range of situations that struck a few things to me. Firstly, it showed me how different I talk around my parents and sister than when I am around my friends. The first thing I notice is that I do not curse nearly as much as when I do when watching a sports game with friends or even just having a conversation. I do not know what it is, perhaps when we are talking to our friends there is more of a drive to challenge each others egos. The next thing I noticed is that the way I talk around my parents is not how I talk around all adults, the guy who bought my car was trying to haggle me to a lower cost but I did not budge, he thought he could roll me because I am younger and I knew that. I think also the fact that we did this log recording on a weekend shows how the results vary to a week day as there is no commute on these days, and there is no school. Not only is my conversation in a different place, but mentally I am in a totally different place when I do not have the obligations of school in a day. It is not to say that I do not like school, I love to learn, however the things a school day entails such as a commute really make the whole day feel like a chore.

 

Annotated Bibliography:

Gee, James P. “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: Introduction. “Journal of Education”  171.1 (1989): 5-17. Print.

Evaluation: This article was really engaging in my perspective. I did not know about the many “intricacies” go into language and how humans go back and forward between language types without even realizing. I feel like this article is useful to my project because I will use the examples he shows in explaining primary and secondary discourses as primary tools for language. The examples will further show how language is more of an expression of belief or passion than anything else, which is my goal. Even though it may seem like humans communicate almost systematically these days, I think that our overall language is shaped by those who surround us.

Summary: Gee points out that language is much more than the common label of “grammar”, after reading this it seems as if his definition is passion-related. Further he has great concern with how people perceive the “discourses” around language, he says that discourse are the variables that go into shaping our rhetoric. The choices we use with words, that can also be dependent on the people we are surrounded by at that moment. I think it is true that our discourses are associated with our identity as they are the variables that represent the choices we make in speech. In short, I think he means to show that language is more of an “art than a science” meaning there is no specific methodology to it, its more of a representation of feeling. He also shapes discourses as situations; when he says that language does not have to be fluent between two people for them to talk, just the discourse is fluent between them. This means both people may not know what each is saying exactly, but they could have an idea through variables such as emotion or body language.

I felt as if I did not face that many challenges obtaining the data on the different forms of speech I use. As an individual I use a few different types of speech to talk to others, this is depending on the context of my emotion. Where am I mentally? And when I say that I mean how am I reacting to the people I am surrounded by. Personally, my speech differs significantly when I am around lets say my friends than when I am around my family, around my family I have a much more conservative tone then the free spirited one I exhibit around friends. Obtaining the info really just took breaking down the context. I was able to separate the situations around my friends to the situations around my family, also the speech I used in class or school in general was in focus. I also examined the communication forms I use 0n the train, it was not meant to be particular to one specific train or circumstance. The fact is for me, when I am on the train I have found several instances where I was making eye contact with another person and that eye contact made me ponder what they were thinking.

I find that the general purpose of putting together a literary narrative is so that you can express your stance on a literature piece. It does not have to be constrained to a literature piece, it can be your overall perspective on literature. I liked how I was able to show how I went through writing earlier in my academic career as a student, my writing has helped me understand not only my relationship to my direction but to society as well. I

I felt like the annotated bibliography was helpful. I used the annotated bibliography to help formulate the main idea to my literature narrative which was centered around how I have grown in my academic writing. I liked how I was able to also see how the articles specifically related to my article, it is not easy to decide whether something is credible by just reading it, by applying it to a real example (an essay) its like testing a hypothesis.

I thought that the peer review was really useful, I was able to not only see what my peer had to say about my writing. But I got to see how my writing stacks up to my peer, and when I say that I do not mean in any competition relate context, I mean how did my peer attack the task at hand and how did my strategy differ and could I use that to better my own writing in the future. I thought it was nice to also talk with someone who had a similar perspective to mine, this re-validated what I was doing.

I thought that finding out other peoples perspectives and ideas is a good way to formulate a direction on where I want to go. It seemed that the general consensus was to create a log based off the context of the social situation you are in. If you are with friends you are going to talk more casually, with family your going to think about what you are communicating more carefully. I also believe that during the time that we are silent, but active we are still communicating with others, when I am on the subway I find myself making eye contact and thinking about what others think about, I think this affects the way I talk with others. Another context is social media, many people tend to communicate in a much different way while they are behind a monitor vs. in person. When the element of confrontation is taken away people are much more comfortable speaking about what they want to speak about.

“Stereotyping” is usually a generalization made about a group of people that targets their integrity and honor. Stereotyping does not always have to deal with race, it just usually deals with specific contexts of individuals for various reasons. I think there is a relationship between language and stereotype for sure in the context of language as a tool to write. It is easy for someone to illustrate a stereotype just by communicating the traits of that person through language. Language has its good qualities but in this sense there seems to be a deviance interconnected. Language is what also destroys the validity of stereotyping as well, through language people begin to realize how stereotypes are merely generalizations about people that are only validated when taken seriously. It is worth noting that insecurity in ones self is usually what triggers them to look outside themselves for reassurance, like “Oh those grandmas really can’t drive, glad I am such a good driver”. I could be the worst driver in the world, but as long as those old ladies are driving 15 miles an hour down 2nd Ave I will continue to reassure myself. When someone is making a stereotype they are enacting a superiority complex on their subject, this is another vice of language because it is an expression of value for the person in front of you. The relationship between stereotype and language is hard to define, however, because language is our means of communicating we can point out a deviance behind it.

To say that I have had my share of times dealing with procrastination would be an understatement. Since an early age I have made it almost a point, to put all my priorities off until the last minute. I really do not think I am all that conscience of this at this point because I think if I were I would have tried to stop it. When I first got to college I was procrastinating a lot with my school work and not carefully managing my time. I was given an assignment for class, the class was American Government. This was not a class that I necessarily struggled with, however, I did not have a firm grasp on my time management at this time so my performance was inconsistent at times. The assignment was an essay on Abraham Lincoln and I forgot to actual question of the essay, but I do remember we were given at least 6 weeks notice. The essay was a research essay and I waited till the day before to start it. It was a disaster and I hope I have not been as stressed as I was in that moment because I was damn stressed out. It ended up taking me over 8 hours to finish the paper as I had to write about fifteen pages. This assignment was a royal pain in the you know what, but as I was doing I remember reflecting that I was the one who got myself into this quarrel, so I had to be more organized in the future.

Daniel Cohen

English 2150

 

Academic Writing

When I think of academic writing, I think of writing for assignments in school specifically. I think that specifically when it comes to academic writing it relates more to the research context. This is a form of writing that I do not feel as comfortable with academic writing than with creative forms. In high school I did not like school, I felt like a rebellious teen, I was 16 and then my class read The Catcher in the Rye, that had a strong impression on me. At the time, I couldn’t really tell why I felt similar to Holden Caufield as a person, but I did. I felt as if I did not relate to a lot of the people around me, I felt as if a lot of the people around me were “phony” and I thought the novel taught a valuable lesson on humanity. Part of being a person is individualism, if you comply with ideals you are told to comply with then your extinguishing the concept. This was my sophomore year and I was a good reader but I had never really gotten that far deep into writing outside of the classroom setting. Throughout middle school, I would go home after school and glue myself to the couch and play video games till it was dinner time. Then after dinner, more video games and the cycle ensued. My sophomore year of high school things began to change for me. I started to take school less seriously, I thought that I would be able to “scheme” my way through high school by unethical means and began to hang out with older kids than myself. However, at the age of 16 years old I started keeping a diary. I really wanted to discover who I was and I thought that by writing a little bit every day that eventually I would begin to figure out who I was. At 16 I had little direction and did not know what I wanted to do in college, all I knew was that I sucked at Math and Science, but when I tried in the liberal arts classes I thrived. I think that this writing is vastly different than academic writing which is mostly based off research models, but that writing even requires some analysis with it.

Holden Caufield, this was a name that really had a lot of impact on me. For me, he really was a hero figure because even though he did not confront any of the people that he had issues with he understood society. He understood that he wasn’t well liked by a lot of people and because of this, he sees how a lot of people simply prop their lives up so they look like they’re having the time of their lives to the outside world. I fit in pretty well in my school, however, I had felt like an outsider because there were a lot of kids who were pretentious. Pretentious in the sense that they felt they were more important than the most important problems going on in the world, and as long as their lives were in order they did not care about the outside. I wanted to write a book about how my perspective of growing up in a town that hid me from the reality of the real world. I wanted to call the book the bubble. I agreed with George Orwell a lot, he stated that one of the motives behind why people write is to push people in a political sense. In a way, this is what I wanted to do, I wanted for people to understand how ignorant the pursuit of money made them. I never went through with writing the book, but I did take a creative writing course my junior and senior year of high school. It really expanded my outlook on the world. I would write stories about many things. The class really made me think about being a writer, I wanted to become and I think this is how academic writing ties into that idea.

Academic writing is thought by many people to be writing that is done purely for school, however I believe that academic writing is when you are writing and learning also. You do not have to be in a school setting, I feel like it’s a very arbitrary thing. In college, I stopped pursuing writing to focus on school, but my school is what kept the learning going. By being a political science major, my most important assignments in my major courses are nine times out of ten essays. These essays require arguments about very specific topics, topics that I was not familiar with prior to encompassing it. I see myself as an active academic writer because I know there is essentially no limit to what I can learn about writing. Also there is a lot of stuff in the political science world that can fool the average researcher as being credible. In reality a source may not be as credible as it is, by going through the process of academic writing and creating an annotated bibliography you learn that things may not be as credible as thought. Also as the writer of an academic piece since it is likely pertaining to researching a hypothesis it helps the credibility of the paper when the things being researched are fact checked and peer reviewed.   I would encourage others to think of writing more about exercise to the imagination. If you have a wild imagination as a child, like I did, you will almost certainly enjoy creative writing. The beauty of writing is that if you really do come to love it, you do not have to do it for the “sheer egoism” that Orwell suggests many are in it for. You can do it because you have a passion for having others hear your perspective. Even if that perspective is through characters you create as a writer, the perspective comes from the author.

I think that creative writing is the steppingstone to academic writing, academic writing entails more attention from the research sector and gathering evidence in support of an arbitrary hypothesis. Academic writing is different because of tone and direction, what I have shown is that I developed as a writer in general through creative writing. By expressing my perspective through story telling I have figured out a method to my writing that helps me better further my points in academic writing which is more argumentative than narrative based.  This was how he was able to see what was on their mind. I think writing is similar in that depending on what your writing, your tone is what represents what is truly on your mind, academic writing is more of arguing to prove a hypothesis right or wrong. The truth is that creative writing is a powerful vice in developing the commentary skills needed to be an effective arguer in an academic piece of writing.

Annotated Bibliography

 

• Citation: Irvin, L. Lennie. “What is “Academic” Writing? .” Writing Spaces: Reading on Writing , 2010.

Summary: In this essay, the author Irvin discusses how people who are new to academic writing are more likely to dread it because of “myths” they are led to believe. Irvin discusses several myths, these are things she believes people are led on to believe and have an adverse effect on how they perceive academic writing these are Myths #2 and #5. #2 states that it’s a myth that writers have everything they want to write figured out before they actually start writing. #5 states it is a myth that good grammar is good writing. Irvin goes further on to say that academic writing is more about understanding the context in which you are presenting. This can mean several things first, who is the audience and on what platform is the writing being presented. In short, this essay is a directive to students who are quick to fear the process of learning academic writing.

 

Evaluation: I think that this can be useful to my topic because I used to have a fear of academic writing. In high school, I was not that motivated to learn about the specific ways to write academically, I did not care to fix mistakes that I had made and did not stay consistent to tones and points of view. The myths that I described in the summary are ways that represent the reasons that I felt as if writing were a wall I could not climb over. Now that I am a political science major, my most important marks as a student require an application of certain writing skills. I appreciated what the author wrote about maintaining perspective throughout a work of literature and always understanding the audience.

 

• Rothman, Joshua. “Why Is Academic Writing So Academic?” The New Yorker, The New Yorker, 18 June 2017, newyorker.com/books/page-turner/why-is-academic-writing-so-academic. Accessed 25 Sept. 2017.

Summary: This article is written by a former graduate student who wrote in response to a critique he received on a previous work of his. He said that his critic suggested that the work be published in an opinion related platform like a magazine and not an academic journal. He then begins to attempt to distinguish the purpose to academic writing which for him is education. However, he says that because of the generations behind us like the baby boomer generation, more and more students began enrolling in colleges. Therefore, the requirement to become a professor was lowered. If this is going to happen, Rothman is claiming that the expectations for academic writing should be lowered because then more people will be able to part take in it.

Evaluation: I think that this work of writing is valuable to the future of writing because it represents a true idea, the idea that because the level of writing is lower now so are the writing levels of most of the audience. So why does academic writing need to be so strict when the people coming into it are not able to keep up. I think the way that I can apply this to my own works is that I feel as if when I focus too much on “damage control” as in mitigating mistakes I end up making more mistakes and my level of writing goes down. With that idea said, I can support what he is saying.

 

• Citation: Orwell, George . George Orwell: Why I Write, 1947, www.resort.com/~prime8/Orwell/whywrite.html. Accessed 25 Sept. 2017.

Summary: This piece is about a man’s effort to search for the answer of why he writes. Orwell starts with an anecdote about how he could not really find himself as a person and transformed his feelings of being lonely into a career as a writer. He talks about the reasons people become writers and he feels as if writing is something that is mainly for self-fulfillment and so that people are remembered and glorified long after they die. He also believes that people want to push the world in a certain direction and do that through writing about politics.

Evaluation: I would evaluate that I could use this piece to show why I might write more in my life. In talking about academic writing, I think that many people write for glory and to push the world in a certain direction. I think that I would be able to find out more about myself through my audience’s reactions to see how ambitious I am to express my opinions. Although I do not know if this is a good conscience reason to start writing because if it’s purely for self-satisfaction what precedent is it setting for future writers.

 

 

 

I decided to analyze a piece I wrote last year in an English class I took at Hunter College. The assignment was to analyze how my writing improved as the semester progressed. The way I worked through this task was by examining my works from the beginning of the semester with my final paper. A lot more attention was applied to my final paper, and that was really what separated it from my other assignments in that class. From an Ethos perspective, I wrote the paper from the perspective of a student analyzing the progression of my skill. I did not aim to denote myself to a higher respect, however I did firmly state the ways I progressed my writing whether it be mechanics or fluidity. I cannot really see how Pathos would fit into my assignment, at no time did the tone become dramatic enough to evoke an emotional response from my audience. Logos would fit into my assignment because I reasoned with myself on how I improved as a writer, specifically in noticing what changed about my writing as the semester progressed. In using the Toulmin method, I claimed that my writing improved throughout the semester. The warranting reason for this was that I had seen improvement in my work from the beginning to the end of the semester. The grounds for the warrant were that I improved my writing in specific aspects such as improving my mechanics and fluidity. My backing of the warrant was that I got better grades as I noticed these flaws in my writing and sought to improve them by paying more attention to them as they occurred. What qualifies me to make this claim is that I spent time on improving my writing skills in specific areas and my grades improved. My rebuttal  to this statement would be that while I was paying more attention to not making mistakes as a writer, ultimately it may have taken away from the quality of my commentary as I was focused less on the commentary and more on writing a “clean” paper.