Identity, Rhetoric & Propaganda in the "Fake News" Era
ENG 2100: JMWA f18 Baruch College
My paper is about gender stereotypes affecting women in the workplace. There’s quite a bit of research included in it showing how women are discriminated against like the wage gap, having a harder time getting hired, sexual harassment, and just generally not being treated as well as men. Companies are however working toward eliminating this discrimination in their hiring process.
Somewhat relevant meme: 
Using Sources
Today, we are flooded with information on practically anything. In this age of information, it is important for us to know where to put our attention and discriminate among what deserves notice against what doesn’t. Professor Howard Rheingold has coined the term “infotention” which is supposed to describe “a mind=machine combination of brain-powered attention skills and computer-powered information filters.” Practicing infotention requires skills of synthesizing information and critical thinking. As you get more information, you need to find a way to integrate it to support your own ideas. There are a lot of things to evaluate in your sources. You must find which ones help set the context for your argument, provide background information, define your key concepts, outline counterarguments, and more. You have to be able to paraphrase and summarize your heavily-used sources. Being able to briefly get across the main idea of a source and deliver what the author was trying to say makes the paper stronger while keeping you as the primary voice. A huge thing to remember in academic writing is to properly paraphrase and summarize sources, or it can be counted as plagiarism. This is known as “patchwriting.” You should always throw in where you found your information and who wrote it.
This text pointed out the importance of sources in an academic paper. The quality of one’s sources has a huge effect on the quality of the paper being written. The text pointed out to me how much of your writing is based on the sources you use and formulates a lot of your paper’s content, like definitions of key concepts, background information, illustration of difficult aspects of the subject, and overall context for the argument you’re trying to make.
Intro to Refining Your Writing
There are rhetorical situations that allow for different writing styles. A large part of learning to write in college is learning about the discourse communities you write for. Different fields like humanities, classic literature, or the sciences have different writing styles which reflect their values. This can be seen clearly in the different styles of citation for said fields. Those in the social sciences, a field dependent on timeliness, prefer APA citation since it puts a lot of relevance on the date of which sources were published. It’s important to determine who your audience is when writing. It helps to keep your writing focused and maybe even more relaxed. Being able to differentiate between the writing styles of different communities is a valuable skill, especially as student. If you know who you’re writing for, you words can become a lot stronger and meaningful.
Finding Evidence
This text is all about finding good, relevant evidence for a paper you may write. The authors first mention relevancy by giving an example regarding government. Arguing government officials should use the same policies for economic troubles that officials used fifty years ago is not convincing since it was a different time period. What worked then does not mean it will work now. The authors then list different types of data and evidence that can be gathered. They go in depth about college libraries and the resources they offer students to conduct research. Besides library and internet searches, you can also gather evidence by conducting interviews, experiments, surveys, and even just putting in a personal anecdote, which may also help to draw the reader in.This was a very informative piece. I didn’t know libraries can offer much more than just books on the shelves. Apparently, they have a lot of other resources, an entire private database, for students to research and gather evidence for whatever project they may be working on. I could possibly see this being useful to me.
Under My Thumb
In her essay Under My Thumb, Chelsea Booth talks about how unfairly women are treated in the music scene. She recalls a time in eighth grade where a boy was asking her about her favorite song by the Rolling Stones. She lied and named a song that wasn’t too “obvious” to be her favorite. She didn’t do this because she wanted the boy to like her, but just so she would be viewed as having an “equal” opinion on music. She then mentions how throughout her music classes, male musicians are the overwhelming majority of what they study. There is barely any mention of female musicians. Even when there are, they are frequently described in relation to their male counterparts, and are also just supplementary material. Booth then tells readers a story of when she was sexually assaulted by a stranger at a concerted. She also gives us some research that shows us how surprisingly common sexual harassment is at music events. In a survey of 54 women, every single one of them experienced harassment. The woman conducting the survey was harassed 22 time herself in just ten hours. She has an optimistic view of women in the music scene and says it’s just a matter of time before they are fully welcomed.I found this piece to be very surprising. I was shocked not only at Booth’s assault story but also how frequently sexual harassment occurs. I also strongly agreed with her points on female representation in her classes. I don’t remember discussing any female artists in my music classes in high school. It’s unfair how the contributions of women are often glanced over and not given the true recognition they deserve.
In this piece George Saunders is talking about a group of people, PRKA (People Reluctant to Kill for an Abstraction), and their actions for the day. These people managed to not kill anyone or do anything catastrophic. They didn’t attract any attention to themselves. Saunders is ironically describing ordinary people as if they are some sort of forceful group. I believe the overall purpose of this piece is to remind people that while we hear a lot of negativity and constantly bombarded by news of hatred and violence, there is still good in the world. In fact, good people outnumber the bad people we hear of all the time. He’s reminding people the world isn’t as horrible as we may think.
Researching and Making Claims
The text starts off with an example to make its point. Picture walking through a forest when you’re asked which is your favorite tree. After being asked, you suddenly notice the differences between the trees. “Researching” the trees made you realize you have an actual opinion on them and changed your view. Research in general has the power to change a person’s view on something. Research allows us to view and feel the world in greater depth. It’s also important to research for the sake of credibility. It contributes to the ethos of a person making a claim. It helps to reach your audience by making you and your work appear more credible and valid.
The most interesting sentence of the piece is “Learning more about a topic expands your capacity for emotion.” I find it interesting because I didn’t realize how true it is. Once you’re well-informed about something, you tend to form an opinion on it. The readings also later expand this sentence. Where you get your information also affects your feelings toward a topic and therefore affects your overall opinion.
The Research Process
Curiosity is a natural human trait. From a young age we ask questions and experiment to learn more about the world and ourselves. Researching is ingrained in our usual behavior and we may not even realize it. Something as simple as asking a friend whether or not you should see a certain movie is conducting research. Our best research questions come from when something we see as ordinary suddenly becomes extraordinary. Forming a research question requires you to pause and take a look at the world around you. Research then goes on to give you surprising bits of information and probably cause you to form an entirely new opinion. Research isn’t so much a collection of facts as it is a type of exploration and learning.
“The best research questions often come from everyday life, when something ordinary, however briefly, becomes extraordinary” is this text’s most interesting sentence. Research comes from innate human curiosity. It’s how we learn and make our most useful discoveries in life.
How to Tame a Wild Tongue
In “How to Tame a Wild Tongue”, author Gloria Anzaluda discusses the struggles she faced growing up as a Hispanic person in America speaking her own language: Chicano Spanish. Anzaluda describes Chicano Spanish as a language not quite like traditional Spanish due to mixing with other Anglo languages. Chicano Spanish was never considered to be a “real” language. Traditional Spanish-speakers would usually not understand it. Chicanos internalize the belief their version of Spanish is illegitimate and “bad.” Anzaluda was often embarrassed to speak it to Latinas and Chicanas alike. She looked down on it since others did too, both Spanish-speakers and English-speakers. This changed in the 1960s when Anzaluda read her first Chicano novel, City of Night by John Rechy. She was later exposed to more Chicano literature, and that was when she realized Chicanos existed as a people. Given a sense of belonging, she found herself a discourse and started to appreciate her language and overall culture as part of her identity.
The Meanings of a Word
In her writing “The Meanings of a Word” Gloria Naylor firstly discusses language and its power in the world. Overall, words are just symbols arranged in some nonsensical order. It is the consensus that gives it power or any sort of meaning. She then tells the story of a time she was confused by being called a “nigger” in grade school. She wasn’t sure what the word meant, only that it was meant to be an insult. However, she remembered in conversations among her parents, aunts, uncles and several neighbors how the word “nigger” was used. The word was usually used to signify a man of strength, drive, or intelligence.
Response
Language has a lot of power in the world, but that power is assigned by those using it. The community from which words come from have a deep affect on the overall meaning of them. Discourse communities can center around anything and develop their own traits and languages. These communities can choose to be embarrassed or proud of themselves, and their language can be used to uplift or humiliate. It’s all up to the people using language to assign it any power.
(re)Making Language
In this writing, Seth Graves explores the idea of language, knowledge, and communication. Mary Shelley’s classic novel Frankenstein is used as an example to establish his point. Frankenstein’s monster first acquired knowledge when overhearing the troubling history of humankind’s mark on the world. He’s shocked that humans were capable of being so vicious and began to contemplate his place in the world. Graves talks about this since the same thing can happen to us. Knowledge, and therefore language, introduces new concepts to us and changes our outlook.
Language, Discourse, and Literacy
Graves starts off this writing by discussing the term “language.” He explains it is more than grammar and is just any way we can communicate, whether it’s through images, gestures, code, or emojis. He then discusses how language is adaptive and brings up discourse communities. A discourse is described by James Paul Gee as “ways of being in the world; they are forms of life which integrate words, acts, values, beliefs, attitudes, and social identities as well as gestures, glances, body positions, and clothes.” Discourse communities can relate to your profession, social group, or even a web forum. Graves then moves to his explanation of literacy, which is one’s knowledge of a discourse. There are multiple literacies like digital literacy, rhetorical literacy, and cultural literacy. Literacy is powerful as it can shape ideology and our understanding of what is possible.
Response
These writings were interesting to read because of how important they depict language. We use language in our life every day for things we don’t even think about. It’s very interesting to think that communication is able to shape people’s minds, their ideologies, and outlooks. Communication is also highly adaptive, and we have certain ways of communicating with others simply because of a perceived context and group dynamic. Language is such a powerful tool, yet it is commonplace and is used all the time.
What’s the Point?
In this reading, David Hengel tries to reframe readers’ understanding of a thesis. He acknowledges that coming up with one or two statements that declare what your entire essay is about can be intimidating. Instead, a thesis can appear as more of a question. Even from there, thinking of a singular question to write an essay on can be a challenge, so it would be helpful to break it up into smaller questions. The three main questions a writer should focus on are as follows: What do you see? What do you make of it? Why does it matter? What you see should always be something meaningful, it should elicit some sort of response from you. What you make of it can be extremely helpful to form your thesis and often does result in operating as the claim of your essay. Why it matters is the key. It is the writer’s interpretation and is what gives insight to readers. It should be an original idea and reflect the writer’s own way of thinking. Hengel then goes on to mention the thesis question should not be too simple, broad, or speculative. It should not be a yes-or-no question or too reliant on opinion while also being specific. A thesis can appear anywhere in an essay. It needs to be concise and articulate. A writer’s thesis also usually may change throughout their writing since essays evolve as we write them.
I found Hengel’s approach to theses interesting. Throughout middle school and high school you’re always taught the thesis needs to be usually just one statement towards the end of the introduction that sums up what the whole essay will be about. It can be challenging to come up with the perfect claim to write about. I think posing the main point as a question seems like a much more helpful approach, both to the writer and reader, as it can give a more in-depth depiction of the writer’s thinking process. Also, I support the idea that the thesis doesn’t need to be in the first paragraph of a paper. Sometimes further context needs to be given, or maybe several other points need to be made before a writer can establish their main point.
Responding- Really Responding- to Other Students’ Writing
Most writing students have given a peer review, but not all manage to give thorough one. Peer reviews should be more than a simple grammar check. They should give insight to the writer and be a very useful tool when composing a new draft. As a reviewer, your main goal isn’t to criticize every little thing about like a cold editor. You should be speaking as more of a friend and giving insight to the writer. Report what you got from the text. When reviewing you can feel free to write notes on the margins of the paper or all as a separate note at the end. You should always address the most important issues of the paper. Smaller errors can be discussed some other time. Comments are essential to the peer review and should not be held back. They are meant to be thoughtful and detailed to fully articulate your thought to the writer. It’s also ideal to offer similar amounts of praise and criticism. Just like how a writer needs to be told what they’re doing wrong, it can also steer them in the right direction to tell them what they’re doing right.
This text seems useful and worth a read for any writing student. Although peer reviews are common, it’s usually not explained how to do them efficiently. The author really goes in-depth and gives some insight as to what a peer review should contain and mean to the writer. I like how the author frames that the review should basically be a report, almost an analysis of what the paper conveys to readers and how it manages to do so.
Topic 1- Black Mirror (TV Show)
My top pick to analyze would be an episode of Black Mirror. The pros of this are that each episode is a different story, so I shouldn’t need to give too much background on the show before I get into an analysis. Also, most episodes are packed with messages on modern society regarding technology and how it affects us, so there should be a lot to write about.
Topic 2- Action Movies
Action movies have been around for a long time. They’re entertaining and it seems people will never get tired of them. I figured I could analyze an action film to see exactly how they manage to be so exciting to the audience. What makes a good, gripping action film? I like this idea because it would give me a new way at looking at film. The major con would be that I’m not sure if I would be able to write six pages on this. Also, there are so many action movies I’m having a difficult time picking a specific one.
Topic 3- The Last of Us (Video Game)
The Last of Us is a critically acclaimed video game set in a post-apocalyptic world. It’s known for having a well-written and emotional story, aside from its fun gameplay. The characters become fleshed-out through the story. Both protagonists of the game change and develop as time goes on. However, again, I’m not sure if I could reach six pages with this.
Questions
Is there an ideal amount of lenses to use in this paper? Do they all need to connect and tie together?