Final Project (Josh Liang)

The point my paper tried to explain in my paper is how dangerous stereotypes could be. A simple statement to identify a person’s identity is simply misleading and something we should not rely on. I listed out the negative effects that stereotypes pose and why they matter. Throughout my paper, I’ve tried to explain how stereotypes are similar to stigmas, which is what I named the title of my paper after.  Some of the effects are division, biased attention and decision, and mistreatment. After seeing the effects they have on society, it is clear to say that stereotypes are as dangerous as stigmas.

Completing this paper was a relief for me. When Lisa Blankenship gave us the initial project about a stereotype within a community, I was simply stumped. I had no idea what I would write about, but thankfully she changed it into a more manageable topic and I did it! It wasn’t easy to finish this project, but it was worth the efforts I put into the paper. It helped me learn more of how to integrate my sources into my paper and how to further develop my points.

Day 26: Style Imitation (Josh Liang)

It is easy to lose sense of consideration and the respect we show to others, especially when we are young. I remember a time when that happened to me, and I was on my way home from school and was down by the noodle shop in the lower parts in Manhattan in Chinatown, and I was going through a daily routine;  go to school,  go buy food, and then go home. Never a different food, nor was it from a different place. The noodle stand was inside of another building where the hallway was narrow, and it wasn’t easy to get by because of another line waiting from a nearby stand. I pushed myself through that crowded hallway, and I heard this man screaming,”Hey! Where’s your manners?!” I did not realize those words were directed towards me, and I resumed to purchase the noodles from the noodle shop that I regularly visit. I tried to exit the building as soon as I got my order, but the man I bumped into previously stood in my way as if looking for something from me. I tried to go around him, but he just moved accordingly to prevent me from walking pass. I recalled the words that he screamed at me, and I quickly thought of the words, “Excuse me” and he let me through. It wasn’t that I didn’t care about how others felt, but rather, I wasn’t aware of the disrespect that I’ve shown.

The first day of college was a scary and most of us remembered how we felt that day. The new setting and the new system felt uncomfortable. There were escalators, and elevators for the students to use. All these things were something can’t be found in previous education institutions.

Day 21: Using Sources / Writing Style (Josh Liang)

In the reading, “Using Sources”, Lunsford and Ruszkiewicz points out the sources that we find are of no use unless ‘infotention’,  a word they used to describe “a mind-machine combination of brain-powered attention skills and computer-powered information filters” allows us to pay attention and focus our attention to it. When using sources, we have to look for information that would support our argument and define concepts of our claim. It is possible for us to base an argument from a source and working around from that or to write our point and support it with the takeaways we gain from reading the source. Some methods that this writing suggests is paraphrasing, summarizing, or quoting a source. The writing says that we should use paraphrasing when we understand and respect the meaning of the source. Paraphrasing helps us to be able to get the main points in our own words without changing the author’s viewpoint towards the topic. It is common to use paraphrasing when the source is heavily used in the writing. Summarizing a source helps the reader get the gist of the source and helps identify key points without the reader having to read the entire point that the source is trying to bring across. It is helpful to summarize our sources when it is used to signify importance in our argument or when the key points could be condensed into a few sentences. We can use quotations when the main point or key points of the source can be expressed one just one sentence and most of its conditions is to use the phrase of the author word for word because the phrase didn’t come from our own ideas. The point is, how we use our sources in our essay has a big impact on its meaning and structure of the paper.

In the reading, “Refining Your Writing: Style, Voice, Editing, and Grammar”, the author encourages us to develop our own style of writing. Everyone has a unique voice and for each person, we use another voice to communicate depending on the discourse communities we are in. Academic writings limit our capability to explore new ways to express our ideas as our grades are reflected on how we present it and the professor may not enjoy us using humor to convey an idea. Also, we should have a defined audience when we write a paper because it allows our writing conventions to vary and help us make a successful argument due to the style we are opened to which can be referred to cultural capital from Pierre Bourdieu. Using our stereotypical standards of academic writing can be repetitive and boring, so the author encourages us to try different styles to convey an idea that we can be comfortable with.

Day 19: Research Process

The reading, “Finding Evidence” explains how some evidence can be irrelevant according to the argument you are trying to make and the point you want to bring across. An examples that Lunsford and Ruszkiewicz bring up is when making an argument that government officials should use policies that date back fifty years, it is not logical because circumstances have already changed and may not work as effectively as it did in fifty years. Also when it comes to collecting data, the reading suggests that quantitative data may be the best evidence to use when supporting our point. Next, the reading goes into how we can find our evidence, whether it is from the internet, the library, or from our peers, we should make sure they are credible and reliable because a strong argument requires a concrete evidence. The reading provides methods on how to go about obtaining evidence like using keywords on search engines, asking the librarian for help, even perform experiments if we are able to. The reading also encourages us to use personal experience if we could, but not write an argument based solely on that evidence as it would not be as strong.

The reading, “Under MyThumb”, Chelsea Booth describes her experiences along with evidence of sexual assault occurring in music concerts. In the writing, she points out that male figures of music history are more discussed than female musicians. She points out that the professor makes pointless claims to exclude female figures and she argues there is much better music to learn than from John Cage’s 4’33” and describes the music piece to be “silence”.  Some of the personal experiences that the writer brings up is her encounter with a man and had sexually assaulted her during the concert. She also provided information on how common sexual assaults in music concerts, but areas like Coachella refuse to make changes for the consumer’s safety. Evidence like that strongly supports her claim because it is relevant to her argument and leaves the reader thinking why places like these aren’t taking action against sexual assault even though its commonly known issue. Overall, all her evidence points back to why women aren’t acknowledged or treated fairly and used sources from surveys and her experiences.

Day 18:Manifesto

In this piece, George Saunders is saying that his organization, People Reluctant to Kill for an Abstraction, is one that does not involve showing force by violence or terror, but by consideration and love. This is important because he lists the acts of violence and humiliation that are usually performed on victims and writes that none of this actually happened. No one was killed, injured, humiliated, or held any grudges. The organization that Saunders speaks of, is people of a whole and are willing to support each other in times of needs. Their voices will be louder than the cries of terror and will stand up to opponents of the organization. Saunders’s intention for writing this could’ve been to unite everyone as a whole because he lists some people from all over the place and their situations and their hope for a better world. He doesn’t point out a specific group or ethnicity that makes up this organization, but “we”. Saunders want us to relate to each other of our distresses and fears of the world and together, we can endure, and prevail.

Day 17 : Researching Stereotypes and “Fake News” (Josh Liang)

The writing, “Introduction to Researching and Making Claims”, Seth Graves points out that when we are exposed to new information, it can change us and expand our capacity of emotion. He describes this with the scenario where you didn’t know any of the trees in a big park, but the guide tells you about them and their names. Instead of recognizing a tree as just a tree, you would recognize them by name instead. He writes that we research because we need credibility to distinguish our claim as real in a society where fake news is found everywhere. The sense of credibility is also able to change a person’s emotion and gives it a valid reason to be believed. I found this to be the most interesting sentence in this piece because credibility is essential now and is hard to prove a point without any. When we are writing any paper, we need to make sure we get our facts checked and make sure they are credible if we want to convince our audience.

The writing, “The Research Process”, tells us why we conduct research. It starts out by telling the common scenario of a child bombarding an adult with “Why?” after every question being answered. The writers of this piece claim that we do this because we want to gain pleasure from learning something new. When we answer our everyday questions, we are conducting research and with that information, we can act accordingly if the scenario calls for it. A sentence that interested me in this piece is, “An inductive approach to forming a research question means by and large pausing briefly and looking at the world around us.” I find this interesting because when you are researching a topic, you are often focused on your bias opinion of the subject, but if we do that, we cannot get a good understanding why we think that way. In other words, we need to look at a topic differently and even explore the reasons why someone may be against our opinions in order to see the whole picture. Like politicians today, they only focus on their own agenda, and any other agenda that opposes theirs is seen as threatening and will be no room for compromise. To avoid that, we need to see the research question more broadly.

Day 15: Revision (Josh Liang)

In the reading, “Revising Attitudes”, Brock Dethier writes, “For most of us revision is the only road to success.” When he says this, I believe he meant that we as a people need to keep improvising to be successful. Like writing that is due, if we do not make any revisions, we essentially leave out any room for improvement and risks our success. I agree with Dethier’s words because if we only do what we are comfortable with, we can never be better at what we do. We would still be limited to using methods or strategies that we know, but there could be better ways to do something that we just can’t find out unless we focus on revision.

Dethier connects revision to repairing a car in his reading. Another metaphor that I have for revision is building a PC. This is because when we are building a PC, we need all the parts, carefully place them in the correct place, and to make sure it works entirely. If something doesn’t work, the PC won’t run and is entirely a failure until it starts to boot up. With careful lookout on the requirements on the PC, we can figure that we may have plugged a cord into the wrong place, or we may be missing a crucial component for a computer to run. Once we can confirm that the PC can run, we can also do wire management and organize the wires so that they are neatly placed, and doesn’t interfere with the performance of the PC. Just like building a PC, revising use similar steps.

Donald Murray writes, “Good writing is essentially rewriting”. I agree with what Murray says because when I finish a piece of writing, I have a voice in my head that keeps telling me, “You can do better than this”, but I would be mentally fatigued from working on the paper. When I turned in my paper and received a B on a paper, I wouldn’t question why I didn’t get an A because I knew if I had the time to rewrite my paper, I could’ve covered the points of the writing with more precision. I believe that there is never enough revisions on a paper, but it is mental fatigue that keeps us from doing that.

Day 13: Anzaldua and Naylor (Josh Liang)

How to Tame a Wild Tongue

In this reading, Anzaldua starts out by expressing how the tongue is uncontrollable through a scenario of a dentist cleaning the roots of a tooth with the tongue getting in the way. Throughout the paper, Anzaldua pointed out that her hometown language was not well accepted by society. She lists eight different kinds of languages that Chicanos people speak today and claims to speak the last five listed to her family and friends. Majority of the Spanish languages somehow adapted to the English community. Even though America is a nation of many ethnicities, people who did not speak English were often attacked verbally. This displays the struggles Chicanos people face based on the unacceptance of their culture and language. Denying a person’s language is almost similar to denying a significant part of them. As for the tongue, it is what we use to speak our languages and the persistence of the Chicanos people helped Americans recognize them as a distinct group.

The Meanings of a Word

In this reading, Naylor pointed out the amount of power used in a word. She referred to the word, “nigger” as a bad word when he was still in grade school. She describes how the word can be used in the following paragraphs. First, the word, “nigger” could be used to signifiy himself in a situation that brought approval for his strength, intelligence, or drive. Or it could’ve meant a term of endearment for husband or boyfriend if used by a possessive adjective by a woman. The point is, there are meanings in the words we say, even if it is something derived of prejudice. In our case, we can use the words that we were called in our early life and explain how that shaped us as a person for our papers. They could signify our language or even who we are. In Naylor’s example, it showed that the word “nigger” adapted into a way which it may be okay to say words if used properly, although it can bring shame if used inappropriately.

Day 12: Alexie and Tan (Josh Liang)

Superman and Me

In this short story, a young Indian lives a life without education and has striking contrasts from the lives we have currently. Alexie lives in a society where they were expected to fail in the non-Indian world, but Alexie refused to fail. Alexie’s discourse community did not encourage their children to receive education and this affects the community as a whole because their limited knowledge cannot support the community forever. Alexie shares this story of how he wants to be different and how much he desired to read. Similarly, for writing our papers, we could bring up a circumstance that limited our productivity and explain how we dealt with it because of how much our lives differed from our peers. We all have different stories to tell, and we do not have the same origin beliefs.

Mother Tongue

In this reading, Tan gives a piece of her personal life with her family and explains that her mother spoke “broken” English. Tan understood what her mother tried to convey to her even if it was not using the sophisticated English we currently use. However, not many were kind to her and criticized her for the way she spoke English. Tan would have to talk to other people in her place in order to cover for her mother’s “broken” English. Not all of our families have something this sort of circumstance where a child had to speak in place for their mother, so it’s important to bring that up because we do not all have the same experience. My experience is very similar to Tan’s case because I have to translate English into Cantonese just so that my parents could understand what the phone was trying to ask or for what the letter was trying to tell her. It isn’t always easy, and some do not have to go through these difficulties that make these experiences unique to write when we write our paper.

Day 11: Literacy Narrative (Josh Liang)

(re)Making Language

In this writing, Seth Graves references a classic novel, Frankenstein to describe the sort of enlightenment we get when we learn of something. Graves uses an example from Frankenstein to explain this sort of thinking. The unnamed monster acquired knowledge from overhearing the instruction of a human and becomes enraged when he learned that humans were willing to take the lives of others. Similarly, when we learn something, we might have the same reaction when something we respect turned out to be something dreadful and disgusting. Next, Graves brings up the question of a person’s role in the world. The unnamed monster had a similar reflection on itself and realized how lonely he was. Graves explains that knowledge broadens our receptivity to emotion and not all knowledge is pleasing to hear. Thus, like Frankenstein’s monster, by acquiring new knowledge, it opens us to more expressions and meaning in our lives.

Language, Discourse, and Literacy

This reading starts off by saying that language is a misleading term and is too often suggests “grammar”. Graves points out that language also consists of symbols, images, and gestures. Discourse communities is a group that shares a common set of languages and can be defined in many ways ranging from social groups to the web forum Reddit. Literacy is also another word that was defined as the ability to read and write a given language. However, due to the broadened definition, Graves explains that literacy refers to one’s knowledge of a discourse and also includes the ability to use language within a specific discursive space. Graves also points out that literacy is connected to how people use texts, so our participation in social groups may be affected by the kind of literacy we possess.

Response

From these readings, I learned that language is a much broader term and can include a variety of communication. The way we perceive things can make us think a different way than we are used to. This helped me realize that language plays a big role in our everyday lives and could also help us better understand society. Also, our acquisition of knowledge can alter the thinking we have due to our emotions on the regarding subject. Thus, we are able to find who we are if we look close enough to who we are.