Finding Evidence

The article explains that the types of evidence used in certain situations can vary because some may convince the audience in certain circumstances and some may not. Evidence is used with the ultimate goal of supporting your argument and convincing your audience. Evidence should match the time and place of your claim thus, the pieces of evidence can vary. The article raises the point that every situation that evidence supports, meaning the argument, can be thought of as a rhetorical situation. I think this is a good point which I never thought of before because every argument poses an idea that can be inputted into society or put into practice thus being a rhetorical situation. There are also many pieces of evidence that are data-related because statistics are fact that cannot necessarily be proven wrong unless there were non-credible sources. The article stresses the point that the same evidence may not always be useful in different fields or situations. It also informs the reader that there are many resources available in libraries and databases which would make them credible. I think this article informs you very well on the different types of sources that can be used to get evidence for your argument and it clearly explains that you have to know the contexts of the evidence and how it matches the time and place of the situation.

Under My Thumb

The writer starts the essay with dialogue of her own experience with altering her truth in order to feel equal in return. I think this tactic really draws in the reader and has them thinking of so many questions. She clarifies at the end of the dialogue of what she means by the whole example and how it relates to her paper. The paper explains that women in music are overlooked and have to work harder for their credibility than men and even in the writers syllabi there is a low number of women musicians compared to men. The writer presents claims of the argument she is against and afterwards she rejects them with her own supporting details. She also supports her claim using sources from authors who wrote books about the female musicians she is talking about like Spiegal. When reading the writers graphic example of how she was sexually harassed at the concert, my reaction was of disgust and astonishment as I would have had a worse reaction in the situation than she did. Her point was further explained in the paragraph that followed in which she talks about how women are unsafe at crowded concerts. The last paragraph of her paper is very eye-opening as she blames herself and opens up about her self-realization about the issue and her involvement in it. I think the use of her experiences as examples made the paper more interesting while she made her point with regular pieces of evidence as well.

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.

“Finding Evidence” Summary and Response 

When writers make claims, the credibility and quality of the source can be considered part of the argument itself. A source that may have been credible a few years ago might not be as accurate today, which is defined as the writer’s “rhetorical situation”. Quantitative data may be the best kind of evidence because it provides precise results to back up your claim. There are many ways to find research sources, like exploring library databases and looking on the internet. Writer’s can also create their own data by performing experiments and observing the results, conducting interviews, and drawing from previous personal experiences. I found this article very helpful in starting my research paper. I learned that research has to all come from the internet; I can utilize the Baruch databases and library books to learn more about my topic. I will also try to use quantitative data in my essay to bring more credibility to my writing.

“Under My Thumb” Summary and Response 

Chelsea Booth begins her essay with an anecdote about being acknowledged as an equal to a boy. She would rather lie about her favorite song than to tell the truth so the boy would think that she has good musical taste. Booth then questioned why male musicians are covered more than female musicians in class. She rejects the common excuses for the lack of female representation, like the argument that women were not allowed to become musicians in the past, so that is why there are less female musicians. Booth also mentions the #MeToo Movement by telling the story of being sexually assaulted at a music festival. She rightfully complains that companies who host the music festivals are not raising awareness about sexual assault, and are more concerned about the “numbers” (being the most popular event, having the best musical artists perform). However, Booth also blames herself for being part of the problem that the #MeToo Movement is protesting. She judges female music artists and doesn’t listen/support enough of them. I think that this essay is very powerful and relatable. I too prefer male artists over female artists because over time, men have just been more popular in society. To be honest, sometimes I lie about my favorite song in a popular male music album because I want to fit in with everyone else. Booth is extremely vulnerable in this piece and I could relate to her frustrations about the music industry.

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.

Finding Evidence

There are many resources at our disposal that can help us conduct research and attain accurate information for research papers, test study guides, or even for our own personal curiosity. One of the biggest resources that we have is our college’s library system. As long as you have access, you can obtain countless sources of information from our college’s vast library collection and be able to get a hold of information that isn’t available on the Internet/Web. Since our library’s database is so vast, typing in certain keywords to be able to narrow down your results is an important skill to learn. There are also various ways in which one can obtain data on their own such as by performing their own experiments, making their own observations, conducting their own interviews, conducting their own surveys, or by drawing upon personal experiences. This article was extremely helpful to me because it showed me resources that were extremely close to me that I was previously not aware of. It also helped me become familiar with how to narrow down my searches and the different ways in which I could obtain data by myself.

Under My Thumb

In the article Under My Thumb by Chelsea Booth, she writes about the inequality between men and women in the music industry. She brings awareness to the problem that female musicians aren’t as talked about as compared to their male counterparts even though there are numerous female musicians in history who have made just as great, if not greater, contributions to music. Male musicians are naturally held to a higher standard while female musicians have to try twice as hard just to get half the amount of recognition that men do. Booth brings up the valid argument that if there is enough time to listen to John Cage’s 4’33”, which is quite literally just four minutes and thirty three seconds of complete silence, in six different classes, then there should be enough time to include a few important female musicians into the curriculum. Booth also brings awareness to the amount of sexual assault that happens to women when they attend concerts. Although these cases of sexual assault are extremely prominent and are higher than what it should be, most musical concerts provide no solution or closure to the people who have gone through this sexual assault and fail to even acknowledge it as a problem. After reading this article, I found that I actually agreed with all the statements that Booth was making in her article. Female musicians are generally less talked about than men historically and often go through more situations of inequality within the workplace than men do. I also agreed with what she wrote about sexual assault during concerts and found that it’s ridiculous that there are still no solutions offered at the majority of music venues on who to report to/what actions to take when a sexual assault has occurred.

“Finding Evidence” by Andrea A. Lunsford talks about how being persuasive requires evidence to support the argument. The author also gives examples of where to find credible sources. She explains that most academic evidence comes from libraries, databases, and online and the more evidence you can obtain, the stronger the paper. She also gives tip on how to find credible sources online. Instead of just taking information from any website, she explains how these websites should be found through advanced search techniques, library databases targeted to the subject, and to ask librarians and instructors for help. In order to gather information on your own, she tells us to perform experiments, makes observations, conduct interviews, use questionnaires to conduct surveys, and draw upon personal experience. This is helpful for me because I always find it hard to find credible sources, especially for a topic that doesnt, have much research done on them.

In “Under My Thumb” by Chelsea Booth, I absolutely love how she started with a conversation she had with a boy. This already showed the reader what the paper was going to be about. It was very engaging and very relatable as a woman. She talks about how women are not acknowledged as much as men are. She uses the example of education to support her argument. She explains how in the music curriculum at school, they barely talk about women musicians and only talk about men musicians. This is very interesting because although in school, men are always the ones being talked about, I never really thought about it until I read this paper. I realized how unfair it was and still is for women.