“Using Sources” Summary & Response
There are advantages and disadvantages of having an unlimited amount of information at our reach. The advantage is that there is information about anything imaginable, but the disadvantage is that the information must be deciphered as to being credible or not. The term “infotention” was created by Rheingold as to combine attention skills and information filters and I think that’s very clever because from experience I know that having a long enough attention span to filter large amounts of information is such a dreadful task. The dread begins as soon as a long article is seen or many articles, for that matter. The passage also states that to practice “infotention,” synthesizing and critical thinking is used from the “collective intelligence”of the internet. The passage sums it up as saying focus is needed for attention. There is also the mentioning of “circumstantial evidence” that does not explicitly state the occurrence of something and should not be the only piece of evidence to support a claim. I think the aspect of synthesizing is fairly explanatory but, the question I have is how far can you twist the evidence in your favor without having it be twisted so much that it’s no longer the truth? The passage also talks about paraphrasing and summarizing in which paraphrasing is putting the authors original ideas in your own words and summarizing where enough of the gist of the passage is identified to emphasize a certain point. I was pleased to see the difference between the two because they seemed similar to me even though I knew there was some difference. However, I never knew that the summary was supposed to lean toward a certain point rather than just succinctly rephrasing the text.
“Intro to Refining Your Writing Style” Summary & Response
Writing Styles differ with that of the audience and rhetorical situation/context. There are different styles because different professions or field value different things. The passage gives the example that the scientific field’s writing style differs from the humanities writing style because scientific scholars value timeliness more than the author of the works cited. The following parts of the passage remind me of the previous lectures in which professor mentions the audience should not be the “universe” but should be a specific group or person to give the writing a focus. There is also the aspect of rules/conventions in writing that should be known in order to maintain credibility. The passage raises a good point in that if you break the rules on purpose it could be a writing style or have meaning behind it, but if you’re not aware of the rules then the breaking of them will be meaningless. The point raised about being honest with the audience I think takes a lot of pressure off when it comes to impressing the audience. I think when the writer is just being honest there is a more sincere tone and the argument is more convincing.