Category: Student Blog Writing

Growing up, we’ve all seen commercials of all sorts, usually modeling a lighter complexion with a slimmer body. For years, society has emphasized beauty standards making us believe that we are all supposed to look the way they want us to. For example, women are supposed to be slimmer and your race defines your beauty. However, this has changed over the years allowing other races to feel beautiful as advertising has broadened their selection. This issue still remains as race is not the only problem. Men are told that they have to be strong and tall. While women are told they have to be slim and more feminine like. Having these “expectations” for people can cause insecurities and lower the self esteem of others. Not everyone can look the way society portrays us to be for various reasons. Some being health issues; people suffer from diabetes and others suffer from anorexia. It’s not easy to live your life when you have someone or something constantly in your ear telling you to change something about yourself.

 

    At some point in everyone’s life, they look in the mirror and they think to themselves “Damn”. This is the turning point where people decide to better themselves and take care of their bodies. Dieting and working out are major industries around the world. It can be a hobby, a career choice, or just a sudden change in lifestyle. People usually start and then quit because it’s too much to handle or they don’t know exactly what to eat and when to eat it. When one comes to this realization that they don’t know where to start, they just up and quit. I myself have attempted to follow a strict diet myself along with going to the gym six days a week. It was a difficult process but I learned from trial and error. But just as I mentioned above it became difficult once college started and I slowly fell out of the good habits I built. The activities leading up to this essay inspired me to try again and to teach others the process as well. One question you may ask yourself “What are the best foods and or diets for losing weight or muscle building?”. I’m here to show you different diets you can follow and certain foods that can help you on your journey. As well as some techniques and tricks to make it a whole lot more affordable and enjoyable than what you’re used to.

The time has come to look at your phone’s battery usage.

You probably have heard your parents tell you this “get off your phone you are addicted to that thing!”. They might just be right. To add on, the percentage of phone and social media usage has exponentially increased throughout people. 

This might just seem like an annoying claim to many people since the use of social media has absolutely skyrocketed, it also has had a negative effect on people’s mental health. To add on, many people simply lose the fight of checking and going through their phone every single time they receive a notification. Furthermore, this social media dependency, allows for many people to be categorized as addicted, simply based on the number of hours they spend within a week. 

The use of social media and its negative effects have caused many to be extremely worried about their child’s mental health. For instance, in England, the concern grew so much that the British government was in the process of drafting official limits on social media usage. To prove my statement, “Britain’s chief medical officer has been instructed by health secretary Matt Hancock to draw up official guidelines on time limits for social media use.”. Adding on, these wouldn’t be just some guidelines that everyone tosses to the side but instead they “would work in a similar way to safe alcohol limits”. It is safe to say that England takes this matter deeply seriously.

But there are many times when they want to say something, and there seems to be no proper word in English to describe such a thing. Therefore, the language communication barrier is caused. So many Chinese words will pop up when we talk. But once people learn Chinese, these difficulties can be easily solved. There are so many words in Chinese that there is no way to translate them into English. Of course, there are also many English words that are difficult to translate into Chinese. Therefore, in the communication between China and the West, relevant explanations are very difficult and need many examples. Foreigners even need to live in China for a period of time to truly understand. Many words cannot be literally translated, and it is difficult to understand the meaning of a word even with examples. Such as, the Chinese word ” 豆腐“, which is difficult to translate into English. The word “豆腐” can be translated as bean curd or ”tofu“.

Cultural appreciation, on the other hand, is one of the most beautiful practices of this world. The educated, credited, appreciation of another’s culture works towards helping all of us better understand each other and the backgrounds we come from. Cultural appreciation is best described as “ the respectful borrowing of elements from another culture with an interest in sharing ideas and diversifying oneself,” (Chyatee). It is a means of understanding where something came from and being eager to share it with the world, in credit to that culture. “It’s Important to Pay Homage to Artistry and Ideas, and Acknowledge Their Origins,” says Jennie Avins in The Dos and Don’ts of Cultural Appropriation. Avins uses the example of the Met Gala China: Through the Looking Glass, that, for the most part, bit off of Chinese based attire. Rihanna was one of the only public figures in attendance that took this opportunity as one to appreciate one’s culture by wearing an original piece by Guo Pei, a Chinese fashion designer, and not an Americanized version of such styles.

According to Ellen Bialystok, as well as her colleagues, bilinguals have an upper hand on monolinguals in cognitive development. “The need to manage two jointly activated languages apparently leads to an enhancement of frontal posterior attentional control mechanisms with the consequence that other types of cognitive control are also enhanced.” (Bialystok et al, 8). Bialystok et al mention how the common belief that childhood bilingualism had negative effects in developing minds was proven wrong in a study by Peal and Lambert. In said study, they gave tests to French monolinguals and English-French bilingual kids in Montreal. The authors expected to see monolinguals perform better, but found quite the opposite: “ bilingual children were superior on most tests, especially those requiring symbol manipulation and reorganization. This unexpected difference between monolingual and bilingual children was later explored in studies showing a significant advantage for bilingual children in their ability to solve linguistic problems based on understanding such concepts as the difference between form and meaning, that is, metalinguistic awareness  and nonverbal problems that required participants to ignore misleading information” (Bialystok et al, 2). 

The power social media holds on teenagers is unbelievable; our whole lives revolve around these meaningless apps. We seem to keep going back to the same things that are hurting us. Why do we spend so much time on social media apps if it hurts us? Competition. We want to be better than these influencers. So, we think being so involved with their lives would teach us how to be the same. Once you start scrolling through an interesting influencers page you really can’t stop. Researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University found that “Only three participants (8.4%) indicated they visited social media sites less than daily. Ten participants (27.8%) reported visiting social media sites daily and 19 (52.8%) reported accessing social media multiple times a day” (4). The majority of the participants check their social media apps more than once a day. This is normalized in society, and no one really thinks about how harmful it is for people to keep visiting their social media apps multiple times a day. It’s so available to everyone and extremely easy to use. Not only is it easy, but it’s also entertaining. With just a few clicks, you can find anything you’re thinking about.

Over the past couple of decades, body expectations have become their most unrealistic, causing thousands of people to develop issues with their body image. Studies have been done to test whether the Barbie Doll, or ultra- thin, unrealistically shaped dolls in general, have a direct effect on one’s body image. I am studying the effect that Barbie specifically has on young girls’ mental health and body image because I want to see if they are indeed a direct result in the development of eating disorders, body dysmorphia, and overall self hate. To understand the correlation between girls’ playing with Barbie dolls and the eventual result in them disliking their changing bodies and developing eating disorders, we have to consider Barbie’s original intent of impacting children and how that changed after the doll began setting unrealistic body standards and expectations because of the her perfect body,  and the body in which young girls wish to achieve, or may feel expected to have. Another large negative impact of Barbie on society is the influence of the dolls’ perfection on plastic surgery. Because of some extreme desire to look like Barbie, some spend hundreds and thousands of dollars to alternate their looks to closely appear as Barbie. After doing research, I found that Barbie actually does contribute to all of these problems, and these problems may never be able to be fixed.

1. After after spending time with Lunsford and Ruszkiewicz and familiarizing myself with Ede’s method for deciding when to quote, paraphrase, or summarize, what I learned and implemented is that citing sources is very important. What I did in my researched based argument is I started to cite my sources. The reason I did this is because the readers or audience of my writing will know where I got my information from. This can also give them a sense of authenticity by showing them that I got the correct sources.
2. Lunsford and Ruszkiewicz define academic integrity as feeling proper citation is an ethical issue, rather than a strictly academic one. They found that academic integrity is to give credit to the author when using the source. The correct citation is not just an academic issue. It will not be noticed by other people, but it will be passed on to another person. Plagiarism is a serious problem and is affecting the way our future doctors, engineers, and workers think. What you have do is to praise writers and whatever source of information you get as much as possible because plagiarism is hard to avoid, and you might not even notice it.

 I personally think it is better to preserve a cultural History writing with our home language Because when you write something in your own language, you can portray your own feelings and you can spread your own as much as possible with your own language rather than using another language. However, I think when you write something in your language you can translate it into English if you got a better response from your home people. However, it depends on individuals’ choices about how they desire to write. For example, Ngugi mentioned “That thinking made me say no — from now onwards, I’ll be writing in my mother tongue” So he argument was in favor of his home language. On the contrary, Ruhsdi argued about how English is a very important language in Indian since they contain English as their main language in school. In my personal opinion, I think language does not matter until you have something to spread  your message in large size of population