Nishmitha Rodrigo, Week 8, Reading Response (10/13)

1. Hengel’s approach is to use the tactic of observing the text to form a claim or an argument. This is pretty much what we did with the exhaustive documentation because it was almost like a free write for us to get our ideas down about the topic that we’ll be writing about for our analysis paper. Writing all my thoughts on the chosen topic allowed me to lay out my ideas to see how I should be organizing my essay and what specific aspects I should be including in my essay as well. Doing this allows us to approach our thesis and claims by making observations and linking those into our main argument. However, sometimes doing an exhaustive documentation can make it harder if the exhaustive documentation made someone realize that they have many different micro topics that they can talk about within this one main topic which lead to them having a hard time picking between them and basically causing confusion.
2. Abdurraqib answered Hengel’s questions about his subject, Carly Rae Jepsen, by making his claim about her music and then using supporting evidence to back up his claim. He basically pointed out that Carly Rae Jepsen’s music failed to hit the billboards due to the feelings of melancholy that’s provoked within the listener. In the text, Adurraqib said “EMOTION has been critically adored, despite disappointing sales total. None of the songs have lit the Billboard charts on fire”(25). By this quote, the author was trying to imply that her song didn’t do as well but not many people got around to listening to it, hence why it didn’t hit the billboards.

Abdurraqib utilized a similar method to answered Hengel’s questions about his subject, Future. His claim is that Future made an album about heartbreak and the aftermath of it. Then he used the micro question format to present supporting evidence and further his claim. Abdurraqib states “All of them ruminate on the same handful of emotions. revealed in the same methods of darkness and escape. I guess, when you work so hard to dodge the long arms of grief, it is impossible to allow all grief stages to move through you,” (Abdurraqib, 272). This quote from the text shows that regardless of how heartbroken or hurt you are, you’re still going to experience it stages from where you’re most hurt at the beginning to the point where you’re done grieving and starting the moving on process.