LO2: Cited Evidence

Be able to integrate their ideas with others using summary, paraphrase, quotation, analysis, and synthesis of relevant sources.

In paper 2, I used quite a few quote sandwiches to introduce what evidence I am using and then backed it up with my own thinking and rationale. The quote sandwich I chose to highlight in paper two was:

Most people in society today do not like to point out disabilities in fear of being rude or offensive. However, the offensive part is still happening just in a more concealed way. The article “We’re 20 Percent of America, and We’re Still Invisible” explains, “At screenings of the Netflix documentary “Crip Camp,” at Sundance, audience members often asked why they had never been told the story of Camp Jened for young people with disabilities in the 1960s, and of the activism many of the campers pursued in the disability rights movement as adults. One theory is this: They didn’t want to know.” (Heumann and Wodatch). People in society do not want to recognize disabilities because they do not seem to care about it unless it affects them directly.

This quote introduces a key concept about how people treat others that have disability in society today and why they might be like that. The quote contradicts what I explained about how people think they are acting around them, but the quote explains differently about how people with disabilities don’t need to be treated any differently than others and this mainly happens because most people don’t take the time to actually understand their disabilities and what they are still capable of. Most of the time they don’t want to be treated differently just because of the label that they have. My thinking at the end justifies that most of the time when someone has something like a disability, no one really cares to either get to know them or understand their situation so they just ignore it.

Before this semester of english, I usually never introduced quotes as much as I do now. Most of the time I would just throw quotes in my papers after just explaining a previous quote so there was no lead up or introduction of what I was going to be talking about next. I also had a hard time connecting my quotes to my thinking in papers. I knew what points I was trying to prove, but the evidence that I chose was too difficult for me to connect them all together. Now I tend to look for evidence from different sources that connect to my main thesis and all of the other evidence that I incorporate into my papers. That way it makes it much easier for me to think critically about my evidence and the overall message of my paper.

LO1: Revision

Demonstrate the ability to approach writing as a recursive process that requires substantial revision of drafts for content, organization, and clarity (global revision), as well as editing and proofreading (local revision).

English 110 has taught me many things about my writing habits that I had practiced before. I noticed a lot of times that I tend to write whatever I am thinking down on the paper which can get confusing for me and the reader which carries over into the final draft. I also had never kept my copy of my draft the same and would change everything on my draft to become my final paper. Now when I am writing my papers, I keep the final draft separate and make comments instead of changing everything around before I am done with my final paper so that I can lay things out much easier and where I was trying to come from initially. Something that I often edited in my papers this semester were whole paragraphs to help with the flow of the paper and also some key concepts that made sense to be introduced earlier or later in the papers. In paper 2, I moved a whole section of my fourth paragraph farther up to introduce one of my bigger ideas so that it would introduce the rest of the paragraph better. The quote below is the section that I moved up in the paragraph. This semester has shown me that I don’t always have to start completely over when the flow of my paper isn’t coming together, but rather switching up the organization can do a lot for the end product.

This can change the way children see the world while growing up especially if they are not exposed to many different kinds of people. The article “Want to Be Less Racist? Move to Hawaii” by Velasquez-Manoff suggests that when being around people of so many different religions and heritages causes a more open minded view of the different backgrounds and diverse lives of everyone around. Velasquez-Manoff provides a good inference about why we might do so much covering and excluding, “We’re group animals. We instinctually divide the world into “us” and “them.” Groups compete with one another. They invariably enter into conflict. Even chimpanzee “tribes” wage war with one another, after all. We’re thus doomed to look down on people we’re not familiar with — to “otherize,” in modern academic jargon, those who don’t look or speak like us.” (Velasquez-Manoff).

LO4: Peer Review

Be able to critique their own and others’ work by emphasizing global revision early in the writing process and local revision later in the process.

Throughout this semester I actually feel less confident in peer review than I ever did before. I felt as though any time I made a suggestion it would get shut down because it wasn’t following the guidelines of peer review and they were too harsh. I personally think that peer review needs to have a little constructive criticism because it helps the reader see the different points of view. I still don’t understand the revision worksheet thing with the global and local revision which probably makes sense as to why my comments were incorrect peer review criteria. In high school I got a lot of positive feedback from my peer review comments and I tried to give a lot so that the writer had more to think about whether they added what they think about my suggestions or not. I also think my papers this semester were not very good because the feedback I got was very minimal and confusing to me. In Paper 1, I made many in-depth comments on Faye’s paper so that she had quite a bit to work with to make her final paper that much better.

LO3: Active Reading

Employ techniques of active reading, critical reading, and informal reading response for inquiry, learning, and thinking.

Throughout this semester, I think my active reading has gotten much better considering I would re-read my work often to make sure everything made sense. Also I would re-read to make sure the evidence that I was using was actually relevant to the point I was trying to get across. A lot of times in my drafts, there were multiple grammatical errors because I wouldn’t re-read them before. One of the things that I also had to work on was making sure my annotations of the articles made sense in a way that I could make connections to real life or to other peoples lives when relating to the articles and readings from class. Before this course, I often read and annotated in a very lazy way which would make it very difficult to understand the main idea of the text and then translate into my own words. One of the things I learned from this course was different ways to go about my annotations, meaning I needed to think about them from different perspectives. The material that was given had to be annotated from different angles to get the most out of them and that made me realize how much I can really get from thoroughly reading and thinking. Because I am able to open up so many paths of discussion from my annotations, it makes me that much of a better thinker, writer, reader and listener. Writing the blog posts has also helped me tremendously in the aspect of understanding my annotations further. The blog posts allowed me to write out my idea in more depth which made it much easier to explain in my paper briefly, but with more detail and in a way that it made more sense to the reader. When reading now, I noticed that because I am thinking more about how I can expand on ideas, I often made annotations on things I agreed or disagreed on so that way I could possibly learn from it or have a more detailed response on why I felt the way I did.

Paper 1: I made many connections to the Chabon article “My Son, The Prince of Fashion” because a lot of the quotes in there explain how he is self conscious about himself, but expresses his confidence through his clothes.

Paper 2: In paper 2 I made many connections to the “Pressure to Cover” article by Kenji Yoshino. He has a lot of good evidence as to why people are either forced to cover for their wellbeing or because they don’t want people to think of them in a different way. One of the points I made from reading Yoshino was that if everyone were to be different, then there would be no reason to cover because no one would be similar to you and I connected this to the story about F.D.R written by Erving Goffman.

Another connection I made was to “We’re 20 Percent Of America And We’re Still Invisible”. I used this article to connect to Yoshino’s “Pressure to Cover” because Heumann and Wodatch show covering in a different perspective. It explains how covering is not just done by people themselves, but people can cover other people too. Even if people think they might not be covering themselves, they could be covering someone else.

Paper 3: In this paragraph I made an inference about how Phelps-Roper from “Unfollow” by Adrian Chen was not unkind because she wanted to, but because she grew up learning the things she was doing. I connected it to how people are quick to judge her because all they see is her hateful words and actions, but she really didn’t know any better. (Don’t have an electronic source to show annotations)

Yoshino’s Pressure To Cover

In most situations, people are pressured to conform into more generic groups to hide who you really are. We see in Kenji’s “The Pressure To Cover” that all of those testimonies were of people that stood out, but were held responsible for not their visible traits, but actions that revolve around what they believe in and who they are. “In such cases, the courts routinely distinguish between immutable and mutable traits, between being a member of a legally protected group and behavior associated with that group.”. Kenji says that courts do not make decisions based off of who the person is because if they did it would be unlawful. People are forced to conform to other ways of living because other people do not like the fact that they are different.

Moises Velasquez-Manoff, “Want to Be Less Racist?”

In the article “Want to Be Less Racist?”, Moises Valasquez-Manoff shows his interest in the racial attitudes of the residents of Hawaii and why they seem to view people of color in a completely different way than others. He touches on subjects about how when children grow up in places that are more populated by people with lighter or white colored skin, they involuntarily learn racist behavior whether it was taught ‘deliberately’ to them or not. The evidence that proves this was a social test done by Dr. Pauker, “She found that between ages 4 and 11, upper-middle-class children from mostly white neighborhoods around Boston increasingly viewed race as a permanent condition and expressed stereotypes about other racial groups: that blacks were aggressive or, on the flip side, good at basketball; that Asians were submissive and good at math. These children came from public schools in liberal areas.” (Paragraph 5, Manoff) This social experiment proves that because these children are in bigger groups of people that look more like them, are able to almost hunt in packs. This is an analogy that Manoff uses that I think is one of the biggest reasons why there is still racism today even if children are not taught much of the topic of racism at young ages.

On the other side of this story comes the enlightenment of the children who grow up knowing that everyone is different and unique in their own way. The reason for that is because almost every single person in Hawaii has drastically different ethnicities. Someone might be native Hawaiian, African and Philipino, while someone they pass on the street is German, French and Native American. You can never know by just looking at someone and what Manoff does, is he explains why this might be the reason for that. The social experiment that he includes that was run by Dr. Pauker was done with children in densely populated areas where the ethnic groups are vastly different as explained above. Then, she did the same experiment with the children from Hawaii and the results were much different. She explains that these children, while still acknowledging the physical differences in people, were able to look past the stereotypes that arise from physical characteristics everywhere else. “They recognized skin color, hair texture and other features commonly associated with race. But they did not attribute to race the inherent qualities — aggression or book smarts” (Paragraph 6).

Chabon vs. Gay

Whilst reading Chabon’s, “My Son, The Prince Of Fashion” and Roxanne Gay’s, “Bad Feminist” I noticed a lot of similarities within the societal views of people and their passions. For starters, in “Bad Feminist”, Gay brings up the fact that she does not know whether being a feminist is a good or bad thing in todays world. She is more caught up in wanting to be considered a ‘good feminist’ which means she would be conforming to society’s view of the ‘good feminist’ traits. For example she says, “the right way to be a woman is to be thin, to wear make up, to wear the right kind of clothes (not too slutty, not too prude, show a little leg, ladies), and so on. Good women are charming, polite, and unobtrusive.” (Gay, Paragraph 2) She seems to believe that conforming to the set traits of a ‘good feminist’ is the only way to make her one, which completely contradicts what Abe in Chabon’s article believes someone should do when they are passionate about something.

Abe is a young man that is very indulged in the fashion industry, even at such a young age. He does everything in his power to make sure that he looks his best with up to date styles and brands.

Yes, Abe does make sure that he is looking the best with the most popular clothing lines and styles according to what everyone loves and lusts over, but he puts his own spin on it. That is why I think these two articles can relate at some levels, but mostly are on the opposite spectrum. There isn’t one line in the Chabon article that suggests that Abe wants to be a follower. From what I see he wants to learn and eventually be one of the trend setters. Unlike Abe, Gay seems to want to fit in rather than being that trend setter and that is where I think the line gets crossed between these two societal driven views.

Chabon post

There are so many possibilities for self-definition. However, in this context, Abe seems to be offered a lot at such a young age even though he says he is “working” for the clothes that he wears. He is awarded things and is able to take them and turn them into something great. Not many kids are awarded things from their parents because of certain situations and most of all, are not able to go to fashion week in another country. I feel like his opportunity was perfect for him because his family was able to give him what he wanted, and what he wanted is out of reach even for a lot of adults. There could be millions of other kids out there that are similar to Abe, but can’t afford his lifestyle. 

One thing that stood out to me was, “Abe almost always found a way to mention the leaf-raking and drawer-organizing, conscious of the atmosphere of privilege and extravagance that permeated the world of fashion..”(pg. 2) I feel he makes it a point to bring up that because he does his chores, he is able to keep up with his expensive lifestyle at 13 years old and is aware that most younger kids are not awarded anything and when they are it’s some spare change. I think he understands the opportunity that he has, but almost feels the need to justify the fact that he is a little spoiled. 

Abe is given a lot of freedom to express himself because of the choices that his parents make raising their children. To a point, most people are able to express themselves the way they want to, but there are certain limitations that come with that if they don’t have the opportunity that Abe does.

css.php