Essay #3 Reflection

I enjoyed making the video for Essay #3 because I feel like it is something I will be able to show my kids in the future, or just re-watch it for myself to remember what my first semester of college was like. It will be nice to look back and reflect upon it and see how my life/ideas about engineering has changed since then. For the interviews I chose the most important people in my life that have to do with my college experience. My parents because they support me through everything and my roommate Pat because he is my best friend at Manhattan and the person I spend the most time with. The equipment that I used was just the camera and microphone on my iPhone and iMovie to put the videos I took altogether. The interviewing skills I developed were to ask the right questions and also to gather more information than I needed. The first thing I did for my project was take the interviews and once I had those and gathered the pictures I feel like the story was already there I just had to piece it together. The different types of media I used were, audio recordings of myself narrating the video, interviews, newspaper articles and video. I used subheadings to help me piece my work together and tell the story of what people were looking at too. Subheadings along with my audio narration hopefully clarified to people what they were looking at during the video. I had fun making this project and although it took a good amount of time I feel like it was time well spent because I will have this video to reflect upon the first semester of college for the rest of my life.

"Man On Wire" Reflection

"Man On Wire" is a documentary from 2008 about a tightrope walker from France, Philippe Petit, who took his tightrope walking talents to the largest stage in the world, The World Trade Center. This documentary, directed by James Marsh, is a beautiful story about the "artistic crime of the century" where Petit becomes an american celebrity after completing his tightrope walk between the towers in 1974. I loved watching this story because it was so well put together and Philippe Petit is an amazing storyteller. The home videos of him practicing on his wire while he was in France are so cool to see because it is like he knew he was going to be famous and make a documentary before tightrope walking in front of the whole world on the biggest stage. A good portion of the documentary was reenactment of them in the building which was very well done and seemed extremely realistic. This along with Petit's vivid storytelling painted a beautiful picture and made you seem as if you were in the World Trade Center Tower with him setting up the cables. The interviews with various different friends and others who were involved in this incredible story gave a second perspective on how Petit acted before and during his show. There were even interviews with guards who were in on the plan which I also thought was cool. I think a reason that this story is so incredible is because it is unable to replicate what Petit did now that the Towers are no longer standing. It gives people an insider view of these towers and I was too young to remember what they looked like but this is the closest I can get to them now.

Peer Review Workshop

My favorite part about Brittany's presentation was how well it flowed. I loved her story and how she talks about what her home life is like because I am not from the city and do know what it is like to live like that. I also loved her interviews they were well placed in the video and well thought out. Although I did not bring my project to show her, since we both did a movie we were able to talk about different strategies we used. I liked her idea of adding soft background music to the video during slideshows and also taking videos of surroundings. Being able to see somebody else's video was extremely helpful for brainstorming ideas for mine. Although mine was already about 90% done I got some good ideas for details such as transitions and music. One thing I thought that she could improve was something that I also had trouble with in my video. Her audio when she was telling the story was sort of plain which does not reflect how she normally sounds in person. In my video I feel like I was very monotoned at parts and could have been better with sounding more excited in my audio. Overall, she had a great video and was extremely helpful in giving me new ideas from a different perspective about how to improve my video.

How to Tell Personal Stories

I really enjoyed reading "Writing Family History and Memoir" from William Zinssner because it gave insight to strategies that writers use when collecting information and writing a memoir. For this upcoming final project I feel like if I did not read this piece I wouldn't have asked the right questions to my family over thanksgiving break. I feel like I was planning on asking questions to them that I already knew the answer to. This would have made for a fabricated, unoriginal project. One of my favorite things that Zinssner said "Your biggest stories will often have to do less with their subject than the significance–not what you did in a certain situation, but how that situation shaped you." I feel like when you are collecting information before writing you may think of a situation that you vividly remember that did not create anything physical but it played a major part in how you changed your thinking from then on. Another strategy he talked about was collecting as much information as you can from who you are interviewing and from there you can read it over and the story will unfold. This method is more truthful and original than collecting the information you want for your story. Instead let them tell the story then just put it all together. This is what Zinssner said, "They will tell you what your memoir is about–and what it's not about. Once the information is gathered the story is right in front of you. You will be able to see how much you should talk about a subject and how little you should talk about another. It will become clear from all of this and when you have it in front of you, just focus on what's important and condense it into a shorter version. "They will tell you what's interesting, what's not, what's emotional, what's important and what's worth expanding."

Tweet: Sir Ken Robinson's TED Talk

Ken Robinson thinks that our educational system causes us to grow out of our creativity and we become afraid to be wrong #DontKillCreativity

Plagiarism: Ethical Issue or Educational Issue?

In Susan Blum's text "Academic Integrity and Student Plagiarism: a Question of Education, Not Ethics" she brings about some new thoughts about an old topic of students vs. plagiarism. Her thoughts about the subject, as you can see in the title, present the topic of plagiarism not as a topic of ethics but one of education. At colleges across the country students are told not to plagiarize when they agree to the institution's honor code. She says "Such codes appeal to the desire of students to do the right thing. The codes assume that, with appropriate social pressure, they will." This is the only way colleges right now are enforcing students not to plagiarize. Blum proposes that students already break a vast majority of other rules included in the honor code why would this one be any different. "The laws regarding drinking, for instance, are routinely flouted at almost every college, and those regarding music downloading, a form of sharing intellectual property, are broadly disregarded." This scare-tactic method might not be the most effective way to tame a generation of college students who already disregard the other rules of their institution. Blum believes that teaching students why to plagiarize their work instead of scaring them with punishments is a more promising way to instill these ideas in students. "Treating academic integrity as a constellation of skills, taught largely through the long apprenticeship of higher education, is the most promising approach for getting students to follow the rules of academic citation, and the one with the least likelihood of providing a shortcut." I think that Blum makes a good point and it sounds good on paper but in reality there just aren't enough college students who want to learn why they can't plagiarize. Most just accept it and cite their work so they do not get thrown out of college. Although this may be the way it should be taught, it just isn't practical enough for the majority of college students. 

 

 

What does "I" Look Like?

In Phillip Lopate's writing on "The Personal Essay and the First-Person Character" he describes how big of an impact using the letter "I" in an essay has. Describing yourself is not an easy thing to do by any means, especially through text. Lopate says "the first step is to acquire some distance from yourself." I think that this is an interesting thought and one people often do not do. Think about if you were anybody else, how would people see you? what would you look like to them? For some people this is a scary thought, but it can be used to improve writing and storytelling especially in works about you. For my final project in College Writing I have to show my class/teacher who I am, why I'm at Manhattan College and who has been the biggest help in getting me here, all in a 15 minute video. It seems near impossible to show strangers who you are and give them the best image of yourself in that short amount of time. I am definitely going to have to use Lopate's strategy and step-back for a second and think about what makes me, me. It may be a difficult story to tell at first but once you are able to gather your thoughts and figure out what makes you different from everybody else it will start falling into place. Whether you are writing a personal essay or creating a short video, whenever you use the letter "I" make sure that they know who that is really talking about.

News Reporting: The Whole Story

In Alma Guillermoprieto's text "Telling the Story, Telling the Truth" she discusses her techniques and tendencies for reporting the news throughout the years. One of the most interesting things she said was her take on news addiction. She described it as "an ethical desire to participate as a citizen of the world community." She also said "Hard news doesn't give us the knowledge or ability to do that." This provoked my thoughts about how news is reported. Hard news that we often watch on CNN or Fox is reported using hard facts to an extent. They choose to report the facts that they want to support their beliefs and sway the thoughts of the general population. Because most people will watch the news and take it for what its worth, but very few will investigate what the news said and try to uncover the whole truth, not just the perspective of one or two news channels. She claims that she is a reporter who wants to reveal the whole story by not just revealing her own opinions and facts but she reads numerous amounts of material from other authors on the subject so that she can support what she said by previous writers. Similar to writing an essay you have to support what you write with other references because this strengthens your claims. I don't like how she rambled on about her own personal strategies in news reporting in general. She talked about how/why she liked to put her "opinions" into her reports and use "personal pronouns." I feel like everybody has different strategies and telling the readers how you write is not interesting, at least to me it's not. Overall, I think her text had some good information and was thought provoking in the topic of news and how much of it you should take with a grain of salt.

The Art of Revision

In Sonia Nazario's passage "Transforming One-Hundred Notebooks into Thirty-five Thousand Words" there are many things that I can relate to as an amateur writer on a smaller scale. She went through many revisions trimming pages and paragraphs from her Los Angeles Times series in order to publish it as a book. The series only included about one-tenth of the information she recorded about the young boy, Enrique. Now as an amateur writer I can relate to this on a smaller scale where I have to make many revisions for essays and reflections in school. Sometimes it is frustrating because you feel like you have so much information and you want to share it with people who read it, but the question is, do they really need that information? Nazario said "I learned that it's okay to go from A to C and skip B." Often times when I write I ramble on and in the revisions for my essays I realize the sentence or paragraph is not really significant to the story. One strategy that I would like to implement into my future writings is to repeat significant but minor details that appear later in the story. Whenever this happens in movies or books I feel like people have an aha-moment and realize why that detail was mentioned. Nazario used this in her book where Enrique proves to his mother's question "What are you wearing"  by telling her that he is wearing "Two left shoes." Anoter strategy that I need to work on is when revising my writings I need to read my work more critically like Nazario does. She says when she reads her writings she asks herself "Is this really necessary? What is lost by cutting it?" These questions can be used to trim your writings to make them more dense and won't bore your readers by rambling on about minor, insignificant details.

Reflection to Essay #2

Essay #2 was harder to write than Essay #1 for me. I feel like I had trouble supporting some parts of my argument that originality no longer exists. Also, the paper itself was more difficult to write in general because it had to be a persuasive essay where in the first essay we were just writing about ourselves and past experiences. In my final copy I will add a strong revoke. I completely forgot to and since my paper did not struggle with length it slipped my mind. But I plan to revise it and add a strong revoke because this is key to a good persuasive essay. Some other improvements I would like to make is to add some more quotes from Barthe's essay "Death of the Author" and also to state some more strong supporting evidence in my paragraph about music. There were some strong points I felt like my paper had. For example I do like how my essay flows as one piece of writing and I also like how I was able to collaborate and organize my thoughts. I feel like I could make the paper more clear and concise in certain parts for my revision.

Reaction to "The Boston Photographs"

Nora Ephron's "The Boston Photographs" was a really easy and interesting read for me. I liked how she started off the story by speaking from the photographers perspective. She talked about taking the photographs and how she "realized what was going on and completely turned around, because I did not want to see her hit." She really grabbed my attention and I was eager to read the description of the pictures or see the pictures themselves. The structure of the story was very clear and made it an easy read for me. First she quoted the photographer's thoughts as the mystery pictures were being taken, then she described the pictures in detail. She stated facts about where the pictures could be seen and then proceeded to put more of her thoughts about what happened into the story. I feel like the pictures were controversial for many reasons. The pictures show a mother and a child in the act of falling to their death. The first of the three pictures should have been the only one published because they were still standing on the fire escape. The second and the third pictures of them in midair falling to their death are pretty gruesome and I know if that was me I would not want people seeing that. I do understand that it is their job to report the full story but I think that the reporters point could still be made without the horrifying pictures.

Is it Possible to Avoid Writers Block?

Freewriting is something that I have never done but always been interested in. I have always felt like keeping a diary or a journal of your thoughts from that day was something that only girls did in movies or tv shows. Peter Elbow talks about freewriting to improve your writing skills. He says that writing ten minutes a day without stopping to pause is a great way to improve your writing skills even if you do not have anything interesting to write about. My favorite part of his thoughts on freewriting was where he said "Freewritings help you by providing no feedback at all." Whenever I write I feel like it is always catered to the audience which is usually the teacher or professor. Writing just for myself would be very different and something that I have yet to do before. The largest reason why I am interested in keeping a journal is that I feel like it would be cool to look back on what you wrote when you were a young 18 year old kid, 10 or 20 years later. Another point that Elbow talks about is that it will be easier for you to write that essay that you would have struggled with in class. Your thoughts come to you and you are just used to writing them down like you do during your ten minutes of freewriting everyday. I know that always happens to me when there is a certain page limit on an essay and I have to fill up more space just to get a good grade. I get writers block, stare at my laptop screen for a half hour without writing down a thing. Another quote that he says is that "The main usefulness in the exercises is not the immediate product but the gradual affect on future writing." I can definitely relate to this because over time I have seen the improvements that I have made as a writer. I haven't done the daily freewriting exercises but just writing in general for class has caused a significant improvement. I kept all of my pieces of writing assignments in high school on Google Drive and when I look back at them compared my more recent essays it is encouraging to see how far I have come.

Reflection to Essay #1

I think that writing Essay #1 was a little difficult to get started. When you think about what made you become the writer that you are today it is hard to try to point out one thing. It started with my mother reading books to me every night when I was a child. That is where my first thoughts about writing most likely came from. Then in school when I learned how to write letters that also contributed to the writer I am today. I chose to write about high school because that is where my opinion about writing really changed. Coming into high school I did not like writing at all but once I was introduced to writing for a different purpose I realized why people got enjoyment out of it. Once I was able to process all of my ideas and get started on the essay it was fairly easy to write. I liked that it didn't have to be very formal and it was easy to write what came to mind in my essay. I just wrote about personal experiences. I think I would like to try to add some more details about my second teacher that I wrote about to make it more personal. There were some things that happened in class that I forgot to write about in the first draft that I would like to add to my revised essay.

Just Write

After reading Anne Lamott's "Shitty First Drafts", I felt like I could relate to it but I also feel like it was over exaggerated. She said "Almost all good writings start with terrible first efforts." I disagree with this statement because I have tried to write essays with terrible first efforts and I either have to start over or I receive a terrible grade. When I have written my best essays, my first drafts have been well thought out and there has been lots of effort put into it from the start. On the other hand, I do see what she is trying to say where it is better to write out your thoughts rather than have writer's block and not write anything out. Sometimes when I am writing whatever comes to me I come up with really good ideas that I would not have come up with unless I was rambling on in an essay just to make the essay longer. Lamott has similar experiences "There may be something in the very last line of the very last paragraph...but there is no way to get this without getting through the first 5 and a half pages." You have to read her text with a grain of salt. What she says is a good strategy to a point. When you write down whatever comes to you, there can be some great thoughts you put on paper but this doesn't mean that you can plan on writing with terrible first efforts and expect to create a well-written paper.

Breaking Down Locked Doors

In the story "The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me" Sherman Alexie talks about his experiences as a young indian boy on the reservation who learned how to read from Superman comics. Alexie does not remember many specifics about the issue of the comic or the villain Superman fought, but he does remember one panel where he breaks through a door. This panel has great significance with the ending of the story because when Alexie is older he continues to visit the reservation as often as he can to teach creative writing to the kids on the reservation. Most of the kids love to write but there are others who have empty notebooks and don't carry a pen or a pencil with them. Alexie describes them as having "locked doors." He says, "I throw my weight against their locked doors. The door holds. I am smart. I am arrogant. I am lucky. I am trying to save our lives." This quote is a metaphor from the panel that Alexie remembers from his childhood Superman comics where Superman breaks down the door. Like Superman, Alexie wants to save their lives by breaking down their "wall" to get them to learn how to write to advance the literacy level of that Native American reservation and Native American people in general.