final draft: unit 2 essay

Here's my final draft of the unit 2 extended essay.

Looking Back On The Semester

The most memorable thing that I have learned about in this course would most ceratianly be blogs. Before beginning this class, I had really no prior knowledge with anything blog related, reading or writing them. When I learned that I would be both reading and writing blogs as assignments, I knew that it would be a whole new experience and a good way to learn about blogs as well. At first, my idea of blogs was basically that they were online personal outlets for individuals thoughts, opinions, and interests. Ultimately, they seemed like journals or diaries before I really got into the blogging world. After keeping up with a few blogs and writing my own, I have a better understanding of what blogging really is. Though some people have blogs as diaries, those really aren’t what blogs are known for. The real blogs that are popular and well-known are the ones with interesting, informative, or thought-provoking content, not someone’s personal ramble. With blogs emerging as such a popular source for news and information, it is important to know about blogs. I’m very glad that my view of such a growing source of information has been corrected in this course.

Over the course of the past few months, I have noticed some changes in my writing. I am not as overwhelmed by large writing assignments as I was before. Writing actually seems to come easier than it has in the past. Reading, however, really has not changed much for me. In previous classes, I have been accustomed to difficult reading and lengthy reading assignments so not much has changed here, except that I approach reading with a more analytic attitude and take a stance on the topic being discussed.

Through the blog assignments, my writing has especially changed. It used to take me an unreasonable amount of time to complete any writing assignment, whether it be a half page response to a paper or a six page essay. For example, I wrote this in about 25 minutes. At the beginning of the class, a couple of the blog-response posts took me a couple of hours to put together. Since writing these posts, I have been able write with more ease and confidence.

second essay roughdraft

here's the roughdraft of the second essay.

The "Death Panel"

Does the RNC Want to Kill Granny?

After reading the article on death panels from the New York Times, I noticed the post above, "Does the RNC Want to Kill Granny?", on Daily Kos about the RNC's insurance plan, end-of-life consultations and death panels and thought it (as well as the discussion/comments posted there) was a pretty interesting addition to the topic if anyone is interested.

Taking an Approach in Writing

Harris’ idea of “taking an approach” seems more complex than the previous ways of rewriting: coming to terms, forwarding, and countering. It is also more difficult to notice in other’s writing because it isn’t as straight forward as the others. Its almost hidden within the style of writing. In his exact words, taking an approach is “working in the mode of another writer.” Three ways of positioning your own work to other writers are acknowledging influences, turning an approach on itself, and reflexivity.
To acknowledge influences in writing, the way of writing and thinking of the influential author is described, rather than describing the author himself. Also, showing how your writing style differs from theirs, though borrowing their style, is important. Turning an approach on itself is “[taking] both your subject and method of analysis from the texts you are working with.” This involves applying the author’s own views to their work. A method of taking an approach that is less about the writing characteristics of the other writer and more about the choices in taking an approach that you make is reflexivity. Reflexive moves in writing acknowledge how your writing has changed based on outside influences.
In my opinion, the New York Times doesn’t really “take an approach” in the sense of acknowledging any outside influence on the style of writing because literally noting an writing style influence in a news article would be rather odd and hard, if not impossible, to pull off. The Artblog has few posts that are written from a personal perspective that would allow for rewriting by “taking an approach.”

Countering "Intellectual Recession"

This post stood out to me while I was looking through my old post titles for one to revisit because the title “Intellectual Recession” and the basic idea behind it seemed a little extreme. I think at the time I was trying to come up with a strong position on the topic so I could have something interesting to write about without truly thinking over what my position was.

"I’ve never looked at something as common and widely used as the internet as a possible cause for the slow “intellectual recession” America is experiencing due to the simple lack of a real need for Carr’s idea of literacy in modern America. Everything is so simplified and altered now that our values, like, as said by Carr, “the ability to think for oneself, to draw independent conclusions, to express dissent when judgment and common sense indicate something is wrong, to be self-critical, to challenge authority, to understand historical facts, to separate truth from lies, to advocate for change and to acknowledge that there are other views, different ways of being, that are morally and socially acceptable” are becoming much less common."

I don't necessarily agree with all of this statement. Though we may seem to be more "simple" because we can now so easily access information without having to truly use much thought, I think we still have the same abilities in our thinking, we are just somewhat more lazy about it, only doing this when we really have to. Today’s technology and society have made it very easy to not have to think for ourselves and sort of go with the flow, so it may seem that we are slowly losing the ability of deep or complex thought, but in reality we might just be using it less often.

While we don’t use the ability to think for oneself, to draw independent conclusions, to express dissent when judgment and common sense indicate something is wrong, to be self-critical, to challenge authority, to understand historical facts, to separate truth from lies, to advocate for change and to acknowledge that there are other views, different ways of being, that are morally and socially acceptable, we are doing it in a different way, one based off of the availability of the entire world of knowledge at our fingertips, whenever we want.

Harris' Countering

Harris’ discussion of countering focused more on how to continue an exchange of ideas between two opposing views rather than how to merely prove the opponent wrong. He presents an example of when he realized how to effectively counter an oppenent in academic writing at the beginning of the chapter. A professor that critiqued his work said that he had simply tried to prove his opponent wrong throughout the entire paper without successfully developing a quality counter to his opponent’s work. To do this he suggests three tactics to use for developing a position of your own: arguing the other side, uncovering values, and dissenting.

He presents a question that he created to assist him with preparing a quality counter after describing his thoughts on his professor’s reaction to his paper in graduate school: “The question I’ve learned to ask myself at such times is: What do I hope will result from pursuing this disagreement? If the answer is simply that I think I can prove that the text I am reading has certain shortcomings or limits, then I try to set aside the temptation to argue.”

On one of the blogs I have been following, Daily Kos, I read a post titled ‘What Is That Orange Guy Talking About?’ that uses countering. The Minority Leader of the House, John Boehner has been persuading the Democrats to make some promises involving the health insurance reform bill. First, the post questions if Boehner may have a point, but continues on to say that, in their opinion, he shouldn’t be pursuing the issue:

"But does Boehner have a point in insisting that the floor managers, who are the chairs of the three committees with jurisdiction over the bill, and therefore will likely be the main conferees in the part of the House, can speak with some authority on what's likely to happen in conference, and could even commit if they wanted to to voting in support of the House's official position on the amendment? Sure.
Does that entitle him to such a commitment? Absolutely not."

These questions use the 'arguing the other side' tactic for countering by presenting both sides, though only one side is strengthened throughout the rest of the post.