Artist Statement

Feighbe Solano

Professor Hall

Artist Statement

           This semester has definitely helped me grow and see “writing” in a completely different way. In my high school they had “majors” that would help them decide what group to section you off with. There was agriculture, RTC, and Center for Writing. My mom immediately put me into the center for writing and for my four years of highschool I took classes like Advanced Poetry, Advanced Writing, Creative Writing, and Shakespeare. Because of the consistency of these classes, I was shaping myself into a writer. I wrote poems and short plays and some of my best essays, but then highschool ended. I flunked my first college semester of English 101 and had to retake it. The professors I had didn’t challenge me at all creatively. One of my professors, throughout the entire semester, had us reading short stories and simply answer his questions in essay format, an entire waste of time. It made me lose my appreciation for writing.

          While looking through “Rate My Professor” I found Doctor Carrie Hall, she was rated very high and received so many comments on how she’s a great professor. I had to take her class, and I even rearranged my schedule multiple times in order to make this class fit. I’m not sure what I expected this class to be but it wasn’t what it turned out to be. By this time I only thought we’d be reading more books and short story’s but it was nothing like that at all. The projects that were presented to us through the units truly helped me get back into the hang of writing but not just through pen and paper, by using more creative outlets (Instagram) I was able to use my voice in a more effective way. My Instagram page on homelessness, MPNYC_ (Mission Possible NYC) is in my top two best works I’ve done for this class. I had never taken a writing project and customized it through an outlet where many people would be able to see and interact with it. Many writing projects simply get graded and put aside, for no one else to see and this is the complete opposite of MPNYC_ it is a public page for anyone to visit and read through and comment on, and the amount of productivity that I received on this page through likes, comments, and even followers, in the short amount of time that I had to put it together, was remarkable. On top of everything the subject that it’s based on is a REAL problem, while it doesn’t affect me personally it does affect the thousands of people who are of may become homeless, this project was dedicated to those people and in order to do that I had to step outside the box, remove myself from the equation, and instead think about the victims to this problem. This project shows my growth as a writer, from my first group project of the semester that was based on the education system, where I only had one slide and about two lines to say, which was also my least favorite project, unit two was definitely my best.

           As I mentioned before MPNYC_ is in my top two best works of done for this semester, the second project that’s also up there is my Bob’s Burgers project, this was unit three. What makes this project one of my best and favorites is the way that I took my all time favorite animated TV show, and I completely gutted it for its misconception on transgender women and men. When I say that this is my favorite show, I mean that I literally watch this almost everyday and have rewatched the series multiple times. In the beginning, unit three was a little hard for me to get on track with because we weren’t given the source, we had to look for it and choose for ourselves. I had gone back and forth between two ideas that I cannot remember right now, but in the end I chose to do it on my favorite show. The drawing that I did for this project was fun, but you can only see my growth through the artist statement that I wrote for unit three. I wrote about my process for this unit and I feel like any reader can see my side of the story whether they agree or not. It was a fun project to draw a Bobs Burgers scene and remake it into what I thought it should’ve been instead. Now, looking back at both of those projects while they are completely different because one is a drawing and the other is a Instagram page, they have one thing in common which is that they were both made to fight for a cause. A REAL cause that has absolutely nothing to do with me, but for the people around me. This is why these projects are my top two, because I didn’t do it on me or my story, they were made based on other people’s stories. The fight for equality for transgender people is still a real one, and the fight to end homelessness is a real one too. Never in my entire high school and college years had I done a project made for such important causes as these were and that’s where you can see my growth in Doctor Halls class, my page on homeless will stay active.

 

Me As A Writer – David Wu

David Wu

5/22/19

Prof Hall

Eng 1121

Me As A Writer

            I don’t believe there’s such a thing as a perfect writer. Everyone has their own set of writing skills. I believed that I was a horrible writer for a long time since elementary school. I had to take ESL to learn how to write. Till now, although I feel my writing has improved a bit then before, there is still a lot for me to learn as a writer.

Coming to this class at the beginning of this semester, I expected it to be another regular English class. I expected us to just be given research papers and regular writing assignments to work on, just hand it in to be graded, and not learn on how to become a better writer. However, the assignments given to us by Professor Hall were something I wouldn’t have expected from an English class. The assignments given to us were assignments to help us find our “inner voice” in our writing and to be able to express our ideas on topics. I felt as if these type of assignments of being able to incorporate one’s point of view or ideas on certain topics is what makes the writer interested in writing and readers being able to see and read what the writer has to say.

The first assignment given to us, we had to write a specific event that impacted us in learning something. For me, I just wrote down lessons I learned from basketball from the top of my head without giving any details or explanations. Most professors would just read it, grade it, and hand it back, but Professor Hall read the paper thoroughly and had a lot of comments on it. She told me there was nothing in the essay that makes it me, there’s no specific details to my claims, and there was a lot to write about. Hearing the feedback from her showed me on how my writing can improve than before. Given the third assignment, a revision on any of the previous units, I decided to rewrite the education essay. This time I took the feedback I heard and incorporated it into the writing. Improving this essay by going into detail about my claims and showing how it makes it me by including my point of view and ideas. I felt the revision I wrote is definitely a lot better than the first essay I wrote.

This carried on to the following units and assignments. Every unit I would incorporate my point of view and ideas on the topic. For example, the final unit which was another revision, I decided to revise the second unit which was an essay about pop culture and social responsibility. Given what I learned on how to improve my writing, I did the same for this unit, incorporating my ideas and thoughts onto the assignment. I analyzed the Kendrick Lamar video “DNA” in depth and went into detail about lyrics and scenes in how I viewed it. This made me confident and interested in writing this essay knowing I am able to incorporate my thoughts to this essay for readers to read on what I think about this topic.

To sum it all up, I feel my writing has definitely improved through the semester. Before I would struggle to write a 500 word essay and feel my essays aren’t great because I wouldn’t know what to write or to know to go into detail in my essays. But this course showed me how to improve my writing by expressing my thoughts and ideas and going into detail on topics. This course definitely helped me find my “inner voice” in my writing. To me, I feel Professor Hall has made me a better writer than before and I would take her for my future English courses if possible to learn on how to improve my writing even more.

Name: Tohuratun Chowdhury

Class: eng1121

 

                                            Me as a writer  

 

  I think I never considered myself a writer. To me, writing is not much to be enjoyed but is a necessity. When I came to the U.S. as a new immigrant 6 years ago, I did not know any English. In 2 weeks after I arrived, I started to attend classes in high school. The moment I stepped into the classes, I realized how important the English writing is! Even in the classes such as us history or Chemistry, good writing skills were still needed to come up good science reports or essay.

 

         Although I knew writing is extremely important for my studies in school, I still tried to avoid it most of the time. After I got any writing assignments, I always wrote many outlines, lists of idea, themes, everything I could, but except the actual essay or report. Sometimes, I could even sit in front of my desk for hours before I actually started to write. The main reason I tried to avoid writing is because I knew there were going to have many errors in my paper such as grammar, spelling, and vocabulary. Until toady, I am a little bit afraid to make these mistakes when I am writing my paper.

 

 When I write I come across a few problems that always tend to slow me down. Finding the right words is the hardest part. While I write, I try to picture what words will follow the writing I have already completed. I can rarely find the words I want or make my writing sound the way I would like it to. When I first started writing my main problem was, and still is, writer’s block. I’ve learned to overcome that by coming up with every way I can to say what is in my head and put it on paper. It may not always work how I would like it to but it allows me to state my mind to the best of my abilities. In the end it is all about getting what is in your head onto the paper. That is one of the main factors that can affect my opinion of my writing.

         In order for me to have a good opinion of my writing, I have to like what I am writing about. If I am not interested in the topic I am writing about I will get bored of it and my disinterest will be obvious in the end result. I enjoy being able to state my opinion and write how I feel. My best work is on a topic I enjoy and includes what I think and feel about it. From past and recent experiences, I have learned that I am more proud of work I have enjoyed writing and researching for. In the past, I have enjoyed writing short stories and assignments on subjects that intrigue me or are on some of my personal interests.

          I always hated my English class for all the writing assignments. But I tried my best to improve myself as a writer. My creative project essay was one of my favourite essay. I found myself being more creative and analysis the pictures on my own way which I never did before. On our group project homelessness, I made a flyer to help the homeless people. I learn so many things when I was working on the project. One of the best things I experience in my English class is a group project its help us to communicate with our group members and help each other to be a good writer. Now I feel proud that I improve myself a lot as a writer in this class, now I like my English class.    

Me As A Writer – Waleed Qureshi

Waleed Qureshi

ENG 1121

Dr. Carrie Hall

5/21/2019

 

Me As A Writer

 

          What is a writer? Sometimes I ask myself this question when I’m making up stories in my mind. I have had this thinking ever since I was little that every time I was extremely free, I thought up stories, putting myself in some heroic situations because even though I have no qualities as a hero or anyone responsible, I just like the thrill of a climax or unexpected turnaround. Even though I can think of fictions, this does not prove that I am a writer.

When I started this semester, I didn’t care much about writing. To say the truth, I still don’t but one thing has changed. I think just me getting encouraged was enough for me to enjoy what I write. One thing I learned in the beginning of the semester was that I really need to check my vocabulary. Before this I always thought that I know a lot of things and if I need, I will just end up getting some idea of what words I had to use and end up using them and they will be correct. The obvious problem was, I was wrong. To some extent I believe that my vocabulary was missing because I lived my life in Pakistan and I didn’t know what some words meant if I had to convert them and make people understand what I did or what I went through.

In my first essay the students had to share one part of our life where we could say that we learned something. As I said before, I lived my life in Pakistan and we had a different high school system there. In my essay I told a story when I failed my exams. Normally, they would be considered my high school years, but I didn’t know that. I thought that what I did gave me GED because at the end of the year when we finished our two years we got something called a General Certificate of Education or GCE, and I confused that. When professor read my story, she was totally confused because it made no sense that I did high school and got a GED? Professor Hall told me to come to her office. There the professor told me how much of confusing essay I had written. Luckily Professor Hall gave me a second chance, told me my mistakes. As it turns out, this feedback was just the thing I needed because I added everything that was missing to the essay.

I always thought that my less knowledge of the United States limited my capabilities because I had no memories of things other students thought as daily routines because I have not been here for as long as they have. I was reminded of this fact in the second essay when we had to choose a pop-culture artifact and write an essay on it or make something artistic with it. Since the artifact also needed to be something that had a message related to community. Everyone had something in their minds starting from songs of Rihanna to x-men movies. A friend of mine also chose a book on Malala Yousafzai who is from Pakistan and she wrote a book on her journey of how she fought her way for her studies. When my friend told me that she had picked that book as her artifact, I thought to myself, why didn’t I think of that but then I realized, even if I did I couldn’t have written anything on that because I hardly ever read any book. The professor gave us two days to think about what we wanted to write. After those two days, the only thing I managed to come up with was a Pakistani song that spoke about the problems the public cause for themselves. I wasn’t sure of this and was very confused until the professor told me that se would love to see that because that was something totally new. I listened to the professor because at first this motivated me, and another thing was I knew everything about this so making something with this was not impossible. I am somewhat good with art, so I decided that I am going to make a comic page showing the message that the song highlighted. When I first wrote and drew the piece, the professor told me that I had taken the instructions for the unit the wrong way because we had to write our opinion on the piece and I had written what the song told. The professor again gave me another chance and I wrote what I felt about that piece. Until a few days ago, I had forgotten about what I wrote until I saw the professor’s comment about how much she liked the piece because it highlighted what I truly felt about the song. I think I am getting overconfident while I write this but at this point I think it is okay.

So, what did I get out of this? How did I grow? I think, a way I grew in was that I learned seeing my mistakes and correcting them as we read about in an essay too that when a writer is writing a story, he must revise his work tirelessly and be open to his own mistakes. Accept them and find a solution to that. Professor Hall provided me with that chance to correct myself again and again and I am very thankful for that.

Me as a Writer – Latrell Greene

Latrell Greene

ENG 1121

Dr. Hall

5/21/19

Me as a Writer

My writing ability over the course of this semester, I feel, has improved. Engaging myself by being tasked in writing in different styles, genres, and formats, proved to be great exercise for my skills as a writer. Not only did I learn a lot of different ways to write, but I learned a little more about how to stay true to my own style of writing, and refine that style to convey my ideas in an effective, but distinct way.

What made this class so different, especially in regard to the comparison between this semester and my last semester’s English class, was its special emphasis on one’s “own voice”, and being able to express one’s ideas in their own unique way. In my last semester there was a quite contrasting focus on using specific writer’s templates in order to express our ideas to an audience in an effective way. For our major assignments, we were given specific articles to respond to, and templates to use as a guide. Leaving that semester and entering this new one, my expectations of the writing that I would be doing were still geared toward that template-driven form of writing. It ended up being surprising to find that this course and its professor takes a heavy approach on embracing self expression in writing.

Right off the bat, in the first unit of this course we were introduced to ideas like “everyone has their own English”. This means that a lot of us grow up in our own cultures, and in those cultures there may exist a different “normal” ways of speaking and expressing one’s self. So it’s reasonable to accept that: for a lot of us, our English-language grammar, writing and speaking won’t be so perfectly formal. This is especially true when considering that for a lot of people, English is not even a first language. Different “Englishes” can reflect different ways of expression, and that’s why they have value. After all, when writing about yourself, and your own experiences, why wouldn’t you want that piece of writing to sound as “you” as possible?

In my Unit 2 piece X-Men and Representation, what I really liked about producing that body of work, was that for the unit, I was allowed to choose upon any topic, which gave me leeay to use a subject that I could be particularly passionate about. In fact, a theme in that same writing piece also connects to one of the themes that I want to convey in this very work: That people enjoy and really appreciate having themselves be represented, whether “themself” refers to their way of thinking, their culture, their personality, or their experiences. In the X-Men piece, I wrote “representation in pop culture can be a wonderful experience for people who don’t normally see people like themselves in those mediums” (para. 5). I think that just like having someone’s background be represented in a medium can offer a deeper connection between a reader and a character, being allowed to fully embrace someone’s natural way of expression can just as well offer a deeper connection between a writer and their own work, allowing ideas and themes to come across more organically. Nowadays, I reflect off of this by reminding and allowing myself to be more conductive and fluid with my own ideas when it comes to layering my writing.

In Unit 3, we were allowed to choose any community problem that we deemed worthy of addressing. I had thought up and decided to expand upon addressing the problem of noise pollution. In one part, I had written: “the purpose of this letter is to persuade you to consider solutions to get New York City, one of the most noise polluted cities in the nation, to achieve a more considerate and moderate noise level, especially regarding our subway system”. (para. 1) What made the unit able to be interesting was that we got to choose our own problems to address, in regard to how we already felt about them. Getting to choose something like noise pollution to address, which could be a really obscure topic to many people, and having to collaborate with a team of people who would bring their own ideas to expand upon it proved to be both effective, and satisfying. I was able to see my own conceptual ideas motivate new ideas in other people, as well as have myself be inspired by those new ideas.

My work with both Units 2 and 3 really reflect the lessons that I’ve learned this semester, about the art of writing, and about the importance of expressing your own ideas; Ideas that hold value, both in the way that the ideas are expressed, and in the ideas themselves. Representation, both from the writer’s perspective as well as the reader’s, can offer a deeper connection from person to page.

Noise Pollution Effects on Health (Portfolio)

Latrell Greene

ENG 1121

Dr. Hall

4/4/2019

Noise Pollution Effects on Health

 

Dear Mayor de Blasio,

Noise pollution being ever-present in big cities, like NYC, can lead to health effects that range from levels of both physical health effects, to psychological.  A multitude of studies have been conducted on the negative effects of noise pollution on the human mind and body, which goes to show how prominent the problem is. As a result, the purpose of this letter is to persuade you to consider solutions to get New York City, one of the most noise polluted cities in the nation, to achieve a more considerate and moderate noise level, especially regarding our subway system.

New York City is home to a subway system that can expose “commuters to noise as loud as a jet engine”. In an article by The Guardian, author Olga Oksman stated that in Time Square’s busy subway station, the noise levels clocked in at 80 decibels to 96 decibels when express trains pass through the station, and up to a level of 101.9 decibels at Manhattan’s Upper West Side station. A study 2011 study from the German Department of Environmental Health also stated the fact that “Noise from transportation is by far the most widespread source of noise exposure, causing most annoyance and public health concerns.” It can become very clear after analyzing this problem by taking a step back and observing just how loud the subway can get, as well as how so many people who commute to work and to school everyday by subway can be, and are affected by this.

Though the subway is arguably the loudest source of noise, it isn’t the only notable source of noise pollution. Noise pollution is also prevalent in busy streets, and there is often a lot of construction around the city, thus the noise is very spread out in the city.  Although the noise wouldn’t be exactly ear-splitting, it can still have an effect internally, on a psychological level, which could connect to problems with blood pressure and heart rate. A study from 1995 by Journal of Hypertension featured conducted research on the effects of urban noise pollution on blood pressure and heart rate in preschool children, and concluded that “the group mean blood pressure and heart rate values of preschool children from quiet areas contrasted with readings for those from noisy environments. This indicates a positive association between the level of traffic noise and a possibly increased role of sympathetic cardiovascular regulatory influence.”

The effects that noise pollution can have on people according to a 2000 study, which conducted research on the effects of noise pollution on humans, has a range including: “Noise Induced Hearing Impairment”, “Stress Related Health Effects”, “Sleep Disturbance” and “Effects on [Cognitive] Performance”.

A possible solution to the subway noise level problem could be an effort to update the subway system, and the practicality as well as the need for it is evident by a comparison between our subway system and others, like the bullet train in Japan. Even by taking steps toward it over a period of years would the outcome be significant.