Category: Reflection

Valeria Cortez

ENG 1101

Prof. Jewell

My genre was Oval Office speeches and after gathering the sources of my annotated bibliography I was able to identify certain characteristics found in these speeches. I noticed that they all contained several similarities to each other. One of the things they all had in common is that the Oval Office Speeches are always going to be given by the president of the United States at the time. Another thing that they have in common is that in most of the cases these speeches are given in order to address an important event or problem that the country had gone through or is going through. For example, when Bush gave his “9/11 Address to the Nation on Terrorist Attacks.” speech, he was informing the nation about the recent terrorist attacks that the country had been victim of. The fact that these speeches are about problems, accidents and important events leads me to other two similarities they all have in common, the tone and the constantly use of pathos. Since all of them address issues and important events, the speakers use a specific tone in these speeches, the tones used in these speeches vary between determined, uplifting, calm and serene. These tones are used in order to provide the audience sense of tranquility and also to make them feel that the country will get through anything it is going through. The speakers in their own way, try to emotionally appeal or connect the audience to the problem that they were addressing. The last remarkable similarity between the sources is the audience the speaker is trying to reach, since this is a speech given by the president of the nation, the audience of these speeches is the entire United States population.
Something I learned about Oval Office Speeches after gathering and analyzing my sources is the speakers approach to the topic is the key to deliver a clear and specific message. The speakers of these speeches typically show a calm, confident and determined approach towards the topic they are addressing. For example, in Obama’s speech on “The Killing of Osama Bin Laden”, His approach toward this controversial and important topic was determined and confident tone, Obama kept the details limited, focusing on the reasons for targeting bin Laden and the process by which he and his team assessed intelligence and found the leader’s compound, which provided the nation calmness and made them feel safe. The fact that he approached in that way is what made the speaker achieve the intent of his speech. After completing the assignment, I still wonder if these speeches have to last a specific time or if the speaker can take as long as he/she wants?
Throughout this assignment I discovered many things about myself. I learned that I have a huge inclination and interest in speeches and in learning how speakers use rhetorical appeals as techniques in order to cause a certain emotion or opinion in a specific audience, towards the message they are delivering. At first when I tried to write the annotated bibliography I didn’t really know exactly how to start writing it, however along the way I used different resources as a guide and taught myself a process on writing it. Once I started it took me time to think and put my thoughts together, so that the reader could be able to understand what I was trying to portray. After that I realized that the best thing to do was to listen and read the speeches a couple of times, and take notes while doing that after that I took my time to brainstorm and come up with the most relevant aspects about the speeches. Once I did that, I was able to complete the assignment. As a writer I think I am good at analyzing how the speakers used different rhetorical to provide their intended message. I know that because I took my time analyze every specific detail about the speeches. As a writer I would still want to improve at organizing my ideas to be able to portray the right message. Another thing I would want to evolve in is in the vocabulary used in my writings, I would want my vocabulary to expand and become more sophisticated. Also to take more time at writing and not to leave it to the last minute. To improve in those aspects I think that organizing my time is the first step to do. Once I have enough time to work on my writings I think all the other aspects I need to improve on would stop being a problem.

All my sources share some similarities of how they can catch the audience’s attention and how we should use our technology in our society. One of my sources was about how we use technology as a negative way in our daily lives. Charita Goshay talk about students that include teens or kids are being distracted by using their cellphones for doing their work in class. Goshay trying to tell the readers that we should focus more of our work than using our phones or play video games. The rest of my sources talk about technology in a good way and they also share potential experience of how designer can develop better technology that can improve our society. For example, these sources “Op-Ed Education for an Age of the technology”, and “Technology broadens Approach to Healthcare in Trenton”, talk about how developing new system can make our lives much easier such as making new medicine to people with their illness and the satellite that can tell us what the weather is going to be like. All my sources share formal tone to explain their argument and some of them have more than one tone that includes, joyful tone, serious tone and optimistic tone. What I learn from my topic is that all these authors (Roba Abbas, Albert Lee, Charita Goshary, Wm. A Wulf, Alice Grossman and Natalie Terens) wanted the readers to understand that we can gain knowledge if we use technology as a advantage that can help us to move on in life such getting our education, making new medicine and finishing our work on time that involved with homework or doing our jobs. One thing that I still like to learn is that how designers come up new improve system that can still help our society today.

What I learned from doing this assignment is that annotating can help me to look back what each paragraph from the reading is about and it allow me to find what the author’s argument is. Annotating is a good strategy to use to remember and to get a clear image what is the reading is about. I believe that reading op-ed is one of the best genres to write about an argument because I learned that op-ed is a newspaper, or an article were writers share their opinion to explain their important issues or agreement of what their argument is about. I think my strengths as a writer is that I able to create example to explain the author’s agreements. For example, going back to Goshay agreement that students are addicted to technology, many kids like to play their video games or using their phones because many kids are more interesting being online than getting an education. I need to work on is my imagination because when I read, most of the time, no ideas come to my mind. I believe I need to read more in depth because reading in depth can help me what the character and author is feeling or thinking.

My Topic for the Annotated biography Assignment was hip-hop.While I was researching sources for this topic I found many similarities between them.One of the similarity I found between the sources was that they were all through the artist’s perspective throughout the songs the rappers would use “I” and describe how he viewed and felt about different things and topics.Another similarity I found between the sources was that they all talk about their life before becoming rappers and what they went through to get to where they are today. Also the sources talks about the street life and how it got them into making music.In all the sources the rappers deliver a message to their fans either to motivate them or give them a view into their lifestyle and challenges they face.Through this assignment I was able to learn how each rapper use life experiences and turn them into hit songs that delivery a message.What i would like to learn from this topic is how each rapper finds their different flow and style and how they are able to implement it into their music 

 

Throughout this assignment I felt like had a difficult time finding the right sources i wanted annotated for my topic hip-hop after researching for a while I was able to find sources i was familiar with and it made it easier to annotated. I believed that my greatest strength when it comes to writing is being able to imagine through the writer or author perspective and understand what they are trying to say. I would like to continue to grow as a writer and be able to write more in detail explanations in my assignment by brainstorming ideas. I can achieve this by participating writing  more and expend my view my writing about different topics which will helping strengthen my writing skills.    

The speeches of Martin Luther King, Robert F. Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama, Queen Elizabeth and Joseph Goebbels all have in common to change their home countries to become the best they can be for the people and for the future generations. Some speeches are different from other speeches and from the points of view of the people or from the leader of the group to change the future. One similarity between all the speeches is that they all have a motivation sentence for the person giving it to the audience and using giving the best voice for the countries. Another similarity between the speeches is the person’s purpose to change the country for the better of everyone in the country and for better things. Another similarity between is how the speeches affected the people and made them think like Abraham Lincoln’s speech and Martin Luther King’s speech. This affected how someone’s speech can change people to thinks of there surroundings and other people around them. Another similarity of all the speeches is that person who gave the speech all were standing up for what’s right for the their countries and for the people, also the person who gave the speech is also a person remembered by the country they were from and changed the country. One other similar trait in the speeches is the tone of voice the person was saying it to the people and how it changed people’s minds about hearing and reading a speech or how the writer used different examples to enhance their work it make it more interesting and sound important to a good audience to hear and support them on the purpose. 3 of the speeches were related to war and how it can save a lot of people who are in danger and make a country be feared by other and to unite countries against a common enemy.  3 other speeches were about freedom and getting rid of segregation and racism. Also to create unity between the people and countries. One speech was delivered and helped the economic issue in the country and helped it save money and increase in the country’s main economic growth.
what I learned about the genre of   speeches is that not only can I be but leaders or higher class people, but normal people can stand up to what right for them and change people’s lives and the country they are in. I also learned the value of how words can carry wisdom to people to make them think straight and to reason that it’s for the better of themselves and others around them as well. Speeches help a lot to inspire people to stand up and help people and also for people to have a voice of there own and help other who don’t have or can’t stand up to. Also thing is how speeches changed over the reasons given for like civil rights movements, racism, war related events and for elections for further leaders of the countries.

Moises Bautista
Prof Jewell
English 1101
Reflection

When viewing and creating pieces of work that are considered Shonen Manga many things can be looked upon as familiar and relatable among most pieces. The main protagonists of the stories all gain a considerable amount of growth in either mental or physical attributes. The protagonist is truly reliant on their friends and allies to overcome difficult situations and conflicts throughout their adventures. While much time passes on throughout the stories all the characters in Shonen manga never lose sight of their own hopes and dreams. All the main protagonists all contain a unique charisma/personality that makes them stand out and create certain situations, in almost all cases the main characters are strong-willed. I learned a lot about Shonen manga while researching the genre. For instance, the author’s value connections between characters forming newer and stronger bonds with each other. While still retaining their dreams and desires intact. Shonen manga all contains detailed and precise explanation’s as to what’s occurring and going to occur. These explanations give us readers a clear and solid context as to the importance and significance of a situation. While forming my annotated bibliography I came upon several questions that I have for the multiple authors that create Shonen manga. How are they able to come up with such a huge and expansive world filled with rich characters and story while building up the plot as a whole? Is the ending for the Shonen manga pre-determined from the get-go or created while forming the story?

Throughout this long assignment, I learned many things about myself that I wouldn’t know unless I had done this assignment. I learned that my strength as a writer is the amount of focus and unique/ vivid vocabulary of words to invoke a sense of deep interest in my readers. For example, in my annotated bibliography I started with powerful hooks such as “The story of recognition from fellow peers and society itself is what we all seek sometimes. “and “Have you ever been in the perspective where you have to make a decision of whether to choose over wanting a villain or hero to win?”. Another one of my strengths would be the structuring of each part of the annotated bibliography being as it is. I started off with a unique and powerful hook to lure readers, then a quick summary to the certain book, after that the audience the book is trying to look towards. Lastly, the rhetorical appeal that the author uses to help his/her story and an explanation as to why and how he used that appeal. I would like to continue to grow as a writer by finding a more concrete way of connecting and making the readers interested in my writing. I would also like to improve on the formatting of each and every assignment I am given to the best of my ability. I can enact these changes by getting provided multiple examples of what exactly is expected from us when it comes to the assignments.

Looking back at my annotated Bibliography there are a few connections and similarities that I can make between my chosen sources. Each source holds a dep meaning behind their “horror” the way that the authors choose to write theses stories reflect on their emotional background and personal desires. From this writing assignment, ive learned a few things about each story and why they were written the way they were. Horror becomes an easy genre to stereotype because it is one of the darkest genres. By being a dark genre, audiences often make Gothic or tragic assumptions as to why the author would write a murder instead of a love story. People who write horror don’t purposely want to write it because they have an “evil” mind or whatever the case may be, they write it because they are interested in it and that’s how they embrace the genre. Something i would still want to learn from my topic is what motivates the writer to create such dark stories. Throughout this assignment I realized a lot of things about myself , I take an interest in scary “horror” themed scenarios. The moral background and the way suspense builds is what grabs my attention. My strengths as a writer is having an open mind about the story and the path it will eventually take build the story line. 

My annotated bibliography consisted of different sources of collections of poetry. When gathering my sources and after analyzing all of them, I noticed they shared many similarities. All of the poets used a specific, yet unique book layout, that sectioned their poems in a way to make the reader feel a sense of self-growth. In every book, you can see that each author divided their poems into chapters, typically these chapters represent a different stage or perspective of an experience and the poems would describe the narrators point of view. This leads to the next similarity I found between my sources, and that’s the type of tone they all use. All of the books were focused on overcoming a past trauma and learning to gain self love and growth. They all try to teach the reader that life goes through many changes and hardships before realizing whats really important. The authors maintained a specific writing style, or rhythm in their books. They kept poems short and simple, no more than a page, and also provided illustrations, making the poems physically appealing to readers. Something I learned about my genre when gathering the sources is the type of audience it typically has. They attract the younger generation mainly because how different society is compared to back then. The poems describe traumas and experiences that people face now in the 21st century, like relationships, gender, growth, mental illness, injustice, therefore making it easy to relate to them. During this assignment I discovered many things about myself as a writer. I learned that my strengths are transferring what I had brainstormed in my head to on paper in writing. It was being able to bring whatever I imagined in my head to life. For example, I use to have troubles putting my thoughts into words, I never knew how to start, or continue, or end my writing, fast forward through years of writing to today and I’ve improved.  However something that would assist me to grow as a writer is expanding my vocabulary and being able to transition in my writing. For example, I constantly get stuck on trying to connect certain things and never know if there’s a simpler term to use instead. There’s many ways I can go about this, or enact these changes, one being getting familiar with different genres of writing and analyzing THEIR writing styles. Another major way would be, to learn and be familiarize with the synonyms and antonyms of different words. In conclusion, I feel more aware of the strengths I have as a writer and the weaknesses I can and will overcome.

Haiku poems are short and sweet that leave their readers smiling. Few common things in all haikus are that they follow the same pattern of three unrhymed lines of five, seven, and five syllables. They are meant to portray images of a specific event in life that the author lived. These events are usually beautiful events that stand out compared to normal events. Most include love for nature and others include love for something else, however they all include a sense of love. In just three lines, the author gives a vivid description of the event for the readers to visually see what the place looks like and at what time is the event taking place. They connect the moment with the readers to share a similar sense of love. Often readers agree with what the poem is trying to portray. One thing for sure, haiku’s rules of the pattern are always to be followed. Few things I learned are that haikus were originated in Japan by famous Japanese poets of 16-1800s. Originally the pattern was five, seven, and five moras but since moras can’t be converted into English, they were replaced with syllables. Also, haikus are meant to be short and sweet, to the point. Anyone is able to read or write them in minutes. I have one question, what happens if you break the pattern? Would it still be a haiku as long as it contains all other aspects other than the pattern? Writing a haiku sounds fun, as much as reading them. Although it may seem easy to write, it’s difficult to think of a loving moment to which your audience can relate to. As a writer, my strength is definitely the ability to imagine and create a vivid picture of what I’m going to write. For example, if I’m writing a haiku on a summer morning, I would have a picture of the beautiful sunrise with a long hot day awaiting. I can also imagine the happiness on people’s faces. I personally enjoy writing because it creates this peaceful environment around me. It puts me in a good mood, reminding me of the great moments I have had as I write about them. I would like to learn more about my hidden strengths as I only learned about my imaging strength through my annotated bibliography. I think learning more about yourself and what you are good at when it comes to writing can definitely grow you as a writer. Doing more annotated bibliographies but on different genres can help me learn more about my hidden strengths. Not only strengths but also my weaknesses. Just doing what I like and over coming the weakness as a change will help me grow as a writer. 

Looking back at my Annotated Bibliography on Movie Reviewers talking about the different movies they each saw, there are some thing that I noticed that each one had something similar to each other. In most cases, they open up with something to get the reader up to par on what they are going to talk about. It may be on a movie before that one or what the first thought of it before seeing it. Another being how they point out specific people in each review. Among all of the however, they each give out points where the movie was good and where the movie was just down right awful, even sometimes saying that the movie has a whole was either good or bad, despite the actors or the plot. The last thing is that a job of a reviewer is to give insight on a piece of media or item, putting that online for others to see if they plan on seeing a movie, show or buying an item. It can change many minds, or change none. One thing that I did learn about looking about movie reviewers is each of them have their own saying on explaining a movie. None of them are really the same unless it is about what is going on in the movie. What I would still like to learn however is how did these people become well known with just speaking about a movie? Was it from luck? Or was it just spreading around like with the best movies of all time?

 

As I began typing out the Annotated Bibliography, I did learn that for a time, it looked like that I have kinda slacked towards typing up the Bibliography, as there are a number of stuff that I have left out from people reviewing things and who they were and also how they were able to get a look at it. I didn’t really find any sort of strength, besides having a little plan when writing this, with who I wanted to include in the Bibliography. I am good at planning since I still have the papers in my backpack where I had written who I was going put in the essay and what they have reviewed before hand. There are a number of ways that I would like to continue as a writer. One, I would like to have a better understanding on how to structure things, as I feel like it’s a bit all over the place still. Even with previously having Playwriting classes for about 2 years in High School.  In some ways that I can enact these changes is to just keep writing a little more, day after day. Have a little bit of practice or just write whenever I’m feeling bored. I don’t really need anything to make this happen.  What I do need however, is to invest time into it. Invest as much time into those problems so that I can keep improving and working on anything else that sticks out.

My genre was science fiction books and I was able to analyze certain characteristics found in these types of books. One of the things they all had in common was the rhetorical appeal of pathos. All of the authors, in their own way, tried to emotionally appeal or connect the reader to the main character with sympathy or other ways. Another similarity is that most of them occur in a futuristic setting, as in years ahead of the present time. For example, The Martian took place in 2035 and Ender’s Game takes place in 2086 which is 100 years after the book was published. Another similar trait they all had was the aspect of warfare. In Ender’s Game the whole plot revolves around making suitable commanders at a young age for war against an alien species. In The Hunger Games the story takes place in a futuristic North America called “Panem” and its government was established due to a huge war between the government and a past rebellion. And lastly, another sci-fi trait is the innovation of science/technology. This can be seen in The Martian because the story is about astronauts who are on Mars, something that hasn’t been done by humans yet. Some things I learned about my topic is that the first ever science fiction book was made in the second century and was called A True Story by the Syrian satirist Lucian. It included other extraterrestrial lifeforms and other universes which is what science fiction is mainly about. I also learned that the rhetorical appeal of pathos is used in all sci-fi books, something I had never noticed. Some things I still want to learn about sci-fi is how it was many years ago. Recent books mainly revolve around space and later years in the future but what about books from the 20th century ? Did they think about certain futuristic things that could happen in our time ? For example, in the Back to the Future movie, it included travelling to the year 2015 where it included self-lacing shoes, something that did not turn into a big thing until this year. Certain things like this make me wonder if science-fiction is just are way of perceiving things that we hope may or may not happen in our own future. 

Throughout this assignment, based on my first draft and the peer review, I learned that at the beginning I was not analyzing the sources in a correct way. This lead to me getting better at analyzing the sources and more importantly showing evidence for my claims on my rhetorical analysis. My strengths as a writer are just being able to understand what the author’s message is or their claim. For example, when coming up with the claims for Flowers for Algernon, it was easy for me to identify because it was just the message that I got and what the author was trying to portray to me. What I feel I need to work on is being able to identify evidence in the sources to support those claims. For example, when I wrote about the author’s claim in The Martian I was able to provide evidence of the book on a certain chapter based off my feelings when I read that specific part. What made this a problem was that I wasn’t sure if any other person reading the book would feel the same way, leading to a different effect. In order to work on this, I guess I would have to practice on finding evidence to support any type of claim.