For the Research Revision assignment, I decided to revise on my Lens Essay. The Essay was about how the internet has effected our brains to the point that we have changed the way we read. We went from reading an article deeply to skimming through them or shortly reading them. I feel like I didn’t elaborate a little more on my exhibit, which was an “internet troll.” I also want to try and elaborate more on how the lenses I used, which were “Deep versus Shallow Reading,” “Brain Plasticity” and the effect of the “internet troll.” My scholarly question for the Research Revision is, if the internet changes the way people read over time, such as our brains adapting to shallow reading, would the brain of an internet troll be any different? The answer to that would be no, since the internet troll is the same as any human that has changed their way of reading over time, their brain just adapted to the new way of reading like how it adapts to anything it deems new and useful. However, even though I have the question and the answer, I want to do more pursuing on my question to help deepen the answer with the use of my sources. One of them being “Is Google Making Us Stupid” by Nicholas Carr, which was the same source I used for my Lens Essay to help elaborate on how my lenses effect the exhibit. Overall, I want to be able to further interpret the “internet troll” and also explain how the “internet troll” can be affected by the lenses “Deep versus Shallow Reading” and “Brain Plasticity.”

Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid” is an composition that gives insight of what Carr believes in how the internet is effecting our reading. One use of lens in the article is the “Deep versus Shallow Reading” as shown in his statement “They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity”, hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited” (4). This means that people who use the internet do not take the time to fully read an article but instead want to take the short way out by skimming through it. In other words, he believes that the internet is making people lose their focus on any long article they were reading on the web, paralleling his other statement “The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing”(3). I think his point is generally true as I have seen and personally have done this “shallow reading” as I also tend to lose focus on any long article on the web. In short the internet has made people become less focus and has made them forget how to fully read like how we used to do with books. I believe this Lens-Exhibit pairing will be of interest to a general reader because it would give them something to think about as it can show them how the internet is effecting the way they read and give them insight of how they should use the Net more wisely.

The article “Is Google Making Us Stupid” by Nicholas Carr has taught me that the internet is affecting how we read and concentrate, based on his statement “They found that people using sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity”, hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited”(4) . This statement implies that people who use the internet do not take the time and effort to fully read any of the context of the site they were on, but instead they lose their focus and skip through them. To elaborate more, it’s a form of ” Deep versus Shallow Reading”, meaning that deep reading has become a struggle for people to stay focused on, so they end up resorting to skimming through the text. Which supports his previous statement that, “what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation” (3). This has also showed me that the internet is affecting how our brains work by making us have trouble staying focus on any long article and having us develop a shallow sense of reading by skimming through the articles instead of just taking the time to just fully read them. In other words, Nicholas Carr is implying that the internet is making people forget how to read any sorts of long articles and develop a habit of skipping through the text and losing the concentration we had on them.This has taught me that the use of the internet is not always good and that it can cause you to lose focus on your reading.

The re-vision process showed me how my writing has some minor mistakes that need to be fix but also some good features. The one positive feature that my partner pointed out to me in the peer review exercise was my ability to break down contents in writing, like quotes, sentences and words, to help the reader have a better understanding of them.This means that I explain what a quote or statement means by breaking them down word by word so it will be easier to understand. I also define certain words for the reader so they will be less complicated to know. However, the one negative feature that my partner pointed out to me was my inability to elaborate on certain topics in my writing that I’ve never notice before.For instance, I didn’t elaborate more on my rhetorical choice for my essay, which was “metaphor,” but instead I added up elaborating more on a different rhetorical choice, “allusion,” which I also didn’t notice I was doing.Overall, this exercise showed me that while I’m great at breaking down contents for readers to understand better, I need to work on elaborating more on certain topics or statements in my writing so that I don’t make the same mistake in the future. I believe that the re-vision process is very helpful as it can help writers understand what mistakes they made that they didn’t notice before so that they will make sure that it doesn’t happen again in any future writings. I will make sure to use this lesson for my final draft so I can make sure that I elaborate more on my rhetorical choice and not make the same mistake twice.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream”  speech was a famous and powerful speech directed towards not only his fellow black community or as he puts it “brothers and sisters” but also towards the white community, the people in the South, including Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia and Louisiana which were considered the main places where segregation is most common. The one rhetorical feature that interest me the most was his use of metaphor in the quote “I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together” (pg 407). This interests me because of the way he says it gives me a good understanding of what he hopes to see for the future of all the black/colored community. It means that one day black and white people will be equal instead of separated, and will come to understand each other in order to live in peace.