Thlog #5 Keepin' it real

Alrighhhht guys!!!  What is up!!!  Sorry I haven’t posted this on my usual date, but to be honest I totally forgot.  My bad.  Anyways, for all you people out there, that have gambling addictions, I just want to say if you are going to take that bet that seems really unlikely to happen.  Don’t take it!! It’s a trap man!! Always go for the safer bet.  I’m bringing this up because sometimes being to exact in our propositions can lead us to fail or be completely embarrassed.  So, in writing, it’s the smart thing to never insist that something is 100%, unless it’s 100% you know what I’m saying.  Another new thing that I learned is that parallelism, isn’t just in math so everyone who hates math….It is ok!!!  So it basically means that if you’re writing a sentence and you’re listing things it is just nice to have all those words ending in the same ending like -ing or -ed.  O.K.  Now I have to ask all my fans reading this, have you ever had like a really big project due, like a 4 to 5 page paper and you mean to start it right away, but there is this one distraction and you just can't resist it.  Well, if you do know what I’m talking about then you know my stress right now.  Why can’t I just push it out of my mind and work.  So now I’m a little stressed about this paper but I know I just got to take it one step at a time.  It will work out.  I think I might try to do this paper on surfing, or something like that, I don’t really understand the prompt yet.  Sometimes, it’s hard to focus like right now I have a continuous playlist of just This Love by Maroon 5 and Rocky Raccoon by The Beatles.  If I got those songs stuck in your head right now then good!  You can endure my pain.  Anyways guys, if anyone reads this anymore, thank you for sticking around and I hope you guys stay cool and keep it shaka!!        

PB#2B The Smooooooth Moves

Every great writer in who aspires to have their own voice in the world, each has a set of their own personal moves.  These moves can be anything from personal phrases to repetition of grammar marks.  Even famous writers, such as John Steinbeck, and J.K.Rowling all their own little flavor that makes their writing some of the most popular pieces to read among all ages.  In my analysis, I will look over some of the “moves” that even the driest article authors in my course reader have and show how even these boring pieces only meant for learning can have fun little tidbits, and excerpts that make them interesting to analyze, even for me.  

The first article that I analyzed was “Navigating Genres” by Kerry Dirk.  As all of you know this piece can be a pain because we constantly have to flip through the damn thing again and again looking for answers to some random question.  But, when analyzing his moves I noticed that his transitions from paragraph to paragraph can be as smooth as a baby’s bottom.  For example, in the reading, the author uses the phrase, “You are already probably familiar…”  This example is described as introducing standard views.  I think that Dirk used this move here so that he will be able to just briefly overview the different ideas that should already be known to other students.  I think that it is effective because it brings about a sense of understanding, or a tone that lets us know that we have done this before, and you know what you are doing.  Later on, in the same article I found two examples that I thought were quite similar.  The first one said, “ I further acknowledge…” and also, “I will admit…”.  These moves can be titled as agreeing with a difference.  I think that the author chose these two different phrases because he wants these paragraphs to explain some of the common rules that students learn when analyzing genre, are valid, but he also wants to show how they can be misleading and maybe a little wrong.  I personally think that it is pretty effective because I understand what he is trying to tell me.  

Later on, in the same text Dirk uses “In other words….” twice.  This move is used a lot.  This is called, explaining quotations.  I think that the author used this move as a way of pretty much just explaining what he just said.  I think that it is very effective because recapturing and explaining what a person writes is an effective way of concluding ideas.  Therefore, I think this move is really important in an informative way.  

In another article called “Murder!(Rhetorically Speaking) author uses the phrase, “I imagine that…”. This phrase can be used in many different ways but it is called capturing authorial action.  I think that the author uses this example because he wants to express his opinions and ideas, and as the writer of this article I think he likes to have full control of what he wants to write and give his ideas.  I think that this type of move is very effective because it lets the reader know that they are about to express their thoughts or make a point.  

Over these two articles, there are many different moves that are already identified by other categories.  However, there are some “moves” that aren’t represented or categorized by other writers.  For example, in the Navigating genres Dirk uses many bullet marks.  I think these can be titled something like ideological points.  Yeah, that sounds really smart, I’ll use that.  I think these points are really effective, because they organize the thoughts and examples that need to be used, and they present them in an easy-to-read way.  Another move in this article is the use of quotations from other sources in the article.  Multiple times he includes another paragraph from another source.  I think this move can be called the “respectful copycat” move because he copies another idea but he respectfully gives them credit for it.  I think that this is an effective move because instead of having to reword another persons idea, he can just directly cite it.  

Now there is one particular move that I think is very effective and cool.  It is when the writer gives the reader a scenario.  I call this the exemplifier move because it exemplifies what the writer is talking about.  I think that it can be extremely effective because it gives the reader an example of how the topic applies to some situations.  Adding on to this move, another move that Dirk uses, is in the beginning of his article.  In the introduction, he gives the reader something that is interesting and fun to read and he uses this example so that he can set a tone and give the reader an idea of what he is talking about.  I think that this move can be called “false enjoyment” because it gives the reader a false sense that the article will be an easy read.  The last move that the writer uses is what I like to call the “first person shooter”.  I title it this because it sounds cool and also because the writer is always talking in first person.  I think that this is effective because it pertains directly to reader and makes the reader think about what he is talking about.  

Overall, these are just a few of the moves that are used by some of these writers.  Overall,  there are infinitely more moves for an infinite amount of genres.  However, we are still able to imagine more and more every time we write something down, because no one writer has all the same moves.  Whether they are good or bad.  These are some of the moves that I have identified and that I think are the most effective in communicating with a reader.        

Thlog #4

Alright, so have any of you guys really tried to do well in something, and then you work really hard on it trying to make it sound all cool and stuff.  Then once you turn it in you feel all good about it and then suddenly see other of the students examples and you’re like bro I totally failed.  Well, writing this I’m starting to think that that is what I’m going to feel like when I turn in these Thlogs.  So here goes nothing.  It was a dark and stormy day heading to lesson plan 4.2 in my writing 2 class.  I was still recovering from the uncomfortable nap I had in greek mythology a couple minutes before.  I walk into class and sit down expecting the worst.  The captain comes in and he’s like WAZZZUPP and I’m like WAZZZUPP.  Anyways, in class we start talking about italics, and if you didn’t notice I used italics earlier in this post like it was nothing.  Yeah now you look back and see it…..pretty cool huh.  Anyways italics are these weird slanted weirds you use to make sure no one gets confused about what you are talking about.  In class we read this sentence as an example, and it has butterflies in it and italics, it was a crazy sentence.  (Side note: This class reminds me of Tyler the Creators rap “Yonkers”.  If you haven’t seen it...don’t.  I just think this stuff in class because I’m weird.)  But, I get italics now.  Now I know why we have that button on this computer screen.  The next thing we learn about is something I’ve never heard of.  They’re called moves and we were supposed to analyze a writer’s moves.  Immediately, I thought of like ninja moves, or like MIKE TYSON’S PUNCH OUT.  You know the old video game, hardest game of my life holy crap.  No but a writer’s moves are kind of like that, its basically just like a videogame but, its writing if that makes any sense.  If it doesn’t well, go ask my professor because i ain’t qualified to explain it.  Look at me using ain’t… lol.  I promise I ain’t gonna use ain’t in my sentences anymore.  Moving on, we just got our new writing assignment.  Now we have to talk about the genre of really smart scholarly articles.  Now, I can barely understand a random oceanography textbook, so if I even come remotely close to analyzing these things, I’m a genius by default.  Did you know that detective’s have to write reports, that sucks!  Here I thought if you were a detective, you ran around like Detective Gordan in Gotham.  So if you want to be a detective, just keep in mind that you have to write too.  ALright, back on topic, we have to write our PB2B now.  I think I know what I have to do.  Or at least I think I know what I have to do.  Otherwise I’m just giving myself false hope.  But, I got this because I’ve learned that if you got to do something, then you have to think you are the best at it.  Alright guys, as always if you’ve kept up with me this long you deserve an award, And I hope you read again next week.

PB#2 A The Art of Drinking in College

There are many different types of writing in today’s world.  We have magazines, newspapers, books, and also online articles.  However, no other genre of writing could be as informing, well thought out, and unfortunately more boring than all the others, as a scholarly academic article written by super smart students and professors.  As a regular student, I can see that these academic articles have a different set of conventions, and rhetorical features than other pieces of writing.

My scholarly article, is titled, “Parenting Style, Gender, Beer Drinking and Drinking Problems of College Students.”  This is an informative research based and academic journal about the different effects that alcohol has on the human body.  This type of written journal can also be compared to the SCIgen generator that I have used in the past.  There are many different conventions and rhetorical features that are similar and also dissimilar between these two pieces.  

First off, some of the similarities that these two papers hold is that they both yield to a higher educated audience.  These papers are not meant to be read by amateurs or uninterested students who do not know what they are even reading.  Also, there is not much content in these two examples that are meant to elicit an opinion or cause an argument.  These pieces are there to identify the facts and highlight what is going on within the area that the article surrounds.  In easier words, they are pretty much just research papers just to give information.  Another similarity between these papers, is that they do not have any constraints between them.  They are just here to establish a point through the use of information and data.  Both papers also use tables and charts so that they can give proof, and a more visual look at the information that the researchers have gathered.  The papers, are also listed in steps as to establish what they are going to talk about next, or what point they want to make.  Then finally, they both end with a conclusion that wraps up their hypothesis and states whether they were correct or not.  

However, these two different sources also have dissimilarities between them.  One of them is that the SCIgenerator is total bogus and none of it makes sense.  But we already know that.  But, a real dissimilarity, is that the drinking piece has a lot more information and statistics laid out for a person to read.  It also has many more quotes, and I mean like pretty much most of the paper is quotes.  These are the dissimilarities that can be found between the two different papers.  

After skimming through this publication about alcohol in college students, many things struck me as being very important.  To start off, I think that all the quotes that they include are very important because they are telling the reader that many studies have been done on this topic, but they are taking it to the next level by examining a parent's influence, and gender of the college students.  Another aspect that is important is that the authors describe the process that they took to find the outcomes of their experiments, and find out if their hypothesis was right or not.  Another aspect that strikes me as important in this work is that they lay out the plan that they are going to undertake to conduct their study.  They set up tables and charts and just go through the data little by little, calculating it all until they have their ratios and answers.  Also, I think that the discussion that is written down in the middle of the paper is important because it gives the authors the chance to maybe answer their readers questions.  If something wasn’t explained clearly, or if they want to clarify something then they have that discussion to answer it.  These are some of the aspects that I think are most important in the article and make it more understandable to their readers.

These are the rhetorical features and conventions that define what scholarly articles really represent and also describe what their genre is.  Even though these articles, are really boring and are meant for geniuses, they are still valuable because they give us facts and solutions that we would otherwise not even learn about.  These are the rhetorical features and conventions that are important in scholarly articles, and that make it different than other publications such as SCIgen.

Thlog #3 Rap Battles

To whom it may concern, the difference between who and whom is that when you are using “whom”, you always have to use it after a preposition.  That is the rule, so if any of you people out there didn’t know that, well now you do.  And if you don’t know what a preposition is, well good luck cause I do not know.  That was a cool review I had in my writing class yesterday.  Another thing that I learned is that when you are writing a really important paper, like a reallllllllllllllly important paper!  Make sure you quote those sources that you have because you do not want to spend your time rushing through trying to figure out where to put your quotes.  But don’t worry, because if you have to spend all night trying to figure out that essay, just think you are not the only one.  

Apart from that,  I was at late night yesterday at DLG you know eating my burgers and what not.  All of a sudden my friend sits down and starts trying to start a rap battle.  Ok now while he was trying to diss me with his slow rhymes, I realized “OH my Gosh!” this is a genre.  The constant attempts to diss somebody with rhymes that don’t make any sense.  After thinking about this, and my friend finished his verse, I got into my battle mode and totally shredded him.  Not really but whatever, it was fun anyways.  So that is what I learned this week from my class, from the classroom to the streets genre is always prevalent.  As always thank you for reading my blog and I hope you come back to read it again.     

Thlog #2 redo

Alright guys so I’m redoing this thlog because I just don’t feel like the first one captured the truth about what has been happening.  What I really needed to talk about was what I am learning in my classes.  Alright so where do I start.  In my writing 2 class we are starting our WP #1.  We have to write about a topic and then identify a certain genre with that topic and talk about its conventions and why it can be explained through this genre.  At first I had no idea what to do, how to do it, or even know what was going on.  However, through careful work, steady examination, and a little help, I was able to get a grip on what my class was talking about with our genre topics.  I hope I will be able to be successful on my first WP #1.  

In class we were also studying the difference between hyphens and dashes.  Now i thought this was kind of off the wall, just to be teaching us this randomly right before a big paper, but I know it will probably come in handy when I have to use it.  We also learned not to plagiarize, because we could get kicked out of school.  And I do not want that to happen, so i think I will use a proper works cited page so that I don’t have anything bad happen to me.  

One thing that reminded me about my writing assignment, was the lab I had to do in oceanography.  I realized that labs can be its own genre…..I think.  But, anyways after that I identified that some of the conventions were that labs had the math problems, and the conversions, and the examples.  So after identifying this, I felt pretty good about myself.  

So as always thank you for reading and I hope to see you again next time.     

Thlog #2 Bad Luck

Alright thlog number two!!! I’m really starting to like this thlog thing man.  It really lets me express myself.  Anyways, I think I might of just had the most bad luck week of my life, or maybe that’s just the way college is.  So first off, I usually skate around campus you know just to do it.  But, I have this bike you know just in case I want to go to somewhere far, like the rec cen or something.  Anyways one friday night, me and my friends were going to I.V. to go check some stuff out.  So this is the first time riding my bike right, and I was riding down there and I was jumping off the little bumps that are on the bike lane if you know what I mean. Then after about  like five of those.  I feel my pedal crank go loose, and I’m like what the heck.  Then a couple seconds later the thing falls off and I’m like what!!!!!!!  Man thats my brand new bike man!!  So after that, I had to ride around I.V. with one pedal man, it was tough.  Then!!!! what happened a couple days later was that I was riding around on my skateboard at night right, and I was doing this trick right…..anyways I’ll just get to it, I snapped my damn board like in half!!! Man, I swear I almost cried.  Dark days man, dark days.  Now besides that, classes are alright so far,  I wish I was a genius so I would never have any problems here, but hey that’s alright, nobody’s perfect.  Anyway if you are still reading I would like to thank you, and join me next week for my next thlog!!

PB#1 B: generators

This discussion about trying to find genres and their conventions can sure be confusing.  That is why it is great to have these random generators so i don’t really have to think about what i’m doing.  On the comic generator Pandyland, I realized that a lot of the the pictures for me were just recurring over and over again.  Some of the conventions that I think about when I think about these comic strips is that they have to be relatable.  Sometimes, you just get these three very random pictures, and you just do not know what to do with them.  I think that a convention for these randomly generated pictures, is that it has to make sense.  Also, it has to be funny, because what is the point of just a random comic you feel me!!  Another convention of these comics is that I guess it has to be very crude sometimes.  These comics also have to be relatable for it to be funny.  For example, after clicking the generate button for the longest time I finally found a comic that I thought was funny and relatable.  This is comic#1, I think it follows convention because it is relatable to many people.  For starters, who doesn’t hate Mondays.  Also, everyone always knows that one person who is just really excited for the day.  I know we all hate that person, and just want to do what this guy did in the comic.  We just want to punch them in the throat.  

The next generator that I used was this SCIgen generator.  If I had known about this in highschool with my science teacher, dang, I would have gotten an A+ no problem!  Even though whatever is written down here is complete bullshit.  My paper that I randomly generated had to do with robots, and I had no idea what the title meant whatsoever.  The title was Robots using extensible communication.  Then I actually started reading it to see if any of it would help me make sense of it, but it didn’t.  Some of the conventions that were apparent were that it had a clear concise order for a research paper.  It had its own table of contents and introduction.  The paper also has the research that you need.  I don’t know what kind of research it really is, but if it was on topic it would be pretty cool.  

The next generator was a meme generator.  Meme’s are actually pretty cool as their own genre.  They are usually used to make a joke, show people new things, or just to highlight certain aspects of life that everyone does and just talk about them.  Meme’s are usually short and witty.  They have to have a relevant topic that many people can relate too.  Also, they have to be easily understood.  For example, the “bad luck Brian” picture is usually used to explain the worst thing that could possibly happen in a situation.  This picture is used that way because when he was first posted someone just connected his face with the face of a person who just gets everything wrong.  That is why memes are so popular today, because they are funny and everyone can relate to them.  

Now I found one more generator online.  (For the extra point!) It’s called a superhero name generator.  It chooses a random superhero name for you and explains your powers and how you got them.  Then it tells you what you do with that power and who your arch nemesis is.  Pretty cool huh!! My name was Shining Boy and I harnessed the power of the great egyptian god Ra to blind people and control light.  my arch nemesis was the evil Domino Bones!  Anyway, the conventions that I thought made it its own genre was that it gave me a name, and also how I got my powers.  It also provided a town that I live in that I protect.  And finally, it gave me a villain to fight.  These are very important to a superhero because what would be the point of just the plain superhero name.   http://superhero.namegeneratorfun.com/

What happens in these generators, can help a person better understand genre because it provides written examples that can be used to show how relevant genres can be.  A student who doesn’t understand genre can easily understand that a comic strip is characterized by picture’s, and memes are used to explain a point or tell a joke somehow.  That is how these genres can help someone who doesn’t understand.  Because it gives them concrete examples that are relevant to them in today's society.

PB!A

                Almost everything that we have, use, and describe can be placed into a category called a genre.  One of the most peculiar written genres is a type of novel called graphic novels.  Graphic novels, have many different rhetorical features and conventions that can be analyzed and used that make this genre so unique.  So let’s start off with what are the main conventions that people think about when they talk about graphic novels.  So the first thing I thought of was the audience.  Comic books are mostly thought of by people to be for children or nerds.  Such as the big guy who owned the comic book store in The Simpsons.  It is also thought to be mainly used for action comics like Marvels and DC’s comics.  Also, another convention is that it is only used for the entertainment of others in short, intruging, and imaginative ways.  It is meant to be used for the action and the suspense that only a superhero comic can give to you.  The style of graphic novels also uses word bubbles and different points of view to show a variety of emotions between characters.  For example, from the first time superhero comics were made, they have been using expanded, huge, one syllable words to show the strength and overwhelming prowess of a superhero punching a villain.  Everyone has seen some form of comic strip with big words like, BOOM, POW, and ZAM! This is just another one of the common conventions that are portrayed by graphic novels. 

                However, this genre can also be used for other things besides a fun and entertaining story. This genre can also be used as a learning tool for kids as well as adults.  For all types of learners, this can be used as a different way to read and learn.  It can be used as a more interesting way to explain things.  One of the constraints of the graphic novels genre is that many people think that it is not a very formal way to explain things other than some sci-fi fiction story.  Another convention that some people think about graphic novels is that the transitions from picture to picture are sometimes choppy or hard to understand some times.  For example, between two scenes the writers of the comic might switch from one persons point of view, to another’s.  This can sometimes be difficult.  So writing a graphic novel has to be well thought out and planned so as not to confuse the readers. 

                As I list these different conventions, we got to figure out, what makes a graphic novel a graphic novel.  I think that the thing that makes a graphic novel a graphic novel, is that it is a different writing style than all other kinds of writing.  It appeals to everyone.  It is also very easy and fun to read.  Another thing that makes graphic novels so unique is that gives you a mental picture of what is happening.  It combines emotions with words and that is what makes it its own genre.  This is what makes a graphic novel, a graphic novel.