CM 1145- Finished the Blog

So this is the last entry of the blog, all fourteen entries, done. Well not really. I definitely need to write more than this for it to count as an actual entry. I really enjoyed doing this blog, I'm actually going to miss it in a way. I'm doing a biology major so I am done with English classes,  while it's never been my favorite course, there was always a different topic to read about, a new type of essay to write. The blog itself was pretty fun to do I guess, it allowed me to write about different subjects and give my opinions. I liked it even more this semester since all of my blogs are now a little different from each other, unlike last time where it was all just opinion pieces on stories and poems that we had read. The only part that was not enjoyable for me in this project was trying to come up with different subjects to write about. I feel like even with this essay I'm just scraping the bottom of the barrel for material to write about. In my defense the entries had to do with class but I still felt that they were a little repetitive so I spent most of the time that I was writing just coming up with random sentences to trow in that still make sense. I guess that one about whales in a previous entry was pretty stupid. I guess this blog will allow me some fun in a few years when I decide to try and find it again and I guess it will bring back some memories of my first year of university. This was a fun project and I will miss doing it.

CM 1145- Essay Reading

In class we had to answer questions on four different essays and hand them in. I was really dreading having to read them all, they were all really serious, not that it is a bad thing, I thought they were all really good, I was just hoping for at least one positive one, something lighthearted and satirical. I found that in the essay The New Causality by Steve Martin. At first I said to myself, " great another celebrity thinks that they are a writer." Maybe that's a bit prejudiced and I was wrong, I guess I was just in shock from finding out that "Snooki" from Jersey Shore wrote a book. That is the most atrocious thing I have ever heard of and I would say that it was preposterous but it's true. I was surprised by this essay though, Martin is basically trying to make a point about the legal system in the United States in this day and age, that many people are just suing over nothing, they are just greedy and avaricious, all they want is money. He uses many examples of court cases in which the person suing wins gross amounts of money for stupid reasons. It reminded me of a story that I thought was funny, it was told to me by a friend so I have no idea if it's true but I thought that I'd bring it up since it fits with this essay. Apparently some girl and her boyfriend are at a restaurant, she gets in a fight with him and throws her drink at him, then she slips in it. Want makes this even more hilarious is that she sues the restaurant and wins. That is ridiculous, probably not true but if it is then my faith in humanity just continues to dwindle down. I recommend that people read this essay, it made me laugh and I actually enjoyed answering the questions on this one.

CM 1145- Literary Analysis 2

So in the upcoming week I will be working on my literary analysis assignment where I have to use a critical approach and analyze a book, short story, or three poems. I am going to do a historical analysis on the short story Stones by Timothy Findley. This was by far my favorite short story that we read in CM 1120. I think it should be really easy to do this as well since I've done multiple essays on this subject, including my research essay last semester, which looked at the history behind the story. This is good, but it also means that I will have to be wary of what I write since I don't want to make a carbon copy of my previous essay. This is a pretty short entry but I can't really think of much more I can write about the literary analysis, I just thought I'd share the topic for my essay since I'm pretty happy that I got to choose it for my subject.

CM 1145- Research Essay 2

So, last time I said that the semester was coming to a close so quickly, and now i'm even more sure of that. The research paper is really weighing heavilly on my mind. I am about to search the internet for sources right snow. Gathering sources is probably the most stressful part of any researching assignment, I feel that it takes longer to extract all the information you need out of the sources and compile it, and then using it in an effective way. All of that usually takes me longer than actually writing the essay. On the bright side, the essay is only 1500 words, only double of what the last essay was so it dosewn't feel that long to me. I'm more worried now about being able to write a good essay on time, and being able to structure it properly. I know that I will have my intro and thesis, a paragraph about appearence of the monument I chose, the history behind the monument, and a conclusion. Can you tell whats missing there? A third body paragraph idea, I can't come up with an idea so if anyone from class actually reads this, maybe you could make a suggestion. This is definately going to be a stressful experience.

CM 1145- Literary Analysis

So we're about to do our last essay of the semester, excluding the research essay. This essay is a literary analysis. Earlier this semester I wrote a blog entry on the different ways you can analyse a piece of literarture, and now we have to do an essay that analyses something using one of the methods I wrote about earlier. I think a will use the historical analysis when I analyse... whatever it is we are going to be analysing. We haven't actually been given the topics, if there are any specific ones, and we haven't discussed the format of the essays at all either so I really have no idea how this essay should go but it should be interesting. It's hard to believe that the course is almost finished and that this is the last bit of in class work that we need to do before we are completely finished. I think that my writing skills have improved at least a little bit by taking this course over the novels course. I also think that this course has made writing a little more enjoyable for me, I used to hate writing but now that i'm out of high school I am able to write on things that I am actually interested in so hopefully this essay will be an enjoyable writing experience.

CM 1145-Causal Argument

  So another essay is afoot this week, or should I say weekend since I haven't started yet so I'm probably going to write a lot of it tomorrow (today really), and this time it is a causal argument. It's basically arguing why something causes something else and I'm doing mine on the issue of childhood obesity. I think it is a very important issue because the rate of childhood obesity is dramatically increasing. More specifically I'm doing the essay on why fast food restaurants are the leading cause of childhood obesity. Tired parents, both who may be working buy fast food very often because they just feel to tired to cook. I'm not arguing that they should be shut down or that there should be a massive boycott or anything of the sort. I'm arguing that moderation is the key to fixing the problem, it's okay to have fast-foods once in a while, just not all the time, and I think that it is a parents responsibility to make sure that their child is eating healthy foods, it may take more effort but nothing is more important than a persons health, would you want to hurt your child's quality of life? But enough about the topic, I am more worried about how this is all going to go down, once again it is an MLA format type of essay, but each paragraph has a specific objective that is to be achieved, I just hope I will be able to do it correctly.

CM 1145-Interviews

A few weeks ago our class wrote notes on interviewing, and just like when I was in high school I absolutely despise the thought of conducting an interview. I just hate interviews in general, I don't like being interviewed or interviewing people, mostly due to the fact that I am really shy in these kind of situation, also because I hate thinking up questions to ask the person I plan to interview. So now I'm pretty sure it's  going to happen, the one project I really wanted to avoid is going to happen. So I guess I will just suck it up and try to do my best. One thing I like about this interview is that it is going to be compiled into an essay, if we actually do one( though I'm pretty sure that if we write notes on it we are going to do one.) The fact that there will be an essay involved just makes me feel like there is an actual purpose behind what we are doing, instead of the high school interviews where we asked the standard questions and handed in the answers to the teacher. I guess I should start thinking about what I will do if this is actually a project, right now I'm more concerned with the rhetorical analysis.

CM 1145-Critical Approaches

  Critical approaches, something we learned quite awhile ago this year, but I figured I would do an entry on it since I really have no idea what to write about right now. A critical approach is pretty much a way of analyzing a piece of literature and there are many different ways you can look at it. I am going to write about my favorite style of analysis based on the list that we got, the historical criticism. I know it makes me sound a bit stuffy and boring, as if I lack any portion of creativity. However, I do belive that it is very important to be historically accurate in a story if it takes place on our world at any time in the past or present, even stories that take place in the future, should have accurate references to the past. If the story took place on some distant world full of large sentient whales that live on land, then the history of that world is free to be manipulated by the writer since it has nothing to do with the real world ( by the way, I would definitely read that story). So that is pretty much my opinion on critical approaches, I know that this is a short entry but hey, they can be one liners if they make sense so I'll just leave off with the definition in my notebook of a historical analysis, " biographical criticism where you'd use history and biography to understand a work." Now try to make that about whales on land, I dare you.

CM 1145- Making a Claim

  So a little while ago we learned how to make and support a claim for an argument. I kind of like the learning how to make an effective, convincing argument. I've had a lot of "debates" with friends before so I do enjoy learning about the process of making an argument or a claim and backing it up with evidence, and all the cool Latin/Greek( I'm not really sure) words that each part of the argument is made up of. I'm hoping that I have another opportunity this year to make a logical appeal so I can use these techniques to make a convincing point. I have always been interested in the art of persuasion, I see so many people who seem to be really good at it. The only thing that worries me about making a certain claim is that I can be kind of indecisive sometimes, I usually try to remain neutral in most situations, and I don't really like to be in the middle of an argument between two other people, and would rather just be the one arguing than just taking a side. I think it's because I try to satisfy everyone, but there are some issues that I wouldn't be so fickle with, only the unimportant ones like what should be for dinner. While thinking about this, I realized that the world would be a completely different place if people didn't argue against things like the segregation of blacks and whites, or the rights of women. It is a skill that can be used long after your education like when you are trying to get a job, your resume is basically a claim stating that you are the perfect one for the job. I guess that is pretty much everything I have to say about making arguments and claims, and I should really stop putting my entries off until after midnight...

CM 1145 Rhetorical Analysis

  So over the reading break our class was assigned to write a rhetorical analysis on an article or editorial from a magazine or online. We basically have to answer a bunch of questions throughout the course of essay and use our answers to these questions to support the editorial used, or maybe even use your answers to deconstruct the argument made in the essay. This is yet another essay that I feel like it will be weird to write since it is such an odd style to me. I don't even know how I am going to start or how to write my thesis, usually I just write the thesis statement in the order that I bring things up in the paper, however, there are so many questions to answer that there is no way that I can do that this time. I am also afraid because the paper has a 750 word minimum, that would be a good thing but I don't want to exceed that word limit by too much either because then the essay may seem extremely wordy. Anyway, I will be doing my rhetorical analysis on an editorial from The Globe and Mail on bullying so I guess I'll see how that goes, should be quite interesting. 

CM 1145 Research Paper

  The semester is coming to an end quite quickly and I already feel so behind on everything. Our blogs need to have fourteen journal entries by the fifth of April. So to make sure that I get this done, I have decided to do one blog entry everyday of the reading break, this one being the first. So I should have about thirteen by March ,12. So this journal entry is about my research paper, also due by the end of the semester and something I feel very behind on.  I plan to start the prewriting process very soon but I did manage to get some research done. The subject I chose for my essay was to research a monument and analyze it's historical importance. I have ( tentatively) chosen to research the Lugou Bridge in China, also known as the Marco-Polo Bridge as it was one of the many places he had visited. The bridge is located about fifteen kilometers south of Beijing and it's historical importance stems from many different things. The bridge itself is over 800 years old, and possesses hundreds of stone lions on each side, all of them unique and different from the others. It was recorded that there were 627 lions oringinally, some dating back to the Ming Dynasty(1368-1664), Quing Dynasty (1644-1911), and some even as far back as the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) and Jin Dynasty(1115-1234).  This bridge was also the sitte of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident which sparked the Second Sino-Japanese War between Japan and China. With these facts, I know that there should be plenty of research I can do on this subject so I think it is a pretty safe bet that this will be the subject I choose for my essay.