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[julianlcs]

Final Journal

Accurate? Yes.

Fancy? Yes.

Problem? No. 

[julianlcs]

Journal 13

-How can I translate my writing process to other work outside of this classroom?

I can translate my writing process to other work outside of this classroom through my outline. My outline depicts what I will do and how I will do it. This can be done through any other platform as well, regardless of the subject. In doing this, not only can I get my work done more efficiently, but the overall performance of my work will be greater than before.

[julianlcs]

Journal 12

I think the assignment that has been the most challenging to me was the infographic. The assignment itself wasn’t difficult, rather it was the amount of time it took to complete it and how specific I wanted my design to be. Especially since I’m not the best when using technology.

I don’t think my writing has improved that much this semester with the exception on writing essays. I have been able to think, process, and commit to the written assignments this semester better than any other English class that I have ever taken.

[julianlcs]

Journal 11

My counter argument I plan to address in my infographic is: With everything technology is used for and what it offers to society, is it solely your fault to be addicted to your screen?

-Firstly, technology, more specifically, social media is used on an day-to-day basis. Roughly 80% of Americans use social media so it’s safe to say that social media is normalized into our society. Technology is used for practically everything and some of the biggest companies in the world settles their products around technology/social media. You can’t necessarily blame the consumers for becoming addicted for how normalized technology has become.

-Secondly, to many, technology is more than just a “device”. Many will take advantage of the unique features, whether that’s from an iPhone or an Xbox or anything along those lines, and use it to distract themselves from the world. To them, technology is their “Coping Mechanism”

When thinking about my audience, I believe this can be referred to any age but even more directly to the teens and younger adults. Addiction is found at any age but you typically see it more in teens and younger adults than any other age group due to the marketing strategy be directly towards them.

[julianlcs]

Journal 10

Evaluating your sources is important to show how strong your paper is. The sources you use is what holds your paper together. The more credible or “stronger” your sources are, the stronger your paper will be. However, the same goes vice versa.

After reading the chapter “Evaluating Resources” from the book “How to Write Anything”, there were some important things I was reminded of. What I found most important was how never to take any source for granted, no matter how good or bad it may seem at first. The book tells you right from the start that in order to evaluate how credible a source may be, you must do a quick once-over to examine its content and structure. You then go into examining the introduction, table of contents, and the finally, the conclusion to that source. This is to show how professional a source may be, which is crucial when using that source for a writing assignment.

This kind of knowledge allows me to understand that I should always proof read a source before using it towards any assignment. The phrase “Don’t judge a book by its cover” is probably the best phrase to use for something like this. Regardless of how professional or credible it may seem at first, its always better to stay safe than sorry. Following the steps I mentioned above can show you how credible a source may be and it can really be the deciding factor in your grade.

[julianlcs]

Journal 9

This article above (https://www.blackscreens.com.au/what-is-screen-addiction#:~:text=The%20term%20screen%20addiction%20has,have%20from%20time%20to%20time.) supports/adds on what the article by Nellie Bowles says. What I really like about this article is how in depth it goes about addiction. It first gives you the definition of addiction and then slowly moves into how can you stop yourself from being addicted. I really like this because it gives you a good understanding of what addiction really is before heading into Bowles’s article. 

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Journal 8

The image I chose is a bit blurry because it will not render correctly when I paste it on here. I found this image on a website called “This Month In Tech History” (https://www.itsconsultinginc.ca/2014/03/this-month-in-tech-history-2/). I believe that the audience for this image is towards practically everybody since everybody uses technology in their every day life. I also believe that the purpose of this image is to show us how much technology has impacted our society, even more so, our world as a whole. We go from having little to no exposure to technology to having it a part of our lives and almost impossible to live without it.

When speaking about the rhetorical appeals (logos, pathos, ethos), it becomes a bit more complicated to explain. Logos is defined simply as the logical reason to something. In this case, the “logos” or the logical purpose of this image is to expose how much technology impacts our lives. Pathos on the other hand is more about emotions. At first glance, you tend to not see any emotion in this image. However, if you study on the image, read the text, and truly focus on the message, you see how much emotion plays out. We start out at ‘1960s’ where we are a happy little baby with no worry or addiction to technology at all. Nonetheless, we see as the baby grows into a young man and technology grows as well, we see how addicted the young man becomes towards technology until it appears on the last image where his life is simply technology and without it, he wouldn’t exist. Lastly, Ethos can be defined as the credibility of someone, or in this case the credibility of this image. This I believe is a no brainer. All you have to do is walk into any store in the city and see that the majority of people are on their phone or laptop depending where you are. Its safe to say that the image above is more than true. With every day that goes by, humanity is becoming more and more attached to technology and without it, we cannot hold onto our own lives.

For the C.R.A.P. principles, this becomes a bit easier to identify:

C- Contrast: Contrast is the visualization of the image. The title for this image has a big red font, which immediately grabs the reader’s attention first. Throughout each image, the font stays the same and also contains a red text which grabs our attention to continue reading.

R- Repetition: Similar to contrast, the main difference that separates repetition is in the name itself. Repetition is the action of repeating itself over and over. In this case, in every image below, there is a light blue text, followed by a bolded larger text of the year, which is then followed by a small grey text with a few red words in between. It is then separated by a thin grey line which is then moved into a larger paragraph of grey text.

A- Alignment: Alignment is used to make the image more professional looking. We see how all the images and texts are side by side to each other. There is nothing that is out of order or anything that makes the image dumb down in any way. The image being professional shows a sense of maturity and seriousness which makes the reader become more focused into it.

P- Proximity: Proximity is very easy to establish in this image. Not only are all the images and text side by side. We see the subtle changes in the images of the child growing into a young man attached to technology, and the text defining it below. This becomes very simple to read and understand what is going on.

Overall, this simple image affects my understanding of my subject of technology by exposing how much we really rely on technology. Though it is true that technology has improved humanity in every way, it has also left us in a spiral of addiction and without technology, humanity seems to be hopeless to go back to its original roots. I see that although I should be grateful for the time period I live in, I cannot heavily rely on technology only because if I do, I too will go down a spiral of addiction where I will not be able to come back from.

[julianlcs]

Journal 7

After reading the essay “The Guardian: How to Write a Perfect Sentence”, I learned many useful tips and advices to improve my English language. The one that stuck out the most was “If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out”. This stuck out the most to me because I often have the problem with adding to many words in a sentence, which makes that sentences uncomfortably long and unnecessary. This small piece of advice reminds me that I need to keep focus in my sentences and if I can cut certain words out, I should do so.

[julianlcs]

Journal 6

While writing papers, I found out that peer-reviews are one of the most helpful resources to improve a paper. An example of this is the senior year research paper. In which I had the opportunity to having constructive criticism from my fellow peers substantially add to my paper. I found that suggestions regarding word choice had the most impact while writing my paper, I found that there are a lot of words that I yet not know and with the help of my peers, I came to learn those new words and realize that they are a much better fit to what I intended to say. On the contrary, I believe that suggestions regarding the topic I chose were the least helpful due to the fact that I personally did the research and learned the most about my topic, which was not the case to the reviewers of my paper, considering they had not have done as much research as I have.

[julianlcs]

Journal 5

The article that I am choosing to do a Rhetorical Analysis on is Steve LeVine’s “How Remote Work Could Destroy Silicon Valley”.

I believe that the point and reason for this article was mostly successful. It seemed that the whole point of this article is to bring awareness to Silicon Valley. With the disaster of COVID and many other complications arising (the deep recession, renewed anti-trust from companies), it seems that Silicon Valley holds a worrisome future.

One of the things that I found appealing is who the targeted audience is. Throughout reading the article, LeVine uses many terms and references that only people who are in some field of technology and/or business or at the very least, someone who knows the bare basics of it, would understand. I found this interesting because it really shows how important it is to people of this field and it shows his professionalism.

Moving forward from this, next is the Rhetorical appeals that were used in this article (Logos, Ethos, Pathos). When discussing about Ethos, we can safely say that LeVine is very credible in his work. Aside from being an editor at Large for Medium, he used to work for other organizations such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and many others along with the fact he used to teach energy security to graduates at Georgetown University. Having this knowledge, we can come to the conclusion that LeVine knows his work and the article we read is more than accurate.

For logos, we see how he displays facts and other claims throughout the article. An example of this is how he uses a big grey text to inform the reader about a fact of or surrounding Silicon Valley: “In Palo Alto, the median home now costs $3.2 million. In nearby Mountain View, it’s $1.7 million, and in San Francisco $1.8 million. In other words, the Valley has priced out almost anyone not making high six-figures, and even many of them.”

Lastly, for pathos, the overall tone for the article directly correlates to the targeted audience. The tone shows a professional standpoint from not only the text chosen but from the way it was written. This correlates to its targeted audience because as stated earlier, the majority of the people who read this are those who are interested and/or already have experience/knowledge in this field. Therefore, making the article professional and to the point. The only thing that caught me off as I do not understand why it is there when using a professional tone, is the article’s artwork. Though it is appealing and interesting to look at, I do not see any reason to put it in the article other than distracting the reader when coming across it.

[julianlcs]

Journal 4

What really surprised me in this article was how much the internet it really used on a daily basis. Knowing that there are more than 1.9 billion websites in existence, more than 3.5 billion Google searches every day, and roughly 350,000 tweets sent every minute is absolutely insane to really think about. The information I found in this article is going to be very useful to help me in future projects. The techniques I found most useful and important to me are “Know your audience”, “Inverted Pyramid”, and “Show, don’t tell”. Knowing your audience is important because you direct the text towards the specific group that it’s targeted for. If the text doesn’t align itself for the targeted audience then it will prove failure towards your goal. The Inverted pyramid is what grabs the audience’s attention and brings them to read and focus on the article at hand. One of the most important aspects in writing is the “hook” in the audience. If you can grab their attention within the first few sentences, they will most likely continue reading your article. Show, don’t tell is also very important for the readers because they see why something is better or more important in contrast to it’s counterpart. These techniques are important because they will further evolve your essay by making it easy to read for the target audience and grab their attention to become hooked into the story.

[julianlcs]

Journal 3

Looking back from our first project “Letter to Your Younger Self”, my pre-writing process was more or less the same than usual: I analyzed what the assignment was, thought about it for a few minutes, and started writing. This project wasn’t as difficult in terms of what I wanted to say than other projects. I made an outline in my head of what I was going to write in each paragraph and how I was going to do it. After writing everything out, I went back multiple times to check for any grammar errors or word replacements that needed to be filled in. One thing that I do want to work on moving forward to the next project is my vocabulary for sure.

[julianlcs]

Journal 2

Someone who has positively affected my writing skills is my English III teacher. She pushed me to do my absolute best and always gave me advice on what to work on. Regardless of how many times I needed to ask her or how well/how bad something was, she always helped me and was never frustrated nor irritated by it. Although I wasn’t the best at writing, she certainly helped me substantially on how to write.

[julianlcs]

Journal 1

From all my previous English/Writing classes up to now I feel that I have a well understanding on how to write essays and what to understand when reading them. I have always enjoyed taking English classes as it was always something I understood. However, something that I have always struggled with in writing essays and English classes in general, are the correct grammar punctuation/word usage, and the outline/ “hook” of an essay. Everything else, especially the rough draft/final draft of an essay, has always felt exponentially easier than everything else to me.