Austin the Vaquero

Howdy! Name's Austin Saco! 19/M I'm a Computer Science major at UTRGV! I'm mainly gonna be focusing on software coding and development. Known languages: English, Spanish, C++, C, C#, Python, BASIC, HTML, CSS, JavaScript Currently taking the Summer II 2016 session for ENGL 1302.96L. I'd like to see myself as a decent writer; I've composed for music in the past and as a student, I'd like to see this as an opportunity to not only improve my writing skills twofold, but to upgrade my coding format.

[vaqueropanda-blog]

I definitely don’t need music to concentrate which I’m writing if anything it distracts me from my thoughts and I end up sitting there trying to remember what I was about to write.

Bianca Sanchez

This is a supplement to the last post I made. In this context, the author had interviewed a friend of hers and asked about her experience with doing homework and listening to music.  Again, you can’t necessarily force yourself to listen to music to be creative. Whatever works for you is fine as long as you have some sort of source to help you tap into that creativity (*legal* sources). Some people listen to music, others require silence. Everyone is different in the sense of how they tap into their creativity pool.

[vaqueropanda-blog]

If you grew up in a home that was noisy and are used to tuning things out, this could be a way to give you a sense of normalcy as you write. On the other hand, listening to music that you enjoy, like soft rock, classical or even hip-hop could help to improve your focus as you write.

Cameron Mackey

You can’t actually force yourself to listen to music. The sound of total silence works as much as listening to your favorite music.I know a friend of mine can’t write a single sentence on her lab report without total silence. As for me, I can work in both quietness and blissful joy to my ears.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9ybFVYg2no

This is part of what I listen to when I concentrate

[vaqueropanda-blog]

The more you use the same songs, the more likely they will continuously trigger the inspiration you are looking for. Your brain will automatically associate certain songs with opening up your creativity

Cameron Mackey 

The key to this is repetitiveness. Much like a person’s muscle memory when they work out, listening to the same songs in a playlist or an album can put the listener into a new perspective. By learning and memorizing the lyrics to a song, it can allow the reader to rhetorically interpret the lyrics and translate the rhetoric to however the listener wants to hear.

[vaqueropanda-blog]

#SmoothJazz

Hey out there! Before I start, I want to make a small disclaimer as to why I’ve been absent for a while. I’ve been going through some very harsh, personal issues that I don’t wanna disclose. However, there’s no excuse for me to be late with my assignments and I apologize for keeping everyone here waiting.

With that said, this post may be my final #Campaign project for this course, but I may return in the future! I want to thank my instructor Professor McGregor for getting me this far in my journey to become a better writer. I also want to thank my fellow classmates for putting up with me for this past month that we had this course :) Today, I’m gonna go over how music can influence your creativity. Sarah Morin, classmate and author of the paper “The Creativity of Music”, has done research on if music influences your creativity. For one last time (maybe), I will dig deep and explore how this research goes.

[vaqueropanda-blog]

Writing professor Peter Elbow, well-known for promoting the practice of freewriting, describes freewriting as private writing without stopping

Steven Lessner and Collin Craig

Freewriting is, in my personal opinion, the best way to get the writing invention process to kickstart. To freewrite is to write whatever is on your mind without any restrictions. You can literally go out and type completely random thoughts that occur in your head, type or write gibberish as long as you understand it, or even draw a doodle. Literally do anything that gets your mind going. Just so you won’t end up like Snoopy right here

[vaqueropanda-blog]

... when reading a New York Times op-ed about the war in Iraq, you might consider the traditional political stance the newspaper has taken on the war in the Middle East and how this might determine how Iraqi citizens are spoken for, or how visual images are used to invoke an emotion about the Muslim faith in times of war

Steven Lessner and Collin Craig

This quote is used as an example in reference to defining rhetorical reading, which is one of the most important invention techniques to help improve your writing capabilities. Rhetorical reading is defined as “ ...[an] approach for understanding the tools that writers use to persuade or effectively communicate ideas..”. Essentially, when you learn how to read outside of the lines of someone’s work, you’ll understand the decisions that writer made.

[vaqueropanda-blog]

Viewing invention as a one time, hit or miss event does not allow the construction and development of ideas to be seen as a continuing process a writer employs throughout the act of writing

Steven Lessner and Collin Craig

When you’re talking about an idea in your writing, be sure to expand and keep thinking of ways on how to further the idea. Seeing it as a one time coin flip won’t help you continue developing the ideas of your writing. 

[vaqueropanda-blog]

#DrawInAndWriteOut

Hi there! Over the course of the week, I was instructed by my professor to read an article that pertains to improving your writing. It is titled “‘Finding Your Way In’: Invention as Inquiry Based Learning in First Year Writing”, and is written by Steven Lessner and Collin Craig. Today, I’m going to go over how you can improve your writing and idea output twofold! It’s my goal to show you how important it is to know these techniques and the results from using them.

[vaqueropanda-blog]

In addition to owning genres, a discourse community has acquired some specific lexis

John Swales

This is the fifth characteristic of a discourse community. Basically, your community has certain lingo attached exclusively to that community. A good example is that in message boards or in video games, people yell out “banhammer” or “get b&” when someone is violating the rules of that message board or game. 

[vaqueropanda-blog]

The discourse community I have discussed meets all six of the proposed defining criteria: there are common goals, participatory mechanisms, information exchange, community specific genres, a highly specialized terminology and high general level of expertise. On the other hand, distance between members geographically, ethnically and socially presumably means that they do not form a speech community

 John Swales

This refers to when Swales had attempted to join the Hong Kong Study Circle, but had failed. He failed because there was little to no communication within the group’s members. The only form of intercommunication between the members was a bi-monthly journal and was the only thing holding the group together.

Point being is that a community cannot be a disclosure community without there being some form of intercommunication. That in itself is the second characteristic of a disclosure community. You can’t have have an online discussion board without some form of electronic medium.

[vaqueropanda-blog]

In a Senate or Parliament, there may well exist overtly adversarial groups of members, but these adversaries may broadly share some common objective as striving for improved government.

John Swales

This quote refers to Swales describing the first characteristic of a disclosure community. When you become part of a community, you and your members share one universal goal; regardless of viewpoints. That’s the first and arguably the most important characteristic of a discourse community: sharing a unified goal. An example would be the recently released Pokemon Go game. In the game, you are allowed to join one of three teams: Valor, Instinct, or Mystic. All three teams have completely different morals and values, but they all share one universal goal: to catch all the Pokemon in the game.

[vaqueropanda-blog]

#GitGudInside

So once again, my professor has tasked us (the Composition II class) to do some reading. Now, I’m fairly certain that you’ve read this article at one point in any of your English courses during your time in college It’s an analysis called “The Concept of Discourse Community”, written by John Swales. Today, I’m gonna go through how you can get good in becoming more comfortable in your community; whether you’re a new member or a solid veteran.

[vaqueropanda-blog]

...How, despite ostensible democracy in educational chances, stratification of opportunity continues to organize access and reward in literacy learning...

Deborah Brandt

Again, this refers back to Brandt’s multiple interviews with different people; Branch and Lopez being prime examples. Both people had completely different means of access to literacy. Branch had the easiest access while Lopez had a much more difficult status due to her roots. However, in the end, both Lopez and Branch came out of college with their respective degrees. They are both successful people due to their self-perseverance, their literacy sponsorship from their parents, and recalling back to why they got to this point.

[vaqueropanda-blog]

One might be tempted to say that Raymond Branch was born at the right time and lived in the right place -- except that the experience of Dora Lopez troubles that thought

Deborah Brandt

To summarize, this quote refers to two people that Brandt had interviewed who went to the same university at the same year. Raymond Branch was born under a highly-held successful family with easy access to literacy and studied software programming thanks to both his interests and the literacy sponsorship from his parents. Dora Lopez was born under farm laborers and had limited second-hand literacy access and studied bilingual language. She was first motivated by wanting to learn Spanish because neither her brother nor her U.S born cousins were able to do so. Keep in mind that both Branch and Lopez attended the same university at the same year. Both people received their degrees in the end. It’s not really about where and when you were born, but what experiences in literacy you went through that got you to where you are.

[vaqueropanda-blog]

Recession, relocation, immigration, technological change, government retreat: all can -- and do -- condition the course by which literate potential develops.

Deborah Brandt

Whatever events you go through in life, it can change what and how you learn things. In this case, whatever life events you go through can change how you can learn literacy. Brandt supports this claim by showing examples from the interviews she had done for her article. The best example I could find was when Yi Vong had to learn English in a school for the blind and deaf after he had immigrated to rural Wisconsin from Laos after the Vietnam War,

[vaqueropanda-blog]

#YourLiteracyRoots

So for our English 1302 class, my professor had instructed us to read through an article based on the sponsorship of literacy. It’s titled ‘The Sponsors of Literacy” and is written by Deborah Brandt. Today, my goal here is to show how literacy access and sponsorship can be affected by where you come from.

[vaqueropanda-blog]

So, about #Campaigns...

I read through the syllabus nice and thorough this morning when I got that notification on my Blackboard app. The way the work is graded is fair and lenient, the amount of time given to complete assignments is surprisingly roomy for a Summer II course, and I especially like the emphasis on “revise REVISE REVISE”. The fact that you allow us to resubmit our papers AFTER their due date to improve our grade is something I welcome with open arms. With that said, I’m still a little lost with the whole #Campaigns thing. “What you’ll be doing is reading an article, coming up with a big question based on the topic of the article, and answering that question through a # campaign” (McGregor, 1). I kind of understand the gist of how to do it, but I was wondering if you can elaborate a little bit on how to do this assignment? As in, how to answer the question and how much you want us to write?  Since the major platform we’re going to be using is tumblr, I’m already in for a ride in this class. I’m already excited for what I’m in for! Pic related, my reaction when reading through the #Campaigns segment in the syllabus