Learning Log

English 2010
https://openenglishatslcc.pressbooks.com/

January 15th, 2019

“Donald J. Trump, Pope Francis, and he Beef That Defied Space and Time” by Benjamin
Solomon
● “Instead, they used intentional, crafted language to take specific actions, to create new
meanings, and to assert their identities in the world. In other words, they used language to
do things, make things, and be things.”
● “Each of us, every day, is using language to create this world.”
This essay explores the ways of writing used by Pope Francis and Donald Trump in a way of
confusing and astonishment. He explains how both leaders used language in a way to tear down
nations as well as break them down. Writing gives power to anyone high in society or even
hidden under a rock to create things and ideas to influence others.

January 17th, 2019

“Language Matters: A Rhetorical Look at Writing” by ​Chris Blankenship and Justin Jory
● Ultimately, we believe that by being more mindful of others’ language and more
deliberate about your own, you can become a more effective communicator.
● Together, establishing credibility through research and using formal language suggests
that the writer is proactive and interested, and this demonstration of rhetorical awareness
can help him build a relationship with a potential teacher and mentor, Professor Smith.
Throughout this essay is gives many examples of how using rhetoric can actually help us
improve our writing. Through using different voices and characteristics in your writing brings a
specific type of language you are trying to portray. Your language can produce and demonstrate
what you as a writer are interested in. Language is messy because if you don't use it properly, the
interest of your writing will be incorrect.

January 22nd, 2019

“Genre in the wild-Understanding Genre Within Rhetorical (Eco) systems” by Lisa Bickmore
● The term ​genre​ means “kind, sort, or style” and is often applied to kinds of art and media,
for instance, sorts of novels, films, television shows, and so on. In writing studies, we
find all sorts of written genres, not just ones that you might classify as artistic (or
creative).
● So a genre is an act of language—for our purposes here, mostly acts of writing, in
particular—that behaves in typical or characteristic ways, which we can observe in
repeated or persistent situations.
At times genre could make writing robotic because if we are taking notes it's most likely going to
be the exact same pattern time and time again. Most school assigned writings will be similar
formats. When you expand upon the different genres that's when english becomes more
interesting. Following specific habits while writing can make someone sound robotic, that is why
we must change up how we write and add our own styles.

January 23rd, 2019

“Writing for Community Change” by Elisa Stone
● Did you know, though, that service learning actually enhances student learning, and that
it leads to greater employment opportunities? Being a good citizen, in other words, can
actually help you get a higher GPA and be a more attractive candidate to not only
prospective employers, but also to transfer institutions if you plan to pursue additional
education after your current degree.
● Don’t take our word for it; try service-learning for yourself and see how the satisfaction
of knowing you made a difference helps all the stress from studying, work, bills,
balancing your life, and catching your breath fade away long enough to make you smile.
If I could participate in any service opportunity and time and money didn't matter I would most
likely want to go help a foreign country with the supply of good food and water. Many places
don't have access to good food and water sources a I want to be able to help and preserve their
life. Food and water are necessities and they need them to survive. I feel like we need the whole
word working on getting them what they need.

January 28th, 2019

“The Elizabeth Smart Case: A study in Narrative News” by Clint Johnson

● In 2002, the year Smart was taken, police received more than 800,000 reports of missing
people under eighteen years of age (Beam). CNN failed to report almost any. Meanwhile,
as of 2014, they reported 498 times on the kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart.
● Stories with narrative structure, stories that feel like stories, get told and retold. Those
that do not, sometimes despite their importance, languish untold or are quickly forgotten.
What made the Elizabeth Smart case so well known was the fact that the Smarts were very
persistent and were working constantly to find their lost daughter. Also when the girl was found,
the situation blew up and turned into an ever growing court case to prevent this from ever
happening again. The fact that some cases don't get known or released it depressing as lives are
ruined due to the kidnapping. As many kidnappings as possible should be looked after to find the
person.
January 30th, 2019
“Writing Is Recursive” by Chris Blankenship
● Yes, they generally begin with invention and end with editing, but they view each part of
the process as a valuable way of thinking that can be revisited again and again until they
are confident that the product effectively meets their goals.
● But if you’re willing to put aside the linear steps and view invention, research, drafting,
revision, and editing as ways of thinking that can be revisited over and over again until
you accomplish your goal, you will become a more successful writer.
When writing an essay or anything really, if you got in exact steps to finish it, the paper will end
up exactly like every highschool paper ever written. When writing you have go in different
orders and repeat many steps over and over again until you are able to produce a more refined
version of what you are try to produce. Writing isn't a step by step process, it finding a flow that
works for you can coming up with new ideas along the way to improve your piece completely.

February 1st, 2019

¨Making Choices in Writing” by Jessie Szalay
● In order to produce the best writing you can—and not be miserable while you’re doing
it—you’re going to want to pick a topic that really, truly interests you, with which you
are excited to engage, about which you have the resources to learn, and about which you
can envision having something to say.
● Making decisions is a fundamental part of writing. The decisions you make will
determine the success of your writing. If you make them carelessly, you might end up
with unintended consequences—a tone that doesn’t fit your medium or audience, logical
fallacies, poor sources or overlooked important ones, or something else.
For my letter I will focus on organization and structure, detail, background info, tone, and word
choice. These will all help me with the sarcastic and mocking tone of my open letter. Like in the
Purple Spaghetti Monster open letter, he uses specific ideas and structure to get his point across.

February 5th, 2019

2 Open letters
● “Illegal immigration is illegal. Unlike illegal immigrants, LEGAL immigrants are a
benefit to our nation and always have been part of the best of who we are.”
● “Lets begin with perhaps the most fundamental of all college-readiness skills - reading.”
All the letters use facts and forms of research to help prove the point of their letter and to get the
idea across. They all do it in unique ways that grab the reader's attention. Both of the letters also
focus on reasons on the why of their topic. It's explaining the importances of it and why we need
to focus on the contents of their letter. Both the letters are also addressed to a very wide ranging
audience showing that it is made for lots of people ot just one person.
February 7th, 2019
¨Peer Review¨ by Jim Beatty
● “If your professor provides a rubric or grading criteria, focus on those issues when giving
advice to your peers. Again, don’t just look for things to “fix.” Pose questions to your
classmate; let them know where they need to give you more to clarify and convince you.”
● “Perhaps the biggest challenge in peer review is deciding what advice to use and what to
ignore. When in doubt, always ask your professor. They know how they will grade, so
they can give you a more definitive answer than anyone else. This holds true for the
advice you get from a writing tutor too.”
● “No good writing exists in isolation. The best writing comes out of a communal effort.”
To make peer reviewing helpful, your peer has to be able to give real and helpful advice. They
need to give the advice they have even if the writer doesn't approve or accept their ideas. What
does not make peer review worthwhile is when peers don't actually try or care to read your
writing. When being lazy they often will make up some fake response and then the writer gets no
help or assistance.

February 11th, 2019

¨Personal Literacy and Academic Learning” by Marlena Stanford
● Once we become aware of the various personal literacies we practice in our lives, we can
begin to see their connections to the academic literate practices we must develop to meet
our academic goals.
● We might think about how we can facilitate the process of contextualization while we’re
in college in order to ease the transition and better use the skills and literate practices we
bring with us to support our academic goals.
Create a timeline mapping out your reading or writing history:
- Age 3-4 (2004-5): Started learning my letter and numbers in preschool
- Age 5 (2006): Began to read in Kindergarten
- Age 6 (2007): Wrote daily journals/staters in 1st grade
- Age 8 (2009): 3rd grade, I took a special reading course as I struggled with reading
- Age 9-11 (2010-13): Finished Elementary school, doing better, still struggling with
reading.
- Age 12-13 (2014-15): 7th and 8th grade, forced to take a reading and writing class
- Age 14-17 (2016-present): Writing and reading improved. Began taking college level
classes.
February 13th, 2019
¨You Will Never Believe What Happened: The Stories We Tell¨ by Ron Christensen
● Telling stories is one way we use language as a resource to create and build relationships.
When we use language to recount events in our life, we are deliberately utilizing
strategies in order to enact a particular type of response to our words.
● Stories are our attempts to make sense of the world. We narrate our experience in order to
connect with others and validate our own experience and self-worth. We shape our
identity through these stories.
When we read a story, we hear about different experiences and understand what others are
seeing/feeling/experiencing. We are able to understand the other parts of the world around us and
to get in touch with our inner emotions and understandings. We get in touch with a part of
ourselves that isn't a part of the craziness of the world.

February 15th, 2019

“Is that a True Story?” by Ron Christiansen
● Meaningful so that we are invested in communicating something to someone who may or
may not know us; coherent so that our story can be understood. And while this
conversation of truth and memoir can get a bit theoretical, it also has a very practical and
pragmatic impact on writing memoirs.
● We may still have to do some research by talking with others and looking up details. But
this process, as we see above, is not about sticking to the facts. Instead, it is about the
overall emotional truth and getting, as best we can, at the experience of being human.
Truth can be complicated because there are different kinds of truth. There is truth that is exactly
true fact for fact and every single thing that was told actually happened. Then some truth can be
seen as, like stated in the article, emotional truth, where the statements were true pertaining to
someone's feelings. All things said can be the truth, it's all in the eyes of the beholder.

February 21st, 2019

“ADDING THE STORYTELLER’S TOOLS TO YOUR WRITER’S TOOLBOX” by Clint
Johnson
● Scene: If you have ever written a story, either from memory or imagination, you have
tools to take this employee’s memory of Jobs and bring it to life as a scene.
● Experience: When people make claims about what is good or bad, effective or
ineffective, or true or false, we automatically compare the claim to our lived experience.
We ask, ​Does this make sense to me? Have I seen it bear out in my life?
 ● Sensory Detail: Knowing that one of the most important criteria for most eaters when
choosing a restaurant is taste...Could the evocative description of human tastes—salty,
savory, sweet, bitter, and sour
● Voice: Their words—dialogue—have great power to establish unique, distinctive voices
separate from the author’s own voice as a story’s narrator.
● Conflict: Conflict is produced when different individuals or groups have competing
interests and take action trying to achieve their personal goals, often by overcoming
resistance from others.

February 25, 2019

“Memorability: 6 Keys for Success” by Nikki Mantyla
● Simple: “ It sticks to only what’s needed to make the story stick with the audience.”
● Unexpected: “Without such surprise, our chances of being memorable are low.”
● Concrete: “The marvel of language is that it can conjure images in our minds even
without pictures and let us hear things even when the words are read silently”
● Credible: “Take advantage of any impressive sources.”
● Emotional: “Aim for the kind of vibe that best fits the audience and purpose, and find
effective ways to solicit those emotions.”
● Story-based: “in all kinds of genres to engage readers with the tension of waiting for
resolution.”
● Conclusion: “That’s the power of language to do things, be things, and make things in the
world.”
This article easily explains the easy ways to write well. Each of these techniques help improve
writing as they easily add memorability to your writing.

February 28th, 2019

¨Story as Rhetorical: We Can't Escape the Story No Matter How Hard We Try¨ by Ron
Christiansen
● ¨A rhetorical analysis … now that sounds rigorous and academic. Personal narrative . . .
sounds squishy, personal, even wimpy.¨
● ¨I’m also arguing that much of the academic writing I’ve done, which explicitly relies on
narrative, is just as valid as any other type of academic writing.¨
● ¨I received an A on that paper so it seems my professor still found an argument in my
personal story.¨
Stories can easily become arguments when an opinion is made or not even that, points of view
are always added into stories. A point of view of how McDonald's food made them sick can be
an argument on how their food is bad for you or how it's unhealthy, it's all in the thoughts of the
reader. Writing is like art, everyone interpret art differently, everyone interprets writing
differently and everyone can get something different out of a piece.
March 5th, 2019
“The Narrative Effect: Story as the Forward Frame” by Lisa Bickmore
● “Stories also help readers understand why and under what conditions the story matters.
This, by the way, is true of most kinds of writing that matter to readers—either the
situation is clearly understood by all those who receive the piece of writing, or the writer
makes that situation clear.” This helped me understand when I’m writing my memoir I
need to write my stories clear as that's how the reader will understand the writing.
● How is a story “Underlying all understanding?”
a. “​we use stories to explore ideas, or to play out the consequences of ideas.”
b. “we might consider the possibility that we should think of all writing as
storytelling.”
c. “A narrative text puts story first; it frames the reader’s experience of the text by
forwarding, or emphasizing, storytelling strategies.”
d. “An explicit and decipherable timeline is key to the narrative effect—that is, key
to understanding a text as a story.”
e. I need to relieve to the reader why the story matters, why did Include this specific
story and why it's significant.

March 6th, 2019

“Punctuation, Memes, and Choice” by Nikki Mantyla
● What’s new? - “You place them around unimportant parts of the sentence that could be
completely removed without changing the overall meaning.” Parentheses are used for
emphasis not just side information. You can use them to bring new styles of writing.
● What’s interesting? - “Therefore, the shorter the paragraph, the more it will stand out.”
You don't need super long paragraphs. Shorten the lengths of paragraphs and keep the
info relevant.
● What’s finally makes sense? - “It’s a big deal because you get this awesome choice of
hooking up your sentence with extra goodness.” Semicolons just emphasise the
connections between sentences. As well as it's another form of a period.

March 8th, 2019

“Peer Review” by Jim Beatty
● “The best writing comes out of a communal effort.”
This quote I strongly believe to be true. It's like they always say, 2 heads are better than one. A
famous writer almost everyone knows is Shakespeare. Something about him is that while writing
plays, he would go to a bar of sorts and ask people there for their input and ideas for the play or
scene. Some amazing wirings are made together with multiple minds. Reviewing allows for lots
of input from other minds to make the writing better.