Dominic Melpignano

Summary:

Carr from the start shares with the audience his personal problem: he can’t focus on reading.

“Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, and begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”

So what he is saying with the article is that the internet is supposed to help browsing for information faster and more profitable than say going to the library. He explains that we are losing in the shift from using the internet as our primary source for information. He uses a scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey which he identifies easier and faster with the computer rather than the robotic human. This clues us in that perhaps using the internet is going to make us more machine minded, perhaps even more than the actual machines themselves.

Response:

First off I want to say this has probably been my favorite reading we have done so far. Not because how easy it was to read, but because I was able to relate to it the easiest. As a person growing up in the computer age I understand computers and how the internet works. With that being said I fully agree with what Carr is saying, the way we read, think, and write is by far a lot different than how it used to be without the Internet, things are a lot shorter, faster, and not as deep. Carr nails it when he says we are becoming more machine like, because if you think about it, we are constantly using machines now to aid us in writing. When do we ever write a book, essay, research paper, you name it by pen and paper? All of our sources are from an Internet search.

Reflect:

I think this work can really help my writing because it pinpoints our writing and reading weaknesses. Many of us (I for one) don’t have attention span to sit and read a huge article, we like to skip around. I have to force myself to sit there and read the article multiple times. This text allows me to see those flaws and with a better understanding of them I can make those “weaknesses” strengths. With this text in mind I am going to try to read “deeper” articles and works, this way I hope make myself better at reading and going deeper into certain works, because with a better understanding of that, writing will only be easier.

Summary:

As a child the author grew up in speaking Spanish, which means she was a “Chicano” (Spanish speaking person living in the United States). I think this was hard because, as we can see she, like the other Spanish speaking individuals and families were labels, so basically we see a line drawn and we have division between the people: The English speaking and the Spanish, then you have the Chicano,, who speak both.

Response:

I think it would be hard because, growing up, the author had to hybrid Spanish and English together in order to communicate. Growing up was hard because the Spanish communities were telling the “Chicanos” that they were speaking a “incorrect form of Spanish” and the English were harsh as well saying to “start speaking English or go back to wherever you come from”. As the author she tells he readers to embrace whatever back round they have.

Reflection:

I think its huge for a person who had to grow up with hardships like the author and to turn around and say I did it, it was hard, embrace who you are, and people will either accept you or won’t.  Personally I think its entirely up the the individual to make it or break it and doing what the author suggests is a great way, embrace yourself.

Summary: Boyd start with inviting us as readers to join her in various writing exercises to become better at writing rhetorically. She takes a few examples one such being an investigator for a crime scene. She stresses the importance of word use and that different word styles establish tone, such as pathos-appeal to the reader’s emotion, ethos-appeal of credibility, or logos-appeal to logic or fact. She stresses the fact to be like a detective when writing so that you can find the best words for the emotion that you want the reader to have when reading your work.

Response:

I think that this approach is very handy, it adds perspective and possible depth to writing. She approaches writing like a detective would on a crime scene, shes not writing to write shes writing to put a point across in her words and what her emotions are. Personally I don’t agree with this approach because its different than mine. I respect that it is a good way to write, but this style of approach towards writing doesn’t fit into mine.

Reflect:

I’m not sure how this will help my writing as my writing has more of a fluid feel to it and I like to just put my thoughts down without thinking, I let my emotions write. I feel like Boyd does the opposite, she trys to figure out her emotions and thoughts and then puts them down. I feel like it has more of a dry feel to it, yet brings emotion out.

I am a reader for sure. Last year in Bio 111 we watched videos for homework and I really did not like that format. Personally I like having the text in front of me, that way I can highlight/reread the parts I find most important as opposed to rewinding and writing more notes. Digging deeper, I like having a textbook over a eBook, it is something about the physical feeling of a book with actual pages in it, I feel like I retain the information better if I can physically touch the pages.

Writing has never been my thing, so in theory you would think that I would like to get my writing done first thing, however because I really can’t stand it I put it off until the last minute. My friends always tell me I should do it first thing because of the stress factor, maybe they are right but I feel like if I receive a good grade on the paper than does it really matter the way I do it? I just feel like writing is really personal so you should do it the way that you like best, whether you like doing it or not.

I’m working on my Lab Report for Bio 112, personally I like to have music on, usually metal. Metal potentially has a harsh feeling to it, so it almost”drives” me to work harder and faster. I really don’t like to work in dead silence because it just gives me writers block.

I was on the train home today and I realized how our world, has become so digitized. Everything, I remember when I was like six or seven we had the want ad, a magazine used to sell and buy literally anything. I find it amazing how now stuff like that is all on the internet. Even how we interact with people on a daily basis, usually has some part of technology whether texting, video chat, phone call, email, etc. Even how we pay for our train tickets, its with an app on our phones. Back in the day, not really that long ago we would have physical tickets, we still do but most people opt in for the digital because of the ease.

I believe the main point Swales is trying to convey in The Concept of Discourse Community is what a “discourse  community is”. Swales runs through how the concept was and is interpreted different ways, saying that although he disagrees, but is possible to compare the idea with a speech community.

Speech community: “a community sharing knowledge of at least one form of speech, and knowledge also of its patterns of use” (Swales Page 6).

He goes on to compare to two then presses on further to a huge point on how the two differ. Saying that while speech community focuses on socialization discourse community consists of a group of people that link up in order to pursue objectives that are prior to those of socialization and solidarity. So to me, I think that speech community is almost a sub group of a discourse community because the discourse community is a group of socialization, and a speech community is a a socialization. He then finishes off with a list that you can use to determine if it is a discourse community. They go as follows:

1. A discourse community has a broadlyagreed set of common public goals
2. A discourse community has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members
3. A discourse community uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback
4. A discourse community utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims

After a lot of reading and research, I think that the discourse community and the Congress of the United States both fit perfectly together. It made me believe that more when Swales actually compares it to how a Congress works. The areas of intercommunication should be very dominant in such a community because the common public need feedback and to give feed back. If we have such a community where both the common public and the congress have a line of communication the group will be tighter and the common public goals will be able to be achieved.

This work was very deep and took sometime to read through and understand but I think reading like this will make me into a better because it will force me to understand different concepts that I previously did not know. Therefore broadening my view and sources so my writing will be fuller and have more meaning to it. In my essay I think I will write about how a basketball team works with the coaching and staff and the players how their relationship is, the communication that goes on between them, and this is what makes it a community.

Hi! My name is Dominic Melpignano I am native to Ma originally from Quincy. I am a Bio Major with a pre-med minor. The only type of writing I like doing are lab reports, but that is a different form of writing you might say. I wouldn’t say writing is my strength as math and science are but I wouldn’t say it is my weakness either. With this class I hope to be able to learn how to write better and more efficiently for the future.

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