11-11-08

Seltzer obviously knows how to protect his ideas from critique. He seems to know what people are going to complain about from his writing and writes in sentences to back up his claims against those people.

In Class Assignment for 10-9-08

I sprained my index finger yesterday and I have a little splint on it that makes typing very uncomfortable to me so I am not going to write too much about this subject. This whole project that you are trying to prepare us for is very interesting to me. I think more classes need to be like this. Take pharmacy for example. My girlfriend has to take classes like organic chemistry and human anatomy for 6 or 7 years to do what? Count pills. Organic chemistry teaches absolutely nothing about what it is like being a pharmacist. Does WVU care? No. They just want the money. At least after a few years of the history of journalism I am in a class that puts students in the real world to get real information about a particular job.

October 2nd in Class Assignment

As a writer I should be very concerned with the genre of writing that I need to be mimicking. If I'm writing a science report it needs to be drastically different from writing a english report. One would be more focused on the strucure and word usage and the other would be focused on what I did for my project. With the progress report I will be sure to include as many specific details as possible.

Assignment Due September 30

I'm a journalism major so essays are pretty easy to come by. I have the news stories I have had to generate and I've had the regular english class essays too. One of these Enlglish essays that aggravated me the most was one I had to write about a play called "The Friends". We were supposed to come up with a theory about the play that hadn't been discussed in class or any type of text book we may have used in class. Coming up with a thesis about something I barely cared about at best was difficult. I had to read and reread the pages to even form so type of opinion about the play itself. Once I had I decided that I would pick one point in the play and argue that that point was the real turning point of the play. I observed the psyche of the three characters very closely and then came up with what moment truely affected the three friends enough to cause an apex to the action. I argued my point strongly enough with psychological explanations of why certain characters said certain things at certain moments in the story. I completely hated the assignment but I did ok on it.

Class Assignment 9-25-08

The people in the clip seem to communicate through argument. This doesn't mean that they are affected at all by the arguing. It simply means that they communicate with eachother through a playful running argument between themselves. When they explain the outlining they are just as abraisive but i think it is just how they talk as a community. They explain in great detail the outlining aspect of tagging which probably means that it is one of the more important things to do. The so called leader of the group did not do a very good job of voicing his opinions about the project with his friend. Neither of them seem to interested with working seemlessly to the end of the project.

Class Assignment for 9-18-08

In the letters to the editor section there is a person named Y. Williams Burns that is concerned about John McCain's presidency from a Christian standpoint. They are concerned about McCain as a Christian because he cheated on his wife and is therefore (in their opinion), unfit to govern the nation. He certainly is very passionate about John McCain's shortcomings as a leader due to his shortcomings as a husband and father. While these two things are connected they are certainly not the same thing as bringing a nation into or out of war or controlling the economy. I guess some questions that they ask are "Does John McCain really support moral values?" "Does his politicial campaign rely heavily on his being a prisoner of war before?" "Is John McCain a fit father?" and maybe a little more inadvertantly he asks "Does Obama fit into the standards of a good Christian?"

Extra Assignment

One question I would have regarding this assignment would be; are we supposed to be making a thesis point and have a bigger meaning to this research project or do we just research the person and then report exactly what we find? I don't think it would be exactly possible to come up with a theory on this person's writing styles without doing the research before. If it is just a research and reporting back should there still be a overall feeling from the project?