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Brainstorming Session

October 23, 2017 / efuller2 / 0 Comments

The link above is to the picture of my brainstorming session.

For my brainstorming session I listed all of the texts we had to choose from for this essay; Richard Restak’s essay, Sam Anderson’s article, Robin Henig’s essay, and Thomas King’s TEDx talk. Then, underneath the each person’s name, I listed the main topics or the topics that related to the prompt and circled each of them. Then I drew lines connecting the topics in each category. The orange lines represented the ideas that support how the availability of constant information could strengthen young minds and the purple lines represented the ideas that support how it could weaken young minds. I wanted to be able to see which claim would have more evidence that I could you as support in my essay. I found that for strengthening young minds I could talk about how times are changing and there is a need for speed, people are expecting more from others when it comes to being efficient, and how focus is a voluntary thing so technology is creating more options for young people to find what interests them and how they want to apply that to the world. I would you the texts from Restack, Anderson, and King for that claim. If I was to write about how constant information weakens young minds I could talk about how it is actually impossible for people to multitask and how that affects young people’s brains. I could also talk about how more jobs have many jobs for people to fulfill and how that can affect mental health of individuals, and how people are turning to drugs to try to keep up with the many impossible jobs they are being asked to do. I could also connect technology to how young people are taking longer to grow up because it is so time consuming. For this claim I would use the texts from Restack, Anderson, and Henig.

The Naysayer

October 21, 2017 / efuller2 / 1 Comment

Some readers might challenge this view of distractions as they weaken the young mind by saying that they are helpful in the creative sense. Distraction can sometimes lead to new ideas. Anderson mentions in his essay, “This sort of free-associative wandering is essential to the creative process; one moment of judicious unmindfulness can inspire thousands of hours of mindfulness,” (Anderson, 11). When writers go off on a tangent or start writing about things that don’t seem to connect to their main ideas they can sometimes come up with great ideas without realizing it. When athletes don’t focus so much on what they’re doing or how well they are performing they sometimes end up performing better than expected. Being able to relax and not think so hard about the task at hand can help people create better outcomes. The times are changing, the speed of technology has a part in that and information being readily available makes young people work faster to keep up with the flow and tasks being asked of them. While it is true that distractions can be beneficial to the creative process, the abundance of distractions technology is creating is mostly hurting the brains of young people, not helping them.

Revision Strategy

October 20, 2017 / efuller2 / 1 Comment

Revision Plan for Essay Prompt 2

My goal for this paper is to prove how the wealth of constant information is weakening young minds. I plan to expand upon how the digitally distracting world forces young people to multitask, puts them at risk for mental illness, distracts them from growing up, and increases their usage of drugs. I need to revise the organization of my paper so that the topics flow more easily. I will use some of the strategies I mentioned in my Learning Log 1 to approach my writing as more of a recursive process. To think more about the global edits of my paper, I will go back and look to see how my thesis sentence lists the claims I will be making and compare it to the order of the paragraphs. If I find that the order of the claim paragraphs do not coordinate with the order of my thesis, I plan to switch up how my thesis lists the claims I make in my paper. During an activity we did in class, we wrote down the claims we were trying to make in our paper on note cards and switched around the order of the note cards until we found an arrangement that made the most sense. I plan to do this to fix the organization of my claim paragraphs and then fix my thesis statement to match. I also need to revise how I introduce the texts I use for evidence. The activity with the note cards will also help me figure out when to introduce the texts. The most challenging part of this revision will be finding the order of my paragraphs that makes the most sense and making sure my concluding paragraph still connects to my thesis.

Klinkburg Sentences

October 17, 2017 / efuller2 / 0 Comments

Before Klinkburg Edits

Although technology is making it easier for young people to ‘multitask’, it isn’t as helpful as they might think. Technology makes it seem as though it’s possible to get things done faster by doing two things at once. Young people make the assumption they are able to text and drive or scroll through their social media accounts while studying for an exam. According to David Meyer, an expert on multitasking mentioned in Sam Anderson’s article, In Defense of Distraction, “ … multitasking, at least as our culture has come to know and love and institutionalize it, is a myth,” (Anderson, 4). By attempting to do two tasks at once the brain is going back and forth between the two tasks rapidly, while not completely retaining or comprehending the information of either task. This means that it actually takes more time to fully understand something when struggling to do two things at once rather than just doing them one at a time. Practicing this can make the brain more easily distracted because it will become used to trying to switch back and forth between two tasks. Even when trying to study for an exam students are easily distracted by people walking by or their phones going off. So, even when young people are attempting to focus on one thing at a time, their brains are still trying to multitask.

After Klinkburg Edits

Technology is making it easier for young people to ‘multitask’. Multitasking isn’t as helpful as people might think. Technology makes it seem possible to do things faster by doing two things at once. Young people assume they can successfully text and drive or scroll through social media while studying. David Meyer, in Sam Anderson’s article, In Defense of Distraction, says “ … multitasking, … is a myth,” (Anderson, 4). Multitasking means the brain is going back and forth between two tasks rapidly. The brain doesn’t retain or comprehend the information of either task. It takes more time to understand two things at once, rather than one at a time. Practicing this makes the brain more distracted because it becomes used to switching back and forth between tasks. Students trying to focus on studying are distracted by people walking by or their phones going off. When young people attempt to focus on one thing, their brains still try to multitask.

Learning Log 6

October 16, 2017 / efuller2 / 0 Comments

Sentence-Level Error

When peer editing other’s work I have noticed that many people struggle with the use of commas. Some people use them too much or don’t use them at all. Commas are a tricky subject and I know that I am sometimes unsure about when to use them. Usually, when I read a sentence out loud and it sounds weird without a pause then I add a comma. I have also noticed that many people accidentally put two spaces after a sentence or don’t put the space in the right place when using a comma. Some people just write very quickly and when they read it over to themselves they don’t catch the small errors. I have a hard time knowing what my voice is when I am writing. I recently just edited a peer’s essay and her essay had such a clear tone of voice and it differently than you would typically see when writing an essay, but she made it work. When I am writing and reading in my head I have a certain voice that I can hear, but I feel like in comparison to others I do not have a strong tone with my writing. I would like to try to improve that and also try to make less sentence level spelling errors in my writing.

Learning Log 5

October 16, 2017 / efuller2 / 0 Comments

MLA Formatting

To properly document my sources in the past I have used easybib.com. That is a good source to use when working with online sources because you can just put in the URL and it will give you all the information you need. You can also use this site for books and resources that aren’t from the internet. I have found the the Little Seagull handbook is very helpful. It lists many different ways to cite sources, but it is hard to know which one to use. Knowing how to use the “Russian Doll” structure for document sources is also helpful, but when using this I became unsure if I was actually doing it the right way for the different texts I was using. I lack confidence in knowing if I am actually using the right format and I plan to pay more attention to the details about the text. I will pay more attention to things like, how many authors the book has or what kind of article the work is and if I am unable to find this out myself I will look them up to know for sure and become more confident.

Learning Log 4

October 16, 2017 / efuller2 / 0 Comments

Critiquing work

It has been difficult for me when peer editing to look at global revision before paying attention to local revision. I tend to get stuck on the wording of a sentence if it doesn’t make sense to me and have a hard time looking at the big picture. During the first peer editing session my attention was grabbed by local revision errors and made minimal comments on global revisions. When editing during the second peer editing session I payed more attention to the author’s organization. I gave suggestions about the organization of the paragraphs and said to move quotes closer to the beginning of paragraphs. I also gave suggestions about connections they could make to the text with specific quotation examples to support their claims. “People in the digital world tend to choose not to focus on communication like you said and you could support this with a quote from page 6 in Anderson’s text.”

Learning Log 3

October 16, 2017 / efuller2 / 0 Comments

Employing Techniques

At the beginning of English 110 I approached reading an essay by trying to read critically and interact with the text. I would circle words I didn’t know the meaning of, look them up, and then write a synonym so I would remember what the word meant when going back through the text. I also would read the questions about the text before actually reading the text so I would know what to look for when reading. If I agreed or disagreed I would write in the margins. I would also ask questions if I didn’t understand what the author was saying. I also apply these techniques of active reading, critical thinking, and informal reading when reading articles for my psychology class. For homework we are usually assigned a couple articles to read and then answer questions about. To know what I’m going to be writing about I read the questions first and then mark where there are possible answers to the questions in the text. To improve, I could possibly read with the idea in mind that I will be using this article or essay to write a paper about and could look for ideas that interest me and that I could expand upon or connect to another piece of work.

Learning Log 2

October 16, 2017 / efuller2 / 0 Comments

Integrating Ideas

In the past I have only ever really used quotes to integrate my ideas with others. I have been working towards transitioning into a quote and introducing a quote in a smoother way rather than just plopping a quote in the middle of a paragraph. For English 110 we had to read through our first essay prompt and highlight the different aspects of summary, paraphrase, quotation, analysis, and synthesis. After doing so, I found that I don’t paraphrase or synthesis as much as I could. I incorporated quotations into all of paragraphs and was able to analyze them well. An example of a quotation and it’s analysis is from my first essay prompt in the fourth paragraph, “‘… the regions involved in emotional control and higher-order cognitive function,’ (Henig, 204). This means that even towards the end of a young adult’s college career and into adulthood they are still developing their emotional control and problem solving skills.” I was able to use a quote from the text to support my claim and then analyze it by putting it into my own words to further explain how a young adult’s brain is developing. To pursue this learning goal I plan to incorporate more paraphrase and synthesis of the ideas from other texts.

Learning Log 1

October 16, 2017 / efuller2 / 0 Comments

Ability to Revise

I am working to achieve the goal of approaching writing as a recursive process by writing with the mindset that my first draft is not my final draft. When writing the first draft for the first paper for English 110, Emerging Adulthood as a Life Stage, I was weary and unsure about changing things. After having it peer edited and talking about ways to change the organization in class I became more comfortable with making global changes to my first draft. Peer editing also helped me learn how to make the claims of my paragraphs more clear. Instead of starting off my second paragraph with a quote “According to Robin Henig’s essay, What is it about 20-somethings?, emerging adulthood is a period of ‘identity exploration … ‘” I revised it to start by saying “Emerging adulthood is a period of “instability” which gives young people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five a chance to find themselves and their purpose.” By changing the first sentence I was able to make the topic of the paragraph more clear. After this first essay prompt I was able to go about the process for writing my second essay prompt a little differently. Before actually writing a rough draft on the computer I wrote down different ideas from each text we were told to use and connected them to see how I wanted to my make claim for the prompt. After that I outlined the ideas for my essay by coming up with a topic sentence then listing the claims I wanted to make and the evidence I planned to use to support those claims and writing a few sentences for what I wanted to talk about in my conclusion. Then I went back to my thesis statement to make sure it fit the claims in a specific way.