Final Blog?!!?!!?

Blog Entry #13

To continue with, if cars are not enough of a reason for you to want to like the mechanical engineering field, then you can look at the energy we use. This makes since with all this brutal chemistry and physics science classes that engineers must take just to get that glorified degree. It makes since though, with engineers having to take in weight distribution to cars and wind impact, then surely they can design ways to capture that energy as well. If a car has to go through that air as aerodynamically as possible, then there are things that can be designed to capture that air and use it to produce different types of energy. Just look at all the wind turbines that are up as you do the drive from Pullman to Seattle or vice-versa. These wind turbines produce 10 percent of Puget Sound Energy, the suppliers for the Seattle area. Yet another reason the engineering field is amazing, just to know what kind of impacts that there can be on our future energy usage.

All in all, the mechanical engineering field is a great field with a vast future. Ranging from transportation to energy, there really isn’t anything that this field doesn’t encompass. Whether you are a car junky, air nut, or green goer, the field is the ideal for everything. Overall with my interview and research, I am excited for this field and entering it in my future. Hopefully one day, I can contribute to something that you yourself spend money on to help you with your daily grind.

I change my intros to each sentence so that they aren’t the typical intros that I have noticed myself falling into. I also put in numbers to support my reasons so that it would leave a more interesting point in the readers mind. In my final paragraph, I tried to incorporate more voice so that the reader would feel me, and also leave a better feeling at the end of the essay.

Blog post #12!!!

Blog 12:

     After looking further into my ethnography essay, I’ve got one main concern about the essay. The concern is what exactly to focus on my topic rather than having such a big focus. The things that I enjoy about writing about this topic are that too, learning what the entire Mechanical engineering field is about. Also, I like the interview portion of this essay, as it includes a hands on focus towards the essay, and it lets you look into the mind of a person in that field.

My (rough) introductory to my essay:

                                                 The Crafts of the Engineer

                When you think of an engineer, what all does it really have. The fact is that they impact everything that you really use. From the computer that typed this essay, to the car or bus that delivered this computer to its location. Engineers even have impacts on how the building you are standing in was designed. Where all does this lead to impacting me? The field of Mechanical Engineering is where we further our story of industrial endeavors. The range of this field is fascinating and the thoughts of just where it could take us. Mechanical engineering does the work on all our mechanical technologies that we have today, ranging from fountains and cars to airplanes and plumbing. As my quest to fully understand this field has lead me to interviewing Bill Williams, who worked at Boeing for 40 years, to researching what mechanical engineering has been doing on other projects to help further our laziness to the extreme all for making life easier.

Blog Entry #11

Blog Entry #11: Interview Questions

Here are some of the questions that I plan to ask in my interview:

      

             1.       What made you want to become an engineer?

             2.       What is the part of your job that you enjoy the most?

             3.       How long have you been working as an engineer?

For my interview, I will be talking to Bill Williams. He is working in the engineering department at Boeing. I’ve known Bill for about a year now, and have talked to him through email mostly, so I plan to do my interview over interviews.

The questions that I will be asking are going to be both, closed and open-ended. The variety of my questions is pretty good, but still sticks to the point of engineering. I think that I won’t have to add more variety because I’m pretty happy with how my questions are of right now.

After viewing other students’ blogs, I feel I could use a little bit of revising on my questions. I feel mine are almost at a done stage, but they could use a little touch up here and there.

Blog # 10

Clair Lauer's "Technological Journey"

  After reading Claire Lauer’s “Technological Journey”, I learned one major thing that I started noticing as I was working on my drafts. As Clair Lauer kept going along with her remediation, she kept finding better ways of showing her point and I seem to be going through the same thing in my project with pictures and ideas.

   Also, when Lauer talked about why she chose Prezi as her presenting tool, it made since because it was similar to why I chose Prezi for mine. What I wasn’t thinking about that she talked about was using it as a one page presentation tool that you could zoom in and talk more descriptively about each subject on the main page ultimately giving you more pages.

   This example is good for me and almost gives a reassuring feeling that it’s ok to be constantly changing my draft every time that I take a look at it.  The fact that it’s eventually going to give me the outcome that I am looking for from seeing the work process the Lauer went through in making her own remediation.

Link to Clair Lauer’s “Technological Journey”

Blog entry #8

   

Remediation To Writing

    After reading the article on WikiBooks of Digital Rhetoric/Remediation and Remix, I saw the website lead to one meaning of remediation. The website says that remediation is like reviving an old subject to a more “now” style. Taking something that was great that is now outdated, to making it more up to date and more suited for the now standards.

    The examples used in the website are helpful in showing ways to remediate ideas. They show that text is ok to use in websites, but the text that is used is very in depth and has lots of meaning of what they are talking about. The pictures are also used so you can get rid of some of your text to help provoke a point and make it have more impact on what the viewer is looking at. They show pictures of someone doing something that the website is advertising, instead of using plain boring text talking about the fun in the environment.

     For my subject, rule changes in football for the good, I see a few ways I can show meaning about the reasons instead of text telling it. For instance, I can show videos of the after effects of head to head hits and how the person has to live instead of text telling the reader of the life-changing effects. Also, I can make the reader feel more sorrow and guilt about the rules and make their feeling of sorrow come out and then make them want the rule changes to be more-so implicated.

    Questions I have regarding this article towards my subject really are that if the argument is more of a current debate already happening in the now, how do I actually remediate the subject? Do I want to focus more off a video argument to get rid of text, or try and change focus to a different audience and refocus my ideas towards keeping the now and implicating changes for the future?

Click Here for website on remediation

Blog Entry #6

Blog Entry #6

     My writing process so far is a little behind from where I would like it to be, I feel as though I am a little bit behind on my sources and feel like I’m not entering them into my paper as much as I should. I feel as though that I can make my paper stronger if I  use them to more focus the counter arguments.

    I feel that my research process is better than how it reflects through my paper. As I stated before, I feel that my sources are there, just that I need to invoke them more into my paper so that they make a bigger and more lasting effect on the audience.

    After reading Zinsser’s article on Clutter, I liked how he used weeds as his example. A weed is something really that you don’t want it to grow where it is, and that really is clutter in your paper. If you don’t need to make a certain point bounce around in your paper, don’t. Trying to fake it to make it works in some parts of the paper but not all. If you think that a certain point of your paper needs more description, then use the description, and it’s fine to do that. Where if you are at a part of your paper that doesn’t need to be continued, then don’t because back to the weed reference, then it doesn’t make your yard or paper look as good as it should be.

Zinsser's article, Clutter

Blog 5

Blog Entry #5 – Academic Research

    Academic research is a very relevant aspect to our lives today. Whether it is for an essay or just to talk about something, it is better to have done research on what that subject is. Not only does it give you more facts to bring forward on the issue, but you have more confidence about what it is you are talking about.

    In my field, there are a couple of ways that research will help me. For mechanical Engineering I can do research to help understand why certain things are built like they are, like how a car or truck is built. Also, I can look into why certain builds a more power efficient than another style of build.

    I chose this image that best fits my attitude towards academic research because I see research assignments being different paths. To start off, you can take the path that starts you in the beginning looking the same if you don’t look over your research, but then the path starts getting tough and hard. The other path gets easier as you go if you go through your research and understand it so that you can reference it more easily the further down the path or writing of the paper you go. After seeing research like this, I see it as a necessary step towards any paper, so I don’t love it, nor do I hate it.

Skip #4 Blog post

Skip #4 blog post

Blog #3

The Summary and What to Take With of Two Passages

      The essay, “Shitty First Drafts” by Anne Lamott is basically an informational piece about what you should be thinking in your first draft. The first draft isn’t about getting to perfection, rather tackling the objective of writing itself. This draft is more of an ease into the activity of your paper and not as daunting as just doing the paper flat out on the first sitting. All you really want in the first draft is to be descriptive, and break the ice of the paper.

        In Richard Straub’s “Responding - Really Responding - to Other Students’ Writing,” is about what it says, responding to someone’s paper. When judging a first draft of a paper, compliment people once, for each critique you give them. Also when judging a paper, don’t judge it with the author in mind, because no one gets better when you let things slide because of how your opinion of that person is. You should always judge a paper equally, and as if you were talking to the person in person and not as a teacher would.

          After reading both of these passages, I can take two main things from them. Don’t dive into projects, but take them by steps, and don’t let things slide just because you know who they are. If I do these, I can use them to tackle difficult tasks easier, and give everybody fair and equal opportunities.

         The biggest quote I get from Lamott’s essay is, “Now, practically even better news than that of short assign­ments is the idea of shitty first drafts. All good writers write them.” This tells me that it’s ok to fail and that I shouldn’t expect perfection from myself right out of the gates in anything because even the best people at things take perfection in steps and not dives.

         The quote that spoke out to me in Straub’s piece is, “Try to focus your comments on a couple of areas of writing.” This quote can relate to anything that combines multiple things together. For instance driving, you need to teach someone how to start a car with a clutch before you can actually teach them to drive. I can relate that to writing because there are many steps that I can focus on one at a time to get better at writing.

Sources:

  Richard Straub's piece:

http://www.loribethdehertogh.com/101/Spring13/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Responding-Student-Writing.pdf

  Anne Lamott's piece: 

http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/english/wwwroot2/ta/hyperteach/pdfs/shitty.pdf

Blog Entry #2

Rory Sutherland’s “Life Lessons from an Ad Man”

As Rory Sutherland describes normal steps he sees in advertisement and reasons for advertisements portraying what they say. Rory said social media has potential to add value to something and I agree with that. If someone sees a star wearing a certain clothing brand, people are more likely to want to wear that clothing brand, thus making that clothing brand worth more. This is the rhetoric tools of Pathos because the clothing brand uses star appeal to help get their name out.

Rory mentioned interface in his video and is true too. He talks about examples of this in his video like the potato having one way where it failed because it was not presented in the right way, and the way where the potato was made into a very common food in Germany. Interface also affects the way people experience web based writing because if a website does not attract the reader, then they’re less likely to talk about the site and they won’t be spreading the word making less people hear about the site.

After watching this video, I learned a couple of things about rhetorical strategies used in advertising. One example is making something that you are arguing against, and make it go hand in hand with something that the general public does not like. Rory mentions an example like Turkey trying to stop people from wearing the veil by relating it to prostitutes. Another example that Rory referred to was ads that think outside the box to give something a new look. An example was Shreddies stopped advertising their cereal pieces as squares and started showing them as diamonds and did not change anything about the cereal at all.

References:

Rory Sutherland’s video, “Life lessons from an ad man.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXneozZwJR0

Aristotle Book I Part II

    The three modes of persuasion that Aristotle refers to in Rhetoric Part II of Book I are personal character of the speaker. The second is putting the audience into a certain frame of mind. The third mode of persuasion is the apparent of proof. The modes relate to writers today and are the guidelines writers should follow when persuading someone in things like pollution and effects towards global warming, and to things like politics. The character of the writer is very important, because no one will believe someone who lies and won’t admit to things that they’ve done in the past. The second mode tells us that we should focus on the audience we are speaking to. If you are trying to persuade a business man, you’re going to want to focus towards different aspects than if it were a farmer. The third mode is important to writers today because if you don’t have proof to what you say, then no one will take your reasons seriously.

     A term from Rhetoric that I saw is enthymeme. Enthymeme is the conclusion of your argument that includes the major and minor premise, or reasons why your reason is right. An example of this is we should drive electric cars because gas cars give off exhaust that ruins our atmosphere.

     After reading all of part 2 by Aristotle, it made me realize things about writing for persuasion. One should not make this more difficult than what it is. For example, you know the audience that you are writing towards, so you don’t need to put in every little bit. In persuasion, it’s allowed to assume that people know the most basic stuff if you project the piece of writing to the right audience. For example, Aristotle talked about the Olympics and that he could assume that people knew what the winner got, which was a crown back then, and could leave that information out of his writing.

Sources:

1. http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/rhetoric.1.i.html

2. http://rhetoric.byu.edu/figures/e/enthymeme.htm