PB@B

I don’t know exactly what this is supposed to be like to be honest. An essay would be strange since we would just be listing the 5 examples with fluff between them; however, a list seems strange as well since it wouldn’t really be writing—and this is a writing class. So don’t judge whatever I write below to much since I am thoroughly confused. 

The move “Introducing “standard views”” was last seen on page 3 of the introduction to Spaces For Writing where it is written, “Often, when people talk about beginning a writing project…”.

The move is approximately 3-14 words long or 15-42 letters(no spaces). It is known to legitimize the claim of the writer, and to introduce new ideas to the reader that have a seemingly strong foundation(because it’s not yours). If you see this move, please run for your life and sacrifice a family member if you have one that you don’t like that much; it is believed to be very armed and very very dangerous.

Move: “Introducing an Ongoing debate”

Technique: An advanced move which grants the writer the power to quickly show the reader the two sides of the debate. In an argumentative paper, hopefully the writer makes it clear which one is better. You must use the weight of one argument to springboard that power to the opposing arguments.

Evidence: On page 7 of the introduction to Spaces for Writing, it states “In college classrooms, some instructors will encourage you to compose within the rules and expectations of specific academic disciplines….and some will want you to experiment wildly.” 

Requirements: Has to display to completely opposite viewpoints and it is recommended that it favors one side vs the other. For example, on page 7, the rules professor is dressed sharply but brutally boringly while the experimentation professor is dressed like an extra from the rocky horror picture show. Since I think the audience of this piece is college-aged kids, the fabulous one is very much favored.

^^These two moves are almost at half of my word count so I will now proceed to tone it down.

Move:”Indicating who cares”

Location Page 13 Writing Spaces 

Quote: “If we hadn’t all been willing to work with others’ suggestions, we would have had a very limited and unsatisfactory book!”

Me: Their claim in this little section of the comment was that learning to write and communicate effectively is important. This quote is saying why it is important: to work together to achieve something that you could not have done on your own.

Move:”Signaling who is saying what”

Location: Page 18 Writing Spaces

Quote:”The renaissance writer Leon Battista Alberti had strong ideas about how images told a story”

Me: Not much to say. Almost word for word what is in the appendix. They just told the reader who was saying something.

Move: Not really sure if this counts per se, but there is a list of transitions in the back of the appendix sooooo, I’ll count that as a move…”transition”

Location: Page 14 Writing spaces 

Quote:”consider this:”

Me: The appendix classifies this as a “example” transition. I think I agree with that. In the example from the text they do use consider this as a precursor to an example. 

No appendix: The leap of faith

The reason why I chose to use Writing Spaces as my article is twofold. 1: I am really just a rather child to would rather read comics than wordy things, and B: that I think that since they are a comic and it does include pictures it makes it so they have a much greater move set when compared to pieces with just words. When the background of your words is illustrations rather than whitespace, it gives you options.

Move: Banana Hammock

Description: When the actual words are ambiguous or vague; however, the context of the writing is given in the background picture of the comic. In other words, when the words are read alongside the picture that is included behind him, their meaning becomes clear.

Example: This is used in a least half of the frames in the comic.

Move: Hidden Guava

Description: This is when the writer seemingly defines a correct solution space within the context of the topic, just to show how this solution space breaks down when pressure is applied to it. More simply, the define a set of rules, just to break them later to make a point.

Example: Page 5: “Our main goal is to help you think about….of course, the rules can differ depending on the situation.”

Move: The Shrink ray

Description: When the writer puts himself into his work. This one is pretty specific, but the writers of this comic do it quite a bit. It is used to make the situation seem more real and give them credibility.

Move:Reality vs Fiction

Description: When the author plays with the fact that our expectations of reality can often bleed into the fictional space when we read and our mind slips further and further from reality. The authors use this when they compare the animated version of them to the photo version of them.

Move: Repetition in space

Description: Within a series of image, the main focus of each image is the same, while the background changes. This gives a sense of meaningless and futility to the background. They use this once at the end of the comic, but I think it is cool.

thlog 4

I think the thing that will stuck with me the most is all the stuff about the research in the library. I didn’t really find the activity to be particularly entertaining; however, odds are, that I will have to research a good bit of stuff in the library throughout my college career. The ability to manage a search engine is a key tool in the research process. I feel like that is a sad reality of adult life. In school, we are taught these grand ideas;however, in real life most of what we do—when school is over— is the tedious part of school that we try to ignore. So I always try to identify parts of school that exemplify the next level, and I think that library research is one of them. Another interesting idea that came out of the library research thread was the two ways to search. You can either have a specific idea in mind and use the search engine to expand on that idea or you can have a very big/general idea and refine it with the search engine. Both of these ways of doing them are interesting, but the fact that you can do either using the search engine is pretty neat. Another thing from class that I thought was interesting are the grammar lessons that we will have to do in groups. Like I have said before, I think that grammar is kind of interesting to look at. I don’t really like grammar tests or anything, but the actual study of grammar for use in my writing is interesting. So I am very interested to see when the day comes that we actually present what all the grammar rules are like. Considering that I don’t even know what hedged language is, it should be quite informative.

PB@A

My article: “COMPLETIONS OF (epsilon)-DENSE PARTIAL LATIN SQUARES” by Padraic Bartlett.

Part 1:

There are things that these articles have in common. Both the real scholarly article and the fake one have introductions. The introductions serve to both educate the reader in the subject matter that follows and introduce the reader to the claim being made. However, the real scholarly article also contains a history sub-section with the introduction section. This gives the reader even more background into the subject matter. A history sub-section is probably needed because the specialization of these papers are so specific that even people within the field are not expected to know everything within the field to this degree. Since this article is a math article, the introduction also lists a series of conjectures and theorems that will be used or—in extraordinary articles—proved in the paper. Conjectures are ideas that have not been proved yet but are theorized by great scientists that came before.Theorems are facts that have been proven by previous scientists. In my article, the section after the introduction is “The proof”. At the start of it, he states the fact that he wants to prove, the he proves this fact using the previously established theorems in addition to original ideas and logic. This is very different from the computer generated paper, which had no logical flow or claim to prove. The only part after the proof is references where the author cites where he got his theorems as well as his background in the field. The computer generated paper had a reference page as well; however, when if you look closely you will find that it is filled with high-brow jokes instead of real sources.

Rhetorical Features:

The are both being made for a higher education level audience. The main difference is that while Dr. Bartlett’s paper is being made for people within his field, the computer generated one is made to confuse people who are not in the computer science field. The tone of both is scholarly, clear, and concise. They are both trying to make a claim, and an important part of any claim is the ability for people to understand it and follow it. In order to achieve this, the authors both try to make a very straightforward argument. Although the vocabulary of the argument is overflowing with words that would make the Mr. T shit himself, the actual logic behind the argument as well as the way the argument is presented are both relatively straightforward. As for visual literacy, they both use graphs or picture or such to further illustrate their arguments.

Part 2:

The specific aspects of the scholarly piece that struck me as the most important parts were the claim, data, and warrant. This is because they are the building blocks of any argument, this paper included. The claim tells the reader what the paper is trying to prove. In my article the claim is the theorem that he is trying to prove. He starts by proving three lemmas, assistant theorems, then uses these lemmas as well as outside theorems and critical thinking to prove his claim: any (epsilon)-dense partial latin square P containing no more than (gamma)n^2 filled cells in total is completable for (epsilon)<(1/12),(gamma)<(1-12(epsilon)^2/10409)(Bartlett 15). The data is the outside evidence(theorems, conjectures) that he uses to give credibility and legitimacy to his claim. The warrant is his use of the evidence to prove his claim. it is his own thoughts and it is the root of the paper.

Thlog Life

Just finished my WP#1, 'twas tough. Don't want to talk about it. The thing that is most drilled into my mind from class is the concept of freedom. Zac was talking about how some people found the freedom that we were given in the WP overwhelmed people. Personally I didn't see "That Much" freedom. There was more than a typical essay but less than what I would consider an overwhelming amount. However, the concept of being overwhelmed by freedom is interesting. I have felt this before. When I do I typically think:"What is freedom if not a prison that we created for ourselves that prevents us from following our destiny." I know it's a stereotypical angsty teen thought, but I think it's kind of an interesting one. We grow up in an environment that celebrates and glorifies freedom, yet there are times in our lives when we wish that someone would just tell us what to do and give us a sense of purpose. At least I do sometimes. Life is complicated; freedom further complicates it. "Give me liberty or give me death"(Patrick Henry I think.) "You can take our land, but you can never take our freedom."(Mel Gibson?) We love that shit. However, one would have a hard time arguing that life wouldn't be easier if our paths weren't pre-determined. To give some perspective, I would consider myself a libertarian politically. I can trace most of my political stances to the writings and ideas of John Locke, so don't call me a fascist. It's just sort of a strange though. Just like some of us were overwhelmed by the freedom that the WP provided, a lot of people(I think) are overwhelmed by the near-limitless freedom that life provides us. Sure, we don't have unlimited freedom anymore(thanks Obama), but we are told from birth that we can do whatever we want to do in life. The flip side is that some people don't know what the hell they want to do, I sure don't. It makes you question why we have this glorification of freedom in our society. I think that is is two-fold. One, selfishness: freedom gives us the right to be a dick, which we all want to be a dick sometimes. Two, hope(this is the more romantic version): looking into the stars and thinking that we are masters of our own destinies is a lot better than knowing that we will be remembered as the 17th best aglet-checker on our assembly line by the time we are 20(if our paths were determined). However, if you think of yourself in geological time, then our lives might as well already be over, with our fate sealed by death. No matter how/when we die it's going to happen a certain way. No one can really change how they are going to die since the process of dying happens only once. It's like trying to change how you are going to wake up tomorrow. Since you won't wake up tomorrow twice, you can't change the result because until you actually wake up the result isn't sealed into place. So once we accept that we can't change how we are going to die, we accept that our method of dying is predetermined. Working backwards from that through induction we might realize that our whole life is predetermined. We can change our past behavior the present time, but never our future behavior since it is yet to happen. What was I talking about again? Freedom I think? Well I think that's enough for now(heh).

THLOG10(binary)

I’m having a tough time writing this blog. All I can think about is Spongebob when he tries to  describe what he learned in boating school.

We studied genre’s a lot. We studied

rhetorical analysis a lot. I liked the genre 

generators quite a bit; they were interesting. 

We discussed WP#1, which I am still having 

trouble grasping. I don’t know if we are 

supposed to analyze the topic within the 

genre across the sources or analyze the 

genre through the topic across the sources. I don’t know if that made sense, but thats so be it. Ehhh, I’m sure I’ll manage. Ooo, I liked the writing tips and tricks, like the stuff with hyphens and dashes or the part about reading it aloud or the part about copying and pasting 3 times. //<—-run on sentence) I don’t how to punctuate that so I just used a commenting method from comp sci. Anyways, I have always kind of liked learning about grammar. Not exactly about the stuff like compound, complex, and compound-complex sentences, but rather little tricks that help you structure sentences with more variety. It reminds me of learning or gaining a new ability in a video game. Good fun. Lets see what else did I learn in boating school? I learned a lot of new vocal words for rhetorically analyzing something! Exigence, audience, ethos, pathos, logos, uhhh rhetorical discourse, I think thats it. My understanding of these words is spotty at best, but at least I will recognizes them and be able to form some sort of response to them in the future. So that’s good. 

P.S. I know the pic of spongebob is a little big, but I had a tough time simply getting it here. Beggars can't be choosers.

PB1B

The Plugging and the Chugging

We had our orders: Plug and Chug. Plug and Chug until we understand what the hell was going on. Simple orders when we set out, we didn’t know the hell we were getting into. Me, Colonel Mustard, and Sergeant Pepper have written over 1,000,000 * 10^-6 computer science papers in less than an hour, and we are writing more as we speak. They don’t seem to suspect our presence; our infiltration has gone unnoticed. Everything is going according to plan. It hasn’t been easy, but we have gathered the following information. However, I urge any readers to question if they want to continue reading. The words that follow are not for the feint of heart. If you despise the laughter of children or are allergic to cats, do not read on. This is your last chance to turn back. Alright, this is the information we have lost a lot of good men to obtain:

There seems to be a defined chain of command. First, there is the Abstract. This acts as the epidermis of their network. It covers the entirety of the paper but at a very thin level. It strips away all the complexities of the paper, and simply explains the fundamental idea of the behind it. Next is the Table of Contents. It is the male nipple of their network; we don’t know what it’s used for. It may be a hyperlink to webpage, or perhaps there are words hidden beneath it in either really small font, or written in the same color as the background. In our opinion, it cannot be trusted. Next is the introduction, the bellybutton of the network. It starts the flow of information in the essay—like the umbilical cord—however, it’s not very deep. It gives an outline of the paper, and tells the reader what to expect to the from the paper. The difference between the introduction and the abstract is that the introduction gives clues towards the structure of the paper, while the abstract only concerns itself with content. Next is the framework, followed by implementation evaluation— subcategories Hardware and Software and Experimental Results— then related works, and finally conclusion. I am to lazy to write blurbs for each of these; however, I am not to lazy to not write about how these pieces form a genre(wicked double negative action there). Simulation Terminated.

Now then, what I got from this genre generator was how you can have the proper skeleton of a genre, filled in with buzzwords and fancy punctuation, and still not fall into that genre. It might look like it belongs there, but it could still be nonsense. None of the papers I generated made a lick of sense, but they followed most if not all the conventions of a good research paper. To me, this says that a genre can’t be solely defined by its conventions. It is the conventions that form the skeleton of the genre, while the meat still defines it. 

Pandyland Comics: where dreams come true. Not for me. My experience in Pandyland was wading through tens of comics up to my hips in puke, vomit, and dead cats. As my mind was starting to close in on me, I realized that there seemed to be some sort of pattern developing. Each comic generally started with some sort of opening frame, followed by a transitionary frame, then finally followed by a conclusion. Each frame is animated and most had some sort of words associated with them. It is really quite simple. The interesting question that it raises: are these all that one needs to fit into the comic genre? My argument would be yes. It may not be on the same level as Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, but it is still a comic strip. This seems like an oversimplification, even to me, but I can’t poke any holes in it. However, this is a quite a contrast from what was found in the first genre generator, where although it may have fit into the skeleton, it failed to exemplify the genre. I think this means that even the process with which we analyze genres changes with the genre, which is something I never really thought about before. 

This brings me to my final topic, what do these websites tell us about genres? As I have said, I don’t think that these websites reveal an elaborate, definitive revelation about genres. Instead, I think they fit together, like a jigsaw puzzle, to form a slightly less blurry picture of what defines genre. They show that we have to use different tools to analyze each genre we look at, we have to look both at the format and the content of a genre to classify it, and we have to think logically rather than formulaically to define a genre….Buzzwords!!!

PB1

PB#1

Titles: The Science of Titles

Quick, things that I can see from my desk: Rubáiyat of Omar Khayyam, The Blazing World and Other Writings, The Tempest, Dune, Problem Solving with C++, Super Mario 3D World, Super Smash Bros, Probability, PHYS 3 Basic Physics UC Santa Barbara, and The Da Vinci Code. Those were all titles. Now, what do they have in common—besides being outrageously overpriced and displaying poor life choices? They’re short? They’re simple? Catchy? Maybe. Boring? Who’s to say; however, what I am here to say is that titles are cool. Not so much because of their actual “content” per se, but rather because every artist, author, director, journalist, blogger, and creator of any sort had to come up with one. It’s no easy task. Imagine, you pour thousands of gallons of blood, sweat, and tears into your creation, then you are forced to forced to describe it in ten words or less, its sole purpose to pique the interest of every plebeian whose vision happens upon it. It’s kind of insulting, yet everyone from Shakespeare to me had to title their written words. So, how did we do it? 

Well, as you can see, I went for the classic “boring research paper” model for this paper, it’s not final. It follows the age-old *a short, concise intro* : *a slightly more thorough explanations of the subject contained within the words written below this* spiel. I was taught by some teacher that it would make my writing look official. But, that is obviously not the only way to title anything. If you are writing a goosebumps story, you want to title to be simple, yet still haunt the reader into early adulthood. If you are painting a portrait, you either want to title it the person’s name or describe them in an exquisitely awkward way. If you are writing a song for Panic! at the Disco’s “A Fever you Can’t Sweat” album, you want the title to have nothing to do with the song, apparently. What I’m trying to say, is that titles don’t have to have a lot in common to still fall into the genre of titles. The conventions of a title: short, describes what it is, catches the eye(sometimes). These are their guidelines. Artists can either follow these in some capacity or completely ignore them, it’s up to them. That’s what is kind of interesting about analyzing titles as a genre. It is a very obviously defined thing: whatever is first seen by the viewer /reader/ listener. However, they are hard to get right. A good title has to simultaneously catch the eye and intrigue the owner of the eye—easy enough. The catch is that the criteria for this changes significantly per eye, and it is faux pa to lie blatantly in the title for some reason. What makes a title a title in short: has to be a short summary of the content it represents, while both catching the eye and piquing the interest of those who see it.