To Next Year's English 110 Students

Dear future 110 students,

I'm not going to lie to you and tell you that this writing course will be easy. It is honestly the same as some writing courses that you have taken but also different in a lot of ways. Throughout the course of these 10 weeks, I have truly worked my brain in ways that I thought I would not at all. I feel like I am leaving this class with a new outlook on what it takes to be a writer.

To be successful in this class and to write a pretty good RAP (rhetorical analysis project), you need many things. First, I would say bring all the expericence you have from writing that you did in high school or even from the college courses you have taken up to this English course. Second, I would say come to class with an open mind about college writing and the types of things they allow you to write about. Each English course has a specific theme assigned to that section. These range from heroism in movies to the rhetoric (underlying message) that is in texts we look at whether it be commericals, TV shows, or movie trailers. Some of the themes may be like "oh! This should be no problem whatsoever!", others are like "WHAT NOW ?!" I feel like the professors (well mines at least) do a good job of making it clear to you as a student what your job is as a writer in the project. You spend a good bit of time on it even though you may not get as much time as you like. But that's one of the many things you deal with being on the quarter system.

For me, there wasn't one specific route I chose to go down to make my paper a good one. I tried many different things. I think the best advice I can offer you as a student who has taken this course before is to just WRITE. You don't even have to neccessarily know what direction you wanna go the first time around. Just write your thoughts about the theme you have. What types of things really interest you about the topic? What things do you really dislike?,etc. It will help you a lot more when you get to the actual writing of the paper.

I hope the advice I have offered you is most helpful. Have fun, good luck, and as always...

GO BUCKS!,

Tacoi

Transforming My RAP to Commonplace Material

A few days ago, I read one of the Commonplace articles. Coincidentally, the article that I picked out was fairly similar to the RAP that I wrote. It was about the effects that hip-hop videos have on the perception of African American women. It gave me a little boost of confidence about being able to successfully convert my paper from an academic piece of work to something more relaxed, laid back, and less academic.
I honestly feel like my paper is ready to go onto Commonplace with minor changes. I think that in order for my paper to fit into the audience that Commonplace seems to draw, I would have to make my paper less academic. I would take out all the citations that are in the paper. I also know that there is at least two or three sentences for starters that I would like to take out of my paper.
I imagine my readers being other college students and possibly college professors. I think that if I "rewrite" my paper and gear it more toward my peers, the college professors reading my paper would also understand the way that we write when we are relaxing our writing; almost like writing prose or a poem.

On Finalizing a Paper

I don't really look for mistakes that are commonly made in writing. But when I was in high school, my friends often asked me to revise their papers for them. I found myself making a lot of grammar corrections, changing word tenses, and also taking out and adding commas. I find that many of my friends use "red" when they should really be using "read" (ha ha). I know for me when I'm writing I do use words like "though" and "however" a lot. I don't know why but it is really a bad habit that I have. I guess I think it makes the paper sound better in way. But I must admit, I do overuse those words. If I had to give you guys any advice about things to watch out for when editing your paper, it would have to be WATCH THE COMMAS!!

When I usually wrap up a paper, I read through it thoroughly and slowly so that I may catch any missing words or words that should not be. I find that during this stage, I implement the MLA format by adding page numbers and doing a works cited page.

My RAP Thus Far

So I decided to write this blog on my RAP and the work that I have done on it so far. It is still very much a work in progress but I am getting the hang of writing it and where I want it to go. My RAP is about stereotypes in the media and how the media makes it okay to stereotype and how they ultimately lead to hate crimes. The piece of text that I am using is the McDonald's commercial called "McNuggets Lovin' (Don't Be Stingaayy)".
The writing for the RAP has been almost the same to writing I have done before in that I had to do a lot of research to produce a paper. But it's also very different because in a way, the sources that we use are the paper. I know that we are not supposed to let our sources be the voice of our RAPs but we do depend heavily on them. Without them, our papers would be NOTHING! And in a way, it makes it hard not to let the sources speak and have their own voice.
As far as revising my RAP has gone, I must honestly say I haven't stuck to one particular route. One thing I can say that I have done though is worked on the paper piece by piece. You know how sometimes when you write papers, you can revise them as a whole? No, I find it difficult to do that with the RAP. I take the paper piece by piece and add more here and take out some there. As each day goes on, I find that one day I may love a sentence and the next day I'm wondering to myself WHAT in God's green Earth is it doing in that paragraph. Ha ha.
Right now, I can't worry about how I'll end up revising my paper for Commonplace because I know that the RAP I have right now still needs a lot of work. So as I revise and reorganize, I can probably begin to think about how I'll revise my RAP to go onto Commonplace.

A Commercial for Thought

So the other night, I was watching America's Next Top Model. Like any other television show that we watch, there are commercials over a span of five or so minutes. Right off the bat, one of these commercials caught my attention because of how silly it was. It was an AT&T commercial for their new BackFlip phone. The commercial included two African American guys, probably about college level sitting on a bench outside. The commerical begins with one of the guys texting about the theme of clothing for that day (for lack of remembering, let's just say day one was jackets without sleeves) and the other guy texting back. Then the camera pulled back to reveal that both guys were wearing jackets without sleeves. The commercial continues to do this for about two or three more days, with a kind of music playing that I like to call "phone commercial music". You know the type, the music that seems to have a sound in common within the music no matter if the commercial is Sprint or T-Mobile. Anyway, the guys text back and forth for about two more days about the theme of clothing they are wearing before going into info about the phone (which was afterall the point of the commercial to begin with).
I feel like this commercial is so silly. It uses two things that I find that high school and college students both love to gain and keep your attention: clothes and cell phones. I think that the intended function of this commercial is to get people (mainly the two groups I said before) to buy
these cell phones with keyboards to make texting and tasks such as updating your status on Facebook simpler (as it does say in the information giving part of the commercial something about Facebook). The part that I find most silly is the secondary function of the commercial. I think the "hidden" function(s) of the commercial is/are:

• texting your friends while you're sitting next to them is cool
• wearing matching outfits with your friends is cool

I don't know about you guys but the only reason I find it valuable to text my friend when they are right next to me is if I have to tell them something that I just canNOT wait to tell them and we are around people that I can't gossip in front of. Other than that, it's a waste of a good text (although I have unlimited). And when I was in high school, me and all my bestfriends would wear matching shirts and stuff like the guys in this commercial did but we only did it on special occasions like Valentine's Day. We didn't do it on a day to day basis. And now that we're in college, I highly doubt that we would wear anything matching. College is a chance to express yourself and find your identity. You just CAN'T find it trying to be like someone else, even if it's a simple thing such as dressing like them.

The Social Networks We Use

We are "Generation X", which means we have more access to technology than any other generation before us. We use the web to log onto social sites such as Twitter and Facebook everyday and think nothing about it at all. But who would've ever thought that people use Facebook almost as a blogging site to get their points and views across? As crazy as it may sound, it's true. Social sites give people a persona to develop and portray to hundreds of thousands through the World Wide Web. You can develop opinions about things you feel passionate about at the same time as telling people what you are eating for dinner. If you have ever made a status on Facebook about something that everyone may have an opinion on, you may have tried to persuade others to think like you. Even when you get a handful of people to comment on that particular status, in a sense, you have become a "blogger" and you have a post that people either agree or disagree on, or are indifferent about. Crazy right? Well it's true in a crazy way. We use these sites everyday and if we used them in a "blogging" kind of way, we could inform people of the problems of the world and also get messages across quicker. Plus, the words won't get mixed up because it's not via mouth =).