Month: June 2016

Dear Administration,

You need to rethink your strategies for limiting irresponsible drinking among your college students.

Now that my Critical Thinking and Writing course is coming to an end, I’d like to take a moment and reflect on the year. I will not hide the fact that I was not excited to begin another English course during winter quarter. The reason why I was not excited was because I had always struggled in my writing courses through high school, and I just assumed writing was something I would never be good at.

 

Fortunately, Ms. Lueck’s class changed my thinking about writing. I began to think of writing as an avenue to get my thoughts out to the world, as opposed to thinking of writing as just another analysis of a book. Now I felt that I could actually write with a purpose, and that purpose being to share my opinion with my audience. The book she had us purchase during winter quarter titled They Say; I Say provided me with useful templates and techniques that I could use to effectively display my thoughts through writing.

My hope is that the information I learned from this CTW course will aid me in writing successful papers for future courses I have. Also, one of my main interests in life is politics regarding America, and I am optimistic that down the road the lessons I learned from this CTW class will help me if I ever want to write a piece about the political environment in America.

Recently when I made a trip to the local Safeway near campus I noticed something right when I walked in. They had positioned a rack of tortilla chips that were on sale right at the entrance of the store. They used large print and brightly colored signs to designate those items as being on sale.

 

They positioned the shelves of discounted tortilla chips right in the front of the store so that the attention of shoppers is drawn right to those items when they walk in. Their goal was to communicate to their audience, shoppers, that those chips were on sale. This form of communication could be labeled as multimodal composition used as a marketing strategy.

This form of marketing can related to positioning important paragraphs at the beginning or the end of an essay as to draw or keep the attention of the readers or audience. I found it very interesting to see rhetorical devices being used in non-writing formats. I’ve always recognized the grocery store’s tactics as marketing ploys, but I have never looked at them as a different form of communication or writing.

In my Political Science course about the economic policies of America, my teacher assigned the class three case study projects. For these projects he gave us a specific topic for each one, and then he expected us to do research on the topic and present our findings along with a thesis about those findings.

For one case study we had to take a look at our home towns and see what has changed in the past 5 years due to international forces. I slightly manipulated the prompt and chose to do a case study on the Major League Soccer team that will soon be formed in my city of Sacramento. The way I chose this topic was very free and natural. I started to generally look up things that were changing in the region of Sacramento. After a while I came across an article that cited the team was forming in the near future.

Using the lessons I learned from our book They Say; I Say, I set up my paper by defining the discussion that I was joining. I pointed out how the city and the MLS had been debating on whether the city should be home to a professional soccer team or not. Then after citing the discussion I was joining I started to give my opinions supported by facts of why the team should be formed in Sacramento. The tools I learned from this CTW class aided me in writing an effective case study paper.

Recently I saw this add campaign above online. The campaign is against drunk driving. The image displays one car split into two different vehicles, one being a taxi cab and the other being a cop car. The image also displays text reading, “Been drinking? Choose your ride.”

 

What the author wants to communicate to his audience is if a person has been drinking then they can decide between going home in a cab or being put in the back of a cop car and headed to prison. He wants to put the decision into a more blanked black-and-white statement that shows how easy it should be to decide between a taxi or a cop car.

The campaign is doubly effective because the image is so eye-catching that he’d immediately have the attention of his audience. He did this by taking a very common place image that people would recognize and transformed it to fit his needs. Also without having multiple images or a lot of words on the picture people can understand the information in a quick amount of time. This all leads to an effective campaign to limit drunk driving.

For our last project in class we had to create a multimodal composition of sorts. The multimodal project could range from social network posts, to videos, and to pictures. One project that caught my attention was that of my classmate, Anthony Iannitti. He chose to translate his academic writing into a series of Tweets.

Twitter has become entwined in the lives of people nowadays. You can’t go long without hearing or seeing something that was posted on twitter. It is a main form of communication especially for young adults. This is one reason Anthony’s multimodal project is so interesting. It is something that most of us in the class can relate to, so it is cool to see how he would take an academic essay and translate it into tweets.

 

Anthony wrote his research paper on the benefits of coeducation. The way he transformed his topic into a series of tweets was very creative. He made it so one student who attended an all girls school tweeted about how much she loved her school, and then in response he had one person reply to her and ask her a question about her college experience, and then he had a second person respond saying what she is missing by attending a single sex school. This was effective because the audience could understand the message Anthony was getting across through his modern medium of communication.

Today I wanted to take a look at Memes. Memes have taken the modern era by storm. If you log onto any social media you will see a variety of memes. Memes are a form of multimodal writings that combine a picture along with texts over the top of the picture. They are typically used as satire pieces to draw attention to specific events or relatable problems. Let’s take a look at the meme above.

 

The meme at the top of the page displays a young Keanu Reeves who has a shocked expression on his face. The text displayed on the picture brings up the question of whether college is just a scheme to force us to work by giving us student debt to pay off. I find this meme particularly effective because of the possibility behind the words. I had never really thought about college that way, but it is something truly interesting to think about.

 

The combination of the text and the words are rhetorically effective because essentially the author of the meme is displaying the reaction he wants to invoke on his audience through the picture of the man’s face. This is an interesting way of directly communicating to the audience how they should feel after reading what the author had written.

While listening to the research projects of my peers in the classroom, this picture displayed above was a reoccurring theme found in a lot of the projects. The picture is of Santa Clara’s newspaper which displays a title saying “Tradition Shattered”. This newspaper article was written in response to Santa Clara beginning to enroll girls into the school.

 

The immediate connotation the reader receives from this newspaper article is that it was a negative thing to allow girls into the school. The rhetoric displayed by the author using words with negative connotations such as “Shattered” is chosen to communicate a feeling or emotion to the audience. The author clearly wanted the audience to understand that he and possibly others were not happy with the school’s decision to admit girls. Also he put the title in all caps and formatted it in absurdly large text to emphasize the magnitude of the situation.

 

From my perspective I dislike how the author used his rhetoric to communicate the event of turning Santa Clara University into a co-educational school. He turned what could have a been an intriguing and monumental point in the school’s history into a situation that seemed to be a bad mistake by the school. The interesting part about this situation is that the author probably did not think his audience would change from the less accepting people of the 1960’s to the more open-minded people of the 2000’s.

We have worked three different types of writing throughout our CTW class, but I want to explore writing outside the realm of those three mediums of composition. Let’s take a look at the creative avenue of music. Modern day music is something which evolved over thousands of years, and is closely related to poetry.

The authors of songs, much like authors of academic writings, have intended audiences for which they have an intended message to communicate. The creative aspect of music is that the authors use many similes and metaphors to get their point across. In addition, they can change the music which surrounds the lyrics to affect the tone of the message. For instance, a love song might be accompanied by slow somber tones, while a song intended for people at a party might be accompanied by up-beat music with heavy base.

 

The other extremely creative thing about music is that even though the author may intend for an audience to receive a specific message the audience can interpret it many different ways. In fact, some authors even say that they let the audience decide what the song means to them. This is a characteristic that is unique to music because having that ability allows music to reach a broader audience.

If you’ve been paying any attention at all to the current presidential race then you are aware of the violence that has come along with it. This last Thursday I attended a rally for presidential candidate Donald Trump and what I witnessed after the rally was disgusting. As we were leaving the venue there were hundreds of protesters assaulting innocent people just because they were supporting a specific presidential candidate. In addition, as me and three of my friends were leaving the parking garage our car was attacked and horribly damaged by a mob of protesters.

What I saw first hand that day was not only terrifying, but absolutely pathetic. Here a group of people were taking away citizen’s first amendment rights through violence and intimidation, aspects that are common to fascist movements. Meanwhile, thousands of police stood aside and watched as these crimes occurred. Why? Because an irresponsible mayor told the police not to do their job they had sworn to do, which is to protect the innocent and bring in criminals to a court of law. When a mayor tells a police force to not engage these violent criminals, then the innocent are left without protection and without a voice.

So how do those being wrongfully assaulted for their beliefs get around the injustices that are occurring? This is where writing and especially multimodal writings come into play. The people who support the presidential candidate, but are too afraid to say anything in fear of being assaulted can instead use online publications to their advantage. They can make their voice heard through social media, blogs, and videos. This is a benefit of multimodal compositions that is playing a huge role in our world. The ability to avoid violent confrontations, but still be able to be heard is priceless.