Month: September 2018

The short essay, “Shitty First Drafts” was very relatable to me. I understood the process described very well. I agree with her process of multiple drafts. I think it is important to have your first draft be your “downdraft”, where you just get every single idea in your head down and somehow piece it together. Next, you compose your second draft which is your “updraft”. Here you fix everything up and piece it together. Lastly the third draft, you carefully go through it with a fine tooth comb, looking for imperfections.

My revision plan is to integrate my opinion more into my essay as well as building stronger claim sentences in each of my paragraphs. I will take the steps of figuring out what I want to relay in each paragraph and build a strong claim sentence that can be based on my opinion that I want to voice in the paragraph as well. My biggest challenge is finding one central topic to build my claim off of. I need to stay focused on the one definite claim instead of different opinions and ideas. I plan to read my essay aloud to friends and family member and ask them if they could pick out the main focus of that paragraph. If they cannot fully understand it as an outside listener, then I must go back and revise it to be more clear.

My impressions on peer review…

I think peer review is helpful in the aspect that you are given the opinions of other students. It is interesting to see the interpretations that other students have. It is especially interesting reading other student’s essays who read the same two pieces of writing as I did, but interpreted them differently. I find it to my advantage when reading other students work and seeing different techniques that they use when analyzing text. I find it helpful to see how they were able to integrate quotes as well as explaining them.

I believe that everyone should live life constantly learning and trying new things. When reviewing other students work, I believe we are learning. We are learning their style of writing and learning about the techniques they use to write a strong essay and relay their ideas. Later on, it may be beneficial for the reader to try to use some of the techniques they learn through reading others’ papers and apply them to their own writing.

One thing that I find not beneficial is having someone make a wrong “corrections” to your essay. Especially in the beginning of the year when classes have just started and we have not yet written a paper, having someone else correcting you paper is scary. Just starting college, no one in our class has yet written a college essay for our professor. We do not know how the professor grades, and do not know what the professor is looking for. I find it helpful to start peer review after we receive feedback from what the professor is looking for on our first essay.

To me, art is not a waste of time. I thoroughly agree that art is not a waste of time after thoroughly reading Southan’s piece multiple times with different points of view, as well as listening to the Ted Talk featuring Zander’s point of view about music as an art. Through brainstorming, I feel that it somewhat helped me to draw a few connections between the two pieces. Both articles are trying to help others live their best life. The Effective Altruism group feels that it is important to forget art and to help people financially rather than creatively. The creative group of people are also trying to help people live a great life, but by displaying their talent and inspiring people.

I believe that when people are sharing their own musical talent with the world, they are benefitting others. Many times when I am down, playing music has helped me through my time. It has, in fact, cheered me up several times. It as also made me think about the lyrics and see a different point of view. Looking at different artists’ work helps us look at different places and situations differently than we would have before.

Art may not financially fix every situation, but in my opinion, art is existent for the better of society.

In the third ted talk, “How Does Music Transform Us?”, Benjamin Zander displays his appreciation for music as it is a form of art. He believes that art has no limit and that art has much power over people. He believes that it, “speaks directly to the heart”. 

He states early into his TEDtalk that music may not,” necessarily change the world, but that it has the power to change us from within.” As a conductor, Ben gets to look into the eyes of the players. He finds himself to have great power when he looks into his players’ eyes and sees them shining. 

The musical piece that the TEDtalk played during the conversation reminded me of a movie called “The Notebook”. The same musical piece was played in the movie during sad times. Like they discussed during the TEDtalk, “it [music] can change the way you experience something”. If I had watched The Notebook without the classical music playing in the background then it may not have been as emotional.

As Zander expresses his feelings about music, he feels that, “it opens the emotional pause to all of life’s experiences”. I strongly agree with these thoughts and think that music is an important role in forming our emotions.

While re-reading the article, “Is it OK to make Art?” after obtaining information from the Effective Altruism website, I had a slightly different perspective of the article.

One brand new thing that came to light after re-reading the text a second time is that, “Everyone can be doing more than they currently are”. After going back and forth trying to pick a side whether I agreed with the EA’s or if I agreed with the aspect of art and creativity, I could not choose a side. However, I do believe that every single person could always find a way to help others more than we currently are. 

Something new I noticed was the analogy that every time we stop trying to stop the world suffering around us, it’s like, “taking a nap” and ignoring the girl who was drowning in the pond. If we are not constantly working towards our goal, then we are actively working against it, by not fixing it.

Decoding the text helped me to better understand the text. For example, I used http://www.dictionary.com to find definitions of words like coalescing, futility, negligible, as well as egalitarianism. Knowing exactly what each sentence was saying helped me to comprehend the message behind the words of the text.

The first thread that I was personally shocked by was when the article described the findings of Peter Singer. He published an essay which questioned why when people saw a girl drowning they would jump in and save them without a doubt. no matter if it were their fault or if their clothes would get wet. He applied the same logic to people dying of poverty and different diseases yet we have the opportunity to help them. For some reason, most people choose not to. This was shocking to me as I had not even thought of this viewpoint. I know that many other places in the world have different living conditions than myself, but this opened my eyes to how much we need to learn to give back.

The second thread I agreed with is that good deeds come in all forms. I think that many people can do something to help out another person. The EA had proposed a question asking, “does your preferred good deed make as much of a difference as simply handing over the money?”. I believe that money cannot fix everything. Although money may help, it is not a cure. For example, countries in poverty do need money to help some aspects of their community, but they also need the right people there with the right mindset and capabilities. Not only do you need money to fix a country, but you also need the people who work together to build a community.