Reading response

This last reading for this class, "Revising for Purpose" Ballenger writes about different ways of revising your paper. I thought the main purpose was to show you some ways to make your paper better even if it seems that it is okay and does not need revision. He tries to make you see that in your paper your thoughts as of now may broadened and you may want to maybe add or clarify on a particular subject or purpose. I liked what he had stated on page 228 were he said "Revision, as the word implies, means "re-seeing" or "reconcieving," trying to see what you failed to notice with the first look." I thought that this excerp was really really good and it really made see that the purpose or revision was to see what I failed to notice with my paper when I first wrote it and turned it in. What I also liked was when he talked about how he is in pursuit of a point and then it eludes him sometimes. I feel like that sometimes, I feel like I have a main point in my head but as I write it down on paper it eludes my or I tend to go way off track.
I thought what he wrote on knowing your words vs. the words or the article or book was a good thing for me because it should me that I should balance and must balance the both of them so that it can flow well within my paper. Its a good way to show voice in my paper.
I thought the cut and paste excerpt was great but I wasn't to fond to probably try it out myself because I think it wouldn't work for me I feel it might just make my paper be all over the place but "hey! what do I know right."
Lastly, I thought that the part were Ballenger goes into what we need from the reader was a great. I really liked how he said that the reader will remind you what the "purpose of your paper is and is it clear and if the thesis is convincing" I thought that the readers are really there to help you better your writing and what they say or change are more that likely right because they are the ones who are reading it and we should listen to them because they know and get a better feel as to what needs to be done in your writing because essentially it is them who you are writing to and want to convince.

Revising for Purpose from The Curious Researcher

This reading was all about how to revise your papers, and not just revision when it comes grammar, but revising with an actual purpose behind it. Ballenger starts out this chapter by describing his high school girlfriend and how he wasn’t sure if he really liked her at first, and then went on to describe qualities about her that made him hesitant to date her, but they stayed together for three years because “I persuaded myself … that I couldn’t live without her. There was no way I was going to break my white knuckled hold on that relationship. After all, I’d invested all that time.” Ballenger then went on to explain how this is similar to the relationships writers have with their drafts. We’ve worked so hard and when we finally finish it we’ve developed such a tight knit relationship that the problems within our draft are difficult for us to see. But Ballenger points out that revision is a process where we need to “step back from the draft and change your relationship with it, seeing it from the reader’s perspective rather than just the writer’s.” You can do this in many ways, my favorite listed in this reading is “wrestling with the draft.” This is an exercise where you choose a random page from the draft and have two different colored highlighters. With one color you go through and highlight parts where you are a less active author (this includes: facts, quotes, or any ideas presented that are not your own.) And with the other color you highlight where you are an active author, which is your interpretation and analysis or synthesis or these facts and quotes. By doing this you are able to see whether you rely too heavily on your sources and need more of your own thoughts, or if your opinion is too strong throughout the piece and you need more sources to back it up.

I found this reading to be entirely helpful, and I plan on using all the exercises and tips listed within it. I have found throughout my academic career, that even if an exercise seems long and tedious, if it something Bruce Ballenger recommends then it is something that will most definitely help me in my writing process. Sometimes when I am in the revision process I don’t put nearly much thought and time into the effort because, like I stated before, it’s hard for me to find errors in my draft or I am just not revising with a definite purpose. But because of this reading I know how to revise properly, and yes the little details are important, but being able to revise the draft and content as a whole carries much importance as well. And I am so excited to apply what I have learned from this reading in my revision process these next couple weeks as I prepare my portfolio.

Revising for Purpose

Ballenger discusses the ideas and concepts in his essay about revising a research paper. He mentions that trying to view your paper with a decisive view or objective view will always help correcting your paper easier. Yet so many of us, including myself look at our own papers and when we read it to ourselves we don't see the errors that might emerge in our papers. Does it flow well, does it flow well with the integrated facts that we researched for the paper? The more common error Ballenger mentioned was the ability to take the facts we drew from other readings and change the wording into our own, while siting the source, to allow your own words and facts flow together to make sense to the reader. In this reading it discusses ways to help one try to discover ways to get all aspects of the paper to flow. In this class we are about to take our essay and cut up portions of it and try and place certain phrases to see if they will match up with another. Now there will be failed attempts but that is how we discover what works or not. There is also ways that are easier by reading the essay out loud to yourself or other people. This will allow you to hear differences or at least see if the sentences flow together. Reading or letting other people read your essay will allow input that you may not have known or thought about to integrate into your paper. Which is the beauty of individualism since most people can view their own writing with a tunnel view point. I know personally when I edit my paper, its brief and I just look for the easy to find things. With patients and strategy I can find my errors and perfect what I can to allow my paper to sound better and seem more fluid. So Ballenger is right, finding ways that works for you to help edit/ revise your paper to make it better is something every write should and needs to do. Since your first try will never be as good as several attempts down the road.

revisions

In the reading "Revising for Purpose", Ballenger writes about different ways of revising a paper.
Somehow stepping back from your draft and looking at it objectively, bearing in mind that this is one of the hardest things to do with your own drafts. Starting with what you believe is the main purpose of your paper, and that over time this purpose may have broadened or narrowed to something different. Another was to mark up what was your own words vs. what is taken from other articles, making sure you have a good mix of both and that they flow together well. This is a good way to see if you have a voice in your paper instead of just a list of facts.
Writing out your main point and coming up with questions about it is another good way to see a different side of the point. This is always good to do with other people. They always see things that you will not. You tend to get tunnel-vision on subjects and a fresh look into a subject is always a good thing, just as we have done in our workshops. I have taken a lot of good info from those. Ideas I did not think of, but were quite obvious to others. The cut-and-paste revision is one I believe would help quite a bit. Cutting up paragraphs and then looking at them to see how they fit the main point is a great idea. Sometimes paragraphs fit into the paper but if you read them alone, you might be lost as to why you put them in or you may find they fit somewhere else better in the paper. this leads into the information part of his writing. Sometimes when you put information in, it does not flow very well. Revising facts in your own words takes some work. Doing it in multiple revisions can really help you. Finally, reading your own writing out loud can help to determine if you speak with a voice or just a list of facts that sound like you are reading from the dictionary. Rewording things as you would say them can make more of an impact to your readers. Ballenger speaks of many different ways to revise in this chapter. All of them make sense, but as he says, you may not always be so willing to part with the version you already have. I believe the workshops really help with this, showing you other avenues you can take that you never looked at before.

Op-Ed Piece

“All Men Are Created Equal”

We live in a very hypocritical country. That being said I think it also needs to be noted that we live one of the best countries on this planet. One that offers freedoms and opportunities that are unmatched. But in the American “melting pot” where diversity is said to be what makes this nation so unique and fascinating, there is a discrimination plight that has become so large it is said to be our day’s civil rights movement. Across the United States homosexuals, and heterosexuals for that matter, are fighting for gay rights, primarily the right to marriage.

A common argument surrounding gay marriage and why it should not be legalized is that fact homosexuals cannot reproduce. But this argument assumes that the sole purpose of marriage is to procreate. I then am forced to pose the question: What about couples who are infertile? Or those who choose not to have children? Or women who are married and postmenopausal? If this argument were valid then all marriages between heterosexual couples that fall under these categories should be nullified, because the couples can’t or won’t have children. And if that were to occur it would surely cause an uproar among the population because of the discrimination of these certain couples. Then why is there not an uproar over the fact that this is occurring to homosexual couples? This goes to show that marriage serves more than just the purpose of procreation but interpersonal commitment, religious reasons, morality and sexual satisfaction, and the legal entitlements of having a spouse, or so says the author of The Case For Same-Sex Marriage, William Eskridge Jr. Since it’s understood that the reasons listed for marriage other than procreation are valid, we cannot in turn deny the right of marriage to homosexuals because they cannot reproduce.

Within the union of marriage there are approximately 1,049 rights allotted to heterosexual couples and of course denied to homosexuals. In an Editorial from March of 2000, the New Jersey Law Journal gives some examples of rights denied to committed same-sex couples. “Same sex couples who are prohibited from marrying are excluded from a panoply of legal benefits specifically tied to legally recognized marriage: for example, access to a spouse's medical, life and disability insurance; hospital visitation and medical decision-making privileges… workers' compensation survivor benefits; spousal benefits under annuity and retirement plans…the right to refuse to testify against one's spouse…” These rights granted to only legally married couples can affect those who are not married, whether they are homosexual or heterosexual. But heterosexual couples have the right to change this and become married, homosexuals however do not.

Based on gender homosexuals are discriminated against each day by denying them the right to marriage and all other rights that ensue from this union. Gay marriage should be legalized in the United States, it’s as simple as that. The injustice that homosexuals face every day is appalling and needs to come to an end by granting these rights.

How Good is Your Parent(s)?

There are various causes for teenage social development but what is the real cause? Sure TV, radio or magazine articles can seem persuasive but is it the real reason, but wait what about the parents? Since children from the age of zero to eighteen live with their parents, they pretty much are under their influence their whole eighteen years. Not all parents are the bad cause for teenage social development, but some are and that’s what I’m getting at.
According Suzanne T. Eller, author of Real Issues, Real Teens most teenagers acquire 75% of their parent’s habits and characteristics and apply them as their own. Many parents believe they are doing a good job raising their teenager and allowing them to become a nice well rounded adult but is that really true? Sure each one of us has our own opinion about certain specifics in life but are they the things that are worth having a narrow-minded opinion on? Such as a bed time and when it should be for a teenager, how to treat men or women, how to treat any authority, how to communicate with other people, or how to do a common household job. I know as a nineteen year old boy I was raised to respect and view women better than myself but not all boys view women the same way I do. I’m not saying they are wrong, but where is the fine line to set a standard?
Kerry Patterson words it perfectly in the book Crucial Conversation Tools for Talking When Stakes are High, “parents are like the “Bill of Rights” in the household. They tell their kids what’s right, wrong, smart, stupid, respectful and not, how to behave and how to wash their hands”. This is very true; if a parent isn’t suppose to be this guide then who is or what is? As little as three years old we look up to anyone who appears bigger than us to help or direct us in the right direction. We never knew if it was “right” but we had the subconscious faith it was. Again since we live with our parents, not the animals down the street or have headphones strapped to our heads all our lives, we must rely on our parent’s judgment to be the good and just answers.
I talk about this stating a problem, so is a there something I can do or we can do to change the view points of faulty parents? Funding for parenting classes, more books with relating stories, more advertisements, maybe inspiration music? As a nineteen college student, I don’t have experience to say what would be the most effective to a parenting change, but as a reader, assuming you’re a parent, can have the most influence on a positive change in parenting to help the social development of our new and growing teenagers. So it’s not a radio host that dynamically alters the minds of young people or the spark that comes from a magazine page but the adult parents the teenager lives with for so many years that influences the possible errors in social development.

The failure of Social security

Chris Estey 11/13/2009 English 102 Christy Vance

Would you trust your retirement fund to the stock market, or even a portion of it? This thought is part of many proposals that have been introduced to reform Social Security. Personal savings accounts for people, to place a portion of their payroll taxes into, to be invested in the stock market.
The Social Security program will not last in its current situation without making some changes. With Baby Boomers beginning to retire now, the money going into the program, vs. the benefits being paid out will begin to turn the current ratio upside down, slowly draining the surplus funds, until there will not be enough to pay 100% of all benefits to retirees.
In the 1980’s, the government made some changes to the system to keep it afloat, including higher payroll taxes and raising the standard retirement age from 65 to 67 over a period of years. While this did help the program at the time, it was only a temporary fix to a problem that would continue to grow with inflation and other programs in government being funded from the surplus and more of the same kind of changes would be unrealistic, placing an even higher tax burden on today’s workers. Instead, placing a percentage of worker’s payroll taxes into personal savings accounts that could be invested into stocks and bonds, that over time, would bring in more funds for retirement than the current system could, given enough time for the investments to grow. Opposition to this reform such as
say it is a backdoor assault on social security that will bankrupt the system. While this will certainly change social security as we know it now, if nothing is done, the system will surely fail in the future, leaving many without needed funds to help them live in their later years. Many critics say the stock market is too volatile to chance investing retirement funds in, citing examples of recent decline in the market and scandals where many people lost much of their retirement. Peter J. Ferrara, a former senior policy advisor on Social Security for Norquist’s Organization said that even with the ups and downs of the market people would certainly end up with more over a lifetime of investment than they would with a pay-as-you-go Social Security system.
Whether you would trust a system that relies on stocks and bonds and has the possibility for great loss or gain, or one that will see a certain amount for sure, knowing it may decrease in time, some type of change to the system is inevitable in the future.

Homosexuality

The American Psychiatric Association voted to remove homosexuality from its list of disorders, even though one study showed that 50 percent of the male homosexuals surveyed in one American city had had at least 500 sexual partners and 28 percent had had 1,000 partners. If that is normal behavior then our society has got problems. A representative of today’s mainstream attitude among psycho-therapists recently wrote in a professional journal that most people in his field believe “that human disturbance is largely associated with and springs from absolutistic thinking—from dogmatism, inflexibility, and that [being extremely religious] is essentially emotional disturbance.” In other words, the way to relieve your guilt about an immoral life is to begin believing there is no such thing as an immoral life. Whatever you want to do is moral, if you want to do it.
The same attitudes are springing up everywhere in other fields, including law and the entertainment world. It is apparent that many of those who produce today’s movies, TV programs, and popular music, as well as those who set the editorial policies of many national magazines, believe that homosexuality is harmless, if not healthy. The filmmaker Kieth Merrill said that today’s movie producers have no more hesitation about showing homosexual acts than they do about showing people eating dinner.
Something deep within the collective souls of our society has gone wrong, and it cannot help but influence our attitudes and dull our normal senses in frightening ways. We are almost suffocated by a dense fog of sensuality. Pornography and moral permissiveness are so widespread that there is nothing to compare with it in the last several centuries in any civilized society; not since Rome, not since Sodom and Gomorrah. The enormous scope of the acceptance of homosexuality is what makes it so dangerous. Even when we are surrounded by abnormality or homosexuality, everything somehow seems so normal. As written by Pascal, “When everything is moving at once, nothing appears to be moving, as on board ship. When everyone is moving towards depravity, no one seems to be moving, but if someone stops, he shows up the others who are rushing on, by acting as a fixed point.”

Jovano's Op-Ed

Jovano Taitano
November 12, 2009
Christy Vance

When you think of teachers, the first thing we remember is the “impact a special teacher or teachers had on us- a teacher who refused to let us fall from the cracks; who pushed us and believed in us when we doubted ourselves; who sparked in us a lifelong curiosity and passion for learning”. (Michelle Obama) So it’s not surprising that the most influential people in our lives were the people who stand up every day in front of their classrooms.
The most standout issue that has been put off for way too long is the issue on teacher salaries. “The current system for paying school teachers in antiquated, counterproductive and in need of drastic reform” as stated by The Times.
A statement by Lewis Goldstein, Princeton Regional Schools’ assistant superintendent for human resources, stated: “People go into teaching not for the money it’s because they love it, their hearts are in it.” This may be true in some sense but in many sense Goldstein is wrong.
The teaching profession is for the most part a low-risk, high-reward career. The 10-month pay is pretty comfortable, and the health and the pension plans are pretty much unrivaled in the private sector.
“There are many teachers who are not happy with the way their salaries are. Teachers, no matter how well they performed, would receive the same bump up in pay if they were on the same step. Teachers with advance degrees translate into better performance, received even more. There is no incentive, anywhere, in any contract, for teachers to improve their performance in the classroom. If it weren’t for the personal pride or peer pressure, there would really be nothing to motivate a teacher to do more and do better. Right now, there is absolutely no reason why a teacher would not get by doing the absolute minimum required to get a satisfactory annual evaluation.”(Neil Brown, former teacher)
The current system of pay does nothing to encourage innovation and excellence, but creating a new system will. It would be a hard and long process to do so but getting a better pay for teachers would provide quality teachers, thus, encouraging them to remain with the school overtime. It is in their best interest. Some pay forms such as “differentiating pay based on content area is problematic; you simple cannot have separated salary structures for subjects like math, physical education and English. Negotiating contracts individually, in essence treating teacher like vendors, is also a non-starter, as well it should be.”(Neil Brown) Through my numerous studying and time on this issue, the only option is to divide up any negotiated salary increase so that a portion of it is given to teachers based on years of service and the remainder is set aside to reward performance.
The United States of America needs to understand this reality and create a bold new initiative to reinvent teacher pay schemes. “We need treat teachers like the professional they are by providing good salaries and high-quality professional development opportunities. And we need a government to support significant efforts to recruit and retain teachers and to reward high-performance teachers.”(Michelle Obama)

Reading for 11/2

Reading Response
In Chapter 4 of the Curious Researcher the author discuss a couple of things to avoid and things to do to make a good argument paper. The first thing he talks about is writing the paper weeks before it is do and not leaving it to the day before. A good bit of advice. Another thing that he discusses is what to do with a mass amount of research that an author may have collected about their subject and what to do if the research found is contradicting. He suggested using the research the best re-enforces your stance on the subject.
Later in the Chapter the author discussed the use of the work “I” in an essay and whether or not it makes the paper to personal. Statements like, “I believe that…” or “I think…” usual aren’t necessary because if your are stating the fact as the author of a piece of writing it is apparent that the facts or opinions are your own and those statements are not really necessary.