Reflection 10

One thing from writing the paper that I prefer is having the time to really think about my responses. when you’re interviewing, it’s hard to know exactly how the other person is going to respond. I feel a lot more comfortable doing assignments where I don’t have to rely on another persons answers for my own success. I think in the end that is why I chose to do the interview at the end instead of throughout the podcast. It allowed me to say everything I wanted to say without having to worry about responding to another person in the moment. A lot of the time I find having improvise in graded situations really stressful.

In my revisions I essentially took my paper and reworded sections to read better. I also cut out some of the more specific evidence that began to feel out of place once I changes the tone of the paper. In the podcast I was able to be a bit more to the point in how I phrased things, as I felt my opinions on certain things came through in my tone of voice.

I definitely feel more comfortable writing a traditional paper rather than a podcast. As much as I love listening to podcasts, I honestly don’t like listening to my own voice for that long. There is also the added factor of music and effects in the podcast, as well as needing to account for background noice and microphone quality. I also don’t love having to revise an original paper so many times in order to get to the final podcast script. In past experiences with podcasts, I find it easier to talk it out line by line and figure out the wording as I go. Breaking it down into sections makes recording seem like a less daunting task.

Reflection 9

After reading these reflections I found that two things I worked on this semester were articulating my thoughts more clearly and being more specific in my writing. These are both pieces of advice that I have gotten from past teachers and writing mentors and it seems like I have kept them in mind as I wrote and reflected. I feel like the reflections also show which assignments I found most interesting. Reflection 5 on empathy and “Devil’s Bait” is the longest reflection.

Reflection 8

In my life I mostly do artistic composition. I usually pick up a pencil at least once a day to create. There have been times when I have been able to combine traditional classes with art in the past. I think including a creative aspect to school is really important and can be helpful in keeping students engaged. Sometimes I struggle with having to split my time between core classes and art classes. In high school, I always had to put more weight on the core classes, and that is still a mindset that I am trying to break. Most of the time art is considered a luxury, it was something that I got to do when I had time, but now that I am choosing to pursue art, I am able to feel less guilty about doing art instead of other work. 

I also value musical composition a lot. I do not write music myself, I was a band/chorus kid for most of my life. I really miss making music but it is rare for me to not be listening to music in my free time. I think having a musical background makes it easier to recognize and appreciate the complexities in music, and I am really grateful that I had the opportunity to become versed in it.

Reflection 7

Peer review is a skill that I have been developing throughout high school until now. In high school, I would often run into the dilemma of not wanting to be too harsh with my peers. Peer review was often superficial. I have been working on being more honest during peer review, as I know that that is the only way to truly help someone improve their writing. One thing I want to work on in peer review is including labels for what kind of revision I am making (I, E, O, V, L). I think using labels would make it easier for my peers to navigate through my comments. 

Reflection 6

After reading the comments from Project 2, I feel like one of my strengths is my word choice. I think I had some really strong moments as far as syntax goes in the last paper. A weakness that I have is not always being specific enough. There were some sections where I used more general terms, which seems ironic when we’re focusing so much on not generalizing this semester. As far as caveats go, I think they are good to include and that they can be really helpful if used effectively, but sometime it feels like I’m trying to force one instead of it happening more naturally. I fear that it will not feel like it fits where I put it.

Reflection 5

Empathy

After reading both “Devil’s Bait” and “Empathy is Overrated,” I am less convinced of empathy than I was before. Jamison’s essay introduces a series of people who have all had similar experiences, whether their disease is real or simply a shared delusion. It is in the fact that they have all had similar experiences that they are able to support and believe each other. On page 229, one of the women afflicted with Morgellons, a woman named Kendra, says, “If it weren’t happening to me… if I was just hearing this from some regular person, I would probably think they were crazy” (Jamison 229); this quote shows that it can be hard to understand others if you are not able to share or imagine a persons feelings or experience. In this sense, empathy seems like an isolating concept. The doctors were not able to believe their patients because they cannot see of feel what is happening to them. Yet the ability to emphasize is also what allows these people a community to fins support in. Is it really possible that all of these people are experiencing a shared delusion? Is it just paranoid people being drawn into a sort of mob mentality around the disease? In any case, it seems like the idea of empathy is both harming and helping these people.

In the Price essay, I came to the conclusion that the author was arguing that to be empathetic is to be passive. Price found a persons empathy unproductive when it came to actually finding solutions to the problems at hand. Not only that, but empathy can be misleading as it is impossible to assume exactly what a person is feeling. It is obvious why people fall back on empathy; they want to feel helpful and understand, which leads to assumptions that dont get corrected because people dont always want to say what they’re feeling. To me, it seems like the main issue is a lack of communication between parties, and a selfish desire to understand. Jamison almost argues the opposite. In Jamison’s essay, the patients’ empathy to each other causes them to move into action, getting together and trying to prove themselves right so they can figure out a solution.

Both authors give the benefits and downfalls of empathy. Jamison’s personal story about how she herself succumbed to paranoia after her botfly incident was an effective tool to instill doubt in the reader around Morgellons, after writing her essay in a scientific argument format. I think both authors do a good job in not just giving exactly what they think, but writing in a way that leaves the reader thinking and doubting.

Reflection 4

Project 1

I had some issues with the final draft of my essay and had to go back to revise it. I didn’t realize that we needed two sources in our paper, so I only had one which made my paper shorter than it should have been. There were also a few punctuation errors that I missed while I was editing. One thing that I need to work on in the future is further developing some of my points. I had some areas in my essay that I though went into enough detail but I probably could have gone further with them. This is an issue I have had in the past as well. In the future I will have an extra peer editor look for spots like that in my writing.

Reflection 3

I really enjoyed the prompt for paper 1. Categorization is a topic that is so present in our day to day lives that it is easy to find good examples of how it harms and hurts. It is also a topic that has an easy answer that is much harder to achieve than it is to find. I think the biggest changes I made in my essay were when I added examples. After having a couple peer editors, we decided adding specific examples would strengthen my arguments. This is something I try to do in all of my papers; however, I sometimes struggle with fitting my examples in smoothly and I often don’t know how to transition back to my original thought. There were also times when I wanted to include more authors from our other readings, but I wasn’t sure if I would be able to do it with purpose instead of just doing it to up the word count. I would have liked to go further into the historical aspects of categorization. I wrote a lot of my negative categories paragraph early on, and by the time I brought in examples, I liked what I had written too much to change it. I also enjoyed writing about feminism. While I am not a super active feminist (as far as activism work goes) I do identify as a feminist and it is a topic I can rant about.

Reflection 1

America Ruined My Name For Me, by Beth Nguyen

For this post I could have gone deeper into describing my ideas. There was a lot in my annotations that I did not include while writing my post. I find that I spent most of my time summarizing, which is a habit that I’m trying to move away from. While reading this article, I did stay away from highlighting; however, I did not do an initial scan of the essay, or do any research on the author. In the future I want to ask more questions and make more challenges while I’m reading.