Jilian’s English 207 Blog Another amazing bgsu blog

I believe that computers are an essential tool in schooling today. With the advancement of technology, computers have increased in importance. If one expects to be successful in the modern world, one must be computer literate at the very least. As a future teacher, I believe that computers are very important. They allow students to have access to important information in a much shorter time. I realize that there are some downfalls, but all in all, computers are absolutely essential for schools today.

New audience: neighbor

Students do need computers in school. Consider your daughter; imagine she is attempting to go find a job when she graduates. She never had a computer or even had access to computer while in school. As a part of the interview process, the interviewer wants to know how proficient your daughter is with various computer programs, such as Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel, etc. The interviewer also wants to know how able your daughter is to research information using the Internet. In today’s fast-paced world, your daughter needs to be able to operate quickly and efficiently. Unfortunately, she’s never had access to a computer. She’s worked with the Internet a little bit but is nowhere near the skill level of the others competing for jobs. Your daughter is therefore unable to find a good-paying job, having instead to settle for a minimum wage job with no chance of ascension in today’s world. Do you see now why computers are so important for schools?

1. A public service announcement (PSA) ought to have a clear message.

2. A PSA ought to have a message whose goals are reachable and realistically attainable for the desired audience.

3. A PSA ought to have a designated audience that will respond to the message.

4. A PSA ought to have a message whose audience is obvious and whose audience is responsive.

5. A PSA ought to employ persuasive techniques that are effective in conveying the message.

6. A PSA ought to be effective in that it reaches the audience, uses correct techniques, and invokes a response from the audience.

7. A PSA should use the rhetorical appeals in a responsible manner; that is, a PSA should not attempt to only scare its audience. If fear is a tactic, fear ought to be used to make the audience slightly uncomfortable so as to invoke a change.

Idea #1

1. The message is a warning about posting questionable pictures on social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, etc. 

2. The intended audience is any person entering a career in which they will be in the held in high regard in society, such as doctors or teachers. 

3. The medium is a video. 

Idea #2

1. The message would be the consequences of students’ reading scores not improving.

2. The intended audience would be those who are influential in students’ reading, such as teachers and parents. 

3. The medium would be a video.

Idea #3

1. The message would be about the prevalence of adult illiteracy, especially with women, and what could be done to change this.

2. The intended audience would be those who are illiterate or maybe those who don’t read as much.

3. The medium would be a video.

The girl who posted the picture of herself was oblivious at first and became increasingly emotional towards the end of the PSA. The people at her school who represented strangers taking her picture from the Internet were all sorts of people: interested, curious, gossiping, probably perverted. These people acted as polar opposites to portray the effect posting online can have on an unsuspecting person.

The music in the PSA was effective. It added a dramatic element to the video and led to the message towards the end. When additional, dark music was played when the voiceover said “Anyone,” that added even more drama and lent more credence to the messsage they were attemtping to convey. They showed how frightening it can be to post things online. They also used the “It could happen to you” approach by using a student in high school, the intended audience for this message.

The voiceover added more intensity to this PSA. Her calm, cool voice added an extra emphasis to how important this message is. Her voice went from being detached to being slightly more emphatic towards the end of the PSA. The final plea of “Think before you post” was enhanced with the emphasis in her voice.

Text was not utilized until the end of this PSA but it was effective regardless. The few simple words were enough to drive the message home. The only words on the screen were “Family,” “Friends,” “Anyone,” and “Think before you post.” They were effective because the PSAs were not long and the words drove the point home.

I think that the literacy statistics are shocking, although being a future teacher, I have heard all of these warnings before. Students are not improving; students are stagnating. Students aren’t reading or writing enough. I don’t think these statistics were are stunning to me, although I can recall many of my concerns when first hearing these. I still have most of these concerns.

What concerned me the most was the first statistics on the page: “By the age of seventeen, only about 1 in 17 seventeen-year-olds can read and gain information from specialized text, for example the science section in the local newspaper.” This is especially troubling considering that newspapers are generally written at a third-grade level. What this statistic is implying is that teenagers cannot understand basic newspaper reporting but also that they cannot comprehend any of what they are reading. While the specialized text in a newspaper can include some foreign terms, there is usually an explanation and comprehension at the basic level can occur. Apparently, this is not the case. Being a future English teacher, this concerns me a great deal because I will have to work with students of this age range.

I won’t comment on the crime and literacy statistics, though those were interesting. It seems obvious that a lack of education can lead to crime but I don’t want to jump to any rash conclusions based on a set of statistics. The adults and literacy section was interesting, based merely on my own observations that many adults don’t read. While the finding that “50% of the population aged 25 and over read a newspaper at least once a week, read one or more magazines regularly, and had read a book in the past 6 months” sounds good, consider it from the other angle. That means that 50% of the adult population is not reading. This is an alarming statistic, as the deep thought processing that occurs when reading can stimulate brain cells, encourage brain development, and even promote lifelong learning.

To sum up, these statistics do not bode well for our society. We appear to be becoming less literate and this warrant deep concern. The question then becomes what we can do about this. How can we encourage literacy throughout one’s life in an increasingly technology-fueled world where attention spans are becoming shorter and shorter?

I think that in attempting to evaluate technology in everyday life, we will realize that technology plays far greater a role than we could ever imagine. It has become such an inherent given in every person’s life that trying to identify all of technology’s possibly benefits, hazards, and uses can be nearly impossible. It would almost be the same as saying, “Name how oxygen affects your life and everyone else’s.” I’m not implying that technology is as essential to being alive as oxygen is, but really, in order to effectively exist in today’s world, one must at least be familiar and competent with the basic technologies in order to function.

Technology is now something that people depend on to keep track of their lives. People now use their cell phone calendars, their computer planners, or even their iPods to stay on track and complete things that need to be completed. Technology has replaced many former paper-driven things, like bills, homework, letters, books, newspapers, etc.

I think that the benefits of technology are obvious. If they weren’t so, I don’t believe that so many engineers and scientists would have devoted so much of their time to developing it and making it better. Technology has become something of a competition, with the global powers continuously working to prove how much better they are than other countries. I believe it has moved from being an added convenience and something that could make work more efficient to something that proves how worthy nations are and how important they ought to be in the world of international relations.

I do see many threats of technology. Any system that can ultimately be so fragile is slightly unnerving. Considering that we invest so much of our lives into machines and networks of wires and cords that could so quickly be eradicated is disconcerting. Any person who has experienced a computer crash can attest to this (although I have a Mac, so I don’t worry about that as much). I think that the biggest issue with technology, at least as I have encountered it, is how it replaces human communication. Handwritten letters are considered antiquated and emails are much quicker. Face-to-face contact has been replaced with telephone calls which have been replaced with text messages. I’ve even found myself feeling awkward during phone conversations, having gotten so used to texting. It seems a shame that we have disregarded the importance of actual human contact so that we could be able to talk with several people all at once about nothing too deep.

The role on literacy is pretty obvious. Peoples’ attention spans have decreased so much that even long magazine articles are a pain to read. Most articles do not exceed two pages and book sales have sadly gone down, especially in actual bookstores. When people write, they often don’t experience the feel of the pen on the piece of paper, instead preferring to shoot out many more words in a shorter period of time. I don’t think I even need to foray into the field of spelling. No one can anymore.

In my education classes, my professors have always stressed the importance of the social factor of learning. Several learning theorists are also of the mentality that learning is a very socially constructed being and thus, any opportunity to work in groups is utilized. This has mainly been for peer workshops or peer reviewing. This can be a very helpful tool for learning. One good thing that I can say about peer reviewing, for me, is that it is beneficial to get someone else’s opinion on my writing and another person’s input. If I were ever stuck and needed a topic or a different direction, peer workshops usually helped me.

Being that writing is one of my favorite hobbies, however, most of the time, peer reviews were useless. I have never been one to write a “rough draft”–my rough drafts usually turn into my final drafts, the only difference being the title. With regards to the “writing process,” I usually only had one process: I wrote. This isn’t to say that peer reviewers didn’t sometimes find my typos or the occasional grammar error. Most of the time, however, my peer reviewers didn’t know much in the way of English grammar and thus were not helpful to me at all. This isn’t to say that the peer workshops in this class weren’t helpful. For the visual literacy narrative, the workshop really helped me gain focus and my group members gave me great ideas. I know that peer workshops can really help some people who need the extra push or need another helping hand or maybe just need to hear that they’re on the right track, but generally, peer workshops haven’t been helpful for me.

My monster is unlike any other monster. He has duo-tone hair of lime green and bright pink. A sharp sheet of metal has punctured the left side of his head, piercing into his eye and dripping vibrant red blood down his face. Housed beneath thick eyebrows, my monster has two different colored eyes: one orange, one blue. The orange eye is unfortunately on the sheet metal side and so it has a bloodshot tinge. Below his lopsided nose is his crooked mouth. He only has 6 teeth remaining, one of which is as sharp as a dog’s fang. The remaining teeth are plagued with plaque.

Beneath his pointed chin is a sturdy neck adorned with a magenta necklace. My monster is wearing a plain white tee. You see, monsters with four arms have difficulty finding shirts that fit properly. On the right side of his body, his first arm has scissors on the end instead of a hand. Below this arm is another arm which has a knife protruding where the hand ought to be. On the left side of his body, higher than any arm on his body, is another arm with a regular hand. Below this is another arm which is merely a bloody stump.

1. I chose pathos. Pathos is the rhetorical appeal of emotion. It draws people in and holds them there by appealing to their emotions. It can often appeal to sympathy (the commercials with the abused animals for ASPCA), fear (the commercials showing us the horrors we’re doing to the environment so that we will change), or desires (sex sells). 

2. I found a rather interesting commercial on YouTube. It’s from the 80’s and it is the commercial that introduced the world to the Apple Macintosh computer. The link can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8. The commercial begins with a row of people marching in a line towards a large room. At the front of the room stands a screen. The people are dressed exactly the same, except for one woman who is running with a hammer. The images of the identical people and the screen with the face talking to the crowd mirrors George Orwell’s 1984, the groundbreaking novel in which Orwell warned people of what his vision of 1984 was. In this vision, it was exactly like the commercial, save the girl with the hammer: everyone is exactly the same and everyone answers to the call of Big Brother, the face and voice on the screen. The people sit down and listen obediently until the woman runs in and throws her hammer at the screen. The screen explodes and words flash across the bottom: On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like “1984.” What was so interesting was how the commercial appealed to two different human emotions. The first emotion was fear; undoubtedly, it has always been a concern of people (especially, it seems, American people) that the government will completely take over and its people will be left automatons in a world completely free of independent thought. The second emotion it appeals to is sympathy. America, a country prided on its independence, always sympathizes with the underdog or the person going against the grain. Thus, the viewers sympathize with the woman dressed and acting so radically different from everyone else. The commercial also brings relief and a possibility of hope: when Apple releases Macintosh, people will once again have their own lives under control and will do so with the aid of a streamlined computer. 

3. Margaret Atwood’s piece “Somebody’s Daughter” also utilizes the rhetorical appeal of pathos. In the beginning of the narrative, she describes the life of the “people up North” and their hardships inspire sympathy in the reader. This point is truly driven home, however, in the final passages. Atwood writes: “The big round tent became a place of safety and comfort and healing for the women in it, and their writing also became–for most, I think–a place of safety and comfort and healing” (14). The pathos used in this narrative is effective. While the situations described for the women in the program were remote and unfamiliar to other readers, everyone has experienced the desire to have a place of safety and comfort. This feeling is especially driven home when the reader recalls what the women’s lives are truly like and the harsh environment they often live in. Atwood uses their situations, both geographical and personal, to appeal to our emotion. We sympathize with the women. We understand their plight. And we are also touched by the effect this program was able to have on them. Because of this, the use of pathos in this narrative was extremely effective.

I think that a good literacy narrative ought to tell an intriguing story. From what I read, the stories really captivated me and I think this is because they were told with such purpose. Each author truly tried to impress upon the reader what the importance of their story was and I felt it. I think that literacy narrative ought to be told with a purpose but also have a purpose to fulfill. Each of the narratives we read were very detailed, though I don’t want to confuse “detailed” with “used many words.” The Frederick Douglass narrative was short and yet very detailed. Emotions filled all of the words in the narrative and in this way, the narrative was remarkable.

Thus, I feel as though a good literacy narrative ought to have all of the elements of a good story. This does not mean that all literacy narratives have to be conventional. Frederick Douglass’ narrative had the feel of a memoir but it still possessed all of the elements of a story. The narratives were told very well and concisely, though they were detail-laden. Each story had a purpose and by the end of the narrative, no matter how short or lengthy, that purpose was fulfilled.