Read/Response

Week 5

Stereotypes are the main topic of my essay, but unlike these two essays which focus on the stereotypes of race, my essay focuses on the stereotypes of gender. That doesn't mean that these two essays aren't valid when it comes to evaluating my essay because they are. Gender stereotypes may differ across races. Briefly in my own essay, I discuss a study done with about a hundred Israeli grade school students, both boys and girls, studying their choices of colors. If the study had been done somewhere else, like the US, with a hundred American boys and girls in grade school, the results may differ from the Israeli boys and girls. I think one of the most important parts I could take away from the first essay is how it talks about how stereotypes make us feel. How it says we "adore stereotypes" and that we need them to either help identify ourselves or to disassociate ourselves from them.

Week 6

Part 1:

Just scrolling through the tabs, I can definitely see I've made some of these mistakes. I have vague pronoun reference in the very first paragraph of my draft. Two more mistakes I ran into while reading through my essay was the lack of subject-verb agreement and the lack of agreement between pronoun and antecedent. I also think I have some fused sentences here and there. Most of these problems are an easy fix, and I feel a bit dumb for making them. If I just focused a little more on what I was writing, all of these mistakes could have been avoided.

Part 2:

I think the video relates to our conversations in class about the process of research in that we have to view situations at different angles. We have to look at other perspectives in both life and in research. In class we talked a lot about stereotypes, and one of the ways we could look at stereotypes is in the shoes of the person that is being stereotyped. In the video, he spoke of getting out of our comfort zone, and putting ourselves in the shoes of a stereotyped person is doing that.

Week 7

Dilan,

The bulk of your essay doesn't actually start until the third paragraph, leaving the two before it almost useless. Almost everything said in the first two paragraphs can be cut, or at least shortened into one smaller intro paragraph. The interview was well done, so I wouldn't really changed much about it, but I feel you can focus a little bit more on your sources in the next paragraph. The quote you chose was nice, but I feel it can be expanded on. Maybe bring in another source with a similar message to help with that, or just expand on your explanation of that one quote.

Joe,

I think you have a similar problem as Dilan in that the essay really doesn't get started until about the interview with your father. If you shorten your opening so it gets to the point faster, I think your essay will be better off. About halfway through the third paragraph, the line, "To someone who doesn't get out in nature a lot, the quite, cold, snowy woods could be the last place in the world that you would want to be," I assume "the quite" is supposed to be "the quiet." A little bit father down from that when you are listing the misconceptions of hunters, instead of saying, "...hunters are cruel to animals, hunters spend taxpayer money, hunters are dangerous..." you should change it to, "...hunters are cruel to animals, spend taxpayer money, are dangerous..." to give the sentence a better flow.

Week 8

Karen Swallow Prior starts off by identifying the sources she encountered while conducting her research and is using to base her conclusion on. She doesn't just rattle off her sources in quick snippets, but she embeds them within her text and makes them flow with the rest of the article. The first two sources she writes about, the Gregory Currie and Annie Murphy Paul pieces, come to what seem to be conflicting conclusions, but Prior states, “Yet these essays aren't so much coming to different conclusions as considering different questions.” She chooses to take an unbiased approach from the beginning and consults both sides before making her decision on what she believes is the correct answer.

While I see what she was trying to do with the unbiased approach, I feel like she doesn’t give enough about her ideas and it’s hard to differentiate her views from the sources she was citing. I would prefer it if she were to state clearly and expand on her own ideas, rather than shove them between the multitude of sources she cites.

Compared to the Said piece we read through in class, I feel like both essays had their strengths and weaknesses. In the Said piece, it was easy to figure out what side he was on, while in the Prior piece it is much more unclear. On the other hand, Said used tough and confusing terms that were hard to get passed, while Prior’s writing is very simple, easily understandable, and more approachable.