Thomas Friedman

For my english class, I was assigned to rewrite a paragraph in order for it to make more sense. The original paragraph is as follows:

Thomas Friedman mentions the untouchables as people that are specialized or able to adapt to a career change, which makes a person harder to be outsouced. Lessig on the other hand, wants to give people a reason to write, to share their work, and spread the culture without having to worry of copyright infringement. THe two authors come together to show how people need to protect themselves with actions. One has to take the steops to protect themselves.

The corrected paragraph goes something like this.

Thomas Friedman mentions the untouchables: people that are specialized or able to adapt to a career change, which makes them harder to be outsourced. Lessig on the other hand wants to give people a reason to write, to share their work, and spread the culture without having to worry about copyright infringement. The two authors came together to show that people need to protect themselves through action. One has to take certain steps to protect himself.

Organized Compostions

This post is about organizational skills in the composition of different works. The original paragraph is as follows:

In an article describing the preparation of a dictionary for schoolchildren, Alma Graham recounts the imbalance discovered in schoolbooks in all subjects in use in the early 1970's. In general, the pronouns he, him, and his outnumber she, her, and hers by a ratio of four to one. Not only are women put off, they are also put down, numerically and otherwise. In the real world, women slightly outnumber men. The numbers alone tell us a lot: men outnumber women seven to one, boys outnumber girls two to one; girls are even in the minority in home econonmics books, where masculine pronouns outnumber feminine ones two to one. But the world created for American schoolchildren presents a different picture. A computer analysis of five million words in context revealed many subtle and not-so-subtle clues to the status of women in American society.


Obviously, this paragraph does not make sense the way that it was layed out, so I took it and did the best I could with it to make it more sensable and have each sentence be placed correctly. This is what I came up with:

In an article describing the preparation of a dictionary for schoolchildren, Alma Graham recounts the imbalance discovered in schoolbooks in all subjects in use in the early 1970's. In general, the pronouns he, him, and his outnumber she, her, and hers by a ratio of four to one. The numbers alone tell us a lot: men outnumber women seven to one, boys outnumber girls two to one; girls are even in the minority in home economics books, where masculine pronouns outnumber feminine ones two to one. In the real world, women slightly outnumber men. But the world created for American schoolchildren presents a different picture. A computer analysis of five million words in context revealed many subtle and not-so-subtle clues to the status of women in American society. Not only are women put off, they are also put down, numerically and otherwise.

Writing: A Ticket to Work...Or a Ticket Out

According to the survey conducted by the National Commission on Writing, good writing skills are essential to success in the professional world. It’s important to have the ability “to say things correctly, to say things well, and to say them in a way that makes sense” (Kerrey,3). Educational Leaders should take this survey to heart to prepare the graduates for the professional world. The survey points out that e-mails and oral presentations with visual aids are ubiquitous in the American economy. Applicants can either be hired or lose the position due to their writing skills (Kerrey,11).

Typogenerator

As I was going through my bloglines account and reading the newly posted blogs, I came across Mary's blog about the typogenerator. I thought, ya know, this looks interesting. I went to the website that she so graciously provided just to see what exactly it was. I put in my name and voila, there it was, completely different from what I was expecting. It is not a typo at all, what it does is take the information you put in and put it in a "mood art" style (as Mary calls it). It is très cool if you decide that you would like to look at it. Here are some that I decided to do for myself:

OWL (online writing lab)

On Thursday October 6, 2005, I was given the opportunity to go to the writing lab conveniently located in Heavilon Hall. Here, I was able to get a better understanding of some technics I should use to become a better writer. One thing that I was having some trouble with is how to get to the point of my statements, and not just work my way around it. I know that Mary was telling me that I should not just tell the story from an outside point of view, but tell it from the inside and make a point that could very definitely be arguable. I was not exactly sure how to go about this, so I took one of my previous blogs to my owl appointment. Chris, the tutorer that I was assigned to, read through my blog, and said the exact same thing to me, "I do not see the point you are trying to make here." That is when I knew that what I think of as the point of my writing, is not always clear to the other readers. They do not know what I am thinking about when I am writing my blogs or papers. Chris was very helpful in letting me know some ways that I could go about getting the point across to my readers. I know that the owl lab helped me very thoroughly and I do plan on going back whenever I find the chance.

Flattener #2-Netscape

In Thomas Friedman's book, The World is Flat, the author describes ten different things that flatttened the world. The second flattener, as he called it, was about Netscape and how it changed the world when it went public on August 9, 1995. Netscape "drove the flattening process in several key ways: It gave us the first broadly popular commercial browser to surf the Internet." As Friedman goes on, he describes how it helped make the internet truly interoperable. Anyone was able to use it, whether they were ten years old or seventy-five years old. "It turned out that the value of compatibility was much higher for everyone than the value of trying to maintain your own little walled network. This integration was a huge flattener, because it enabled so many more people to get connected with so many more other people." Netscape was one of the main internet sources that brought the world together. People were able to look at the same page and the same information, no matter what type of computer they had. From Macintosh all the way to a PC, everyone with Netscape and the internet was able to obtain the same information.



Netscape

FANBOYS

Today in class, we discussed how English 106 is a writing class. We talked (for the eighth time) about the different ways of putting end punctuation with quotes. It always comes before the end quote, at least almost always. There is only one exception, but I am not going to get into that right now. Later on in the class period, my teacher, Mary, spoke of something that many of my classmates and I have not heard of: Fanboys. Fanboys is an acronym for conjunction words of sentence phrasing. F=For, A=And, N=Nor, and I am sure that the rest are self explanitory. Mary explained to us the way to set up a complex sentence and how to insert the "fanboys" correctly. Most of us already knew how to do that, but a review is always good for the brain. I thought it was quite interesting though that an acronym was thought up for the conjuntions of a sentence, and now each time I have to write a complex sentence, I know that I will think of Fanboys.