Steve Epting
AP English
Literary Response: Christopher Columbus
This reading spoke about the voyager, Christopher Columbus. It spoke about his four voyages and everything that he went through such as being arrested and put in chains and every island or continent that he explored. The text portrayed him as a person that loved to travel and someone that was eager to find a new place to settle. In the letters, Columbus described the islands, which he found, so well that I had a vision of what the island looked like. The diction was perfect in this reading. Many descriptive adjectives and details were used. The only question I had was how did the letters that he wrote get back to whoever he wrote them to? I was wondering that when I read the article because there was no mailing system.
This reading was very interesting to me. The tone of this text was pithy and bittersweet. It was pithy and bittersweet because it was precisely meaningful and it wasn’t rambling on and on and, to me, it showed a mixture of pain and pleasure because it know he was frustrated and tired from all of that traveling across the big oceans. This reading appealed to ethos because it appealed to the right audience. The vocabulary wasn’t too hard to understand and it didn’t appeal to your emotions. My favorite line in the reading was, “It is well to give to God that which is His due and to Caesar that which belongs to him.” This line is actually in the Bible and it is teaching Christians that God wants you tithe and start a relationship with Him. But, the line was written to Ferdinand and Isabella on his fourth voyage. The line was placed there to his opinion toward his discoveries.
The author was trying to show us the true Christopher, based on his journal entries. He also states that he is not doing these voyages for the wealth and the fame; he’s doing this because he has a purpose on his life. These entries told us that he was excited about finding the new land and it also told us that he was a very good writer. Columbus shows us in the journal entries that the voyages weren’t easy, but he still made it to find the “promised land.”
In conclusion, the author told us about the voyages he took and what he went through. Christopher Columbus was a trailblazer that made a mark on this country.
Saturday, August 29, 2009
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Iroquois creation Literary response
Steve Epting
AP English
Literary Response: The Iroquois creation story
In this article, the author spoke on how the Native American tribe, the Iroquois, started on this earth. There were twenty-five versions of Iroquois. It talked about the customs, the religions, and where they originated from. This text is very informational and it really doesn’t use any words or phrases to catch my attention. The four sections of the story tell the background on the tribe and it tells stories of creation. The tone of this article is prosaic and insipid. It lacked a flavor and a zest and it was dull and ordinary. Even though I felt that the tone was dull, I still understood the different stories of creation. I think that the author was trying to target an audience that was about high school level. The author targeted people doing research on this topic. The author’s purpose was to give information about the Iroquois.
When I first got this reading, I expected it to be a lot of information. I expected that because it sounds like an informational topic. If I could, I would cluster different paragraphs to make the background paragraph first, including different tribes and how they originated, and then I would make one long creation story with lots of details. In the reading, the author appeals to logos because a lot of facts were stated. To me, there wasn’t any good diction in the paragraphs. I think that maybe the writer derives from an Iroquois tribe and they did the research and they wanted to share this information with readers. There are inferences that I can make based on the reading. I can infer that the tribes of the Iroquois were made a long time ago and some still are around today.
There aren’t really that many short paragraphs so some of the openings of paragraphs did support the shape of the discourse. In the reading, there is nothing that the author failed to omit. I don’t think that the author used any good figurative language at all because as I stated earlier, the author did not use any word to grab my attention or the author didn’t use any words in an unusual context to make me think.
In conclusion, I think the author was just trying to educate more people to the different Iroquois tribes. There were enough facts in the reading to help me find out something new about them.
AP English
Literary Response: The Iroquois creation story
In this article, the author spoke on how the Native American tribe, the Iroquois, started on this earth. There were twenty-five versions of Iroquois. It talked about the customs, the religions, and where they originated from. This text is very informational and it really doesn’t use any words or phrases to catch my attention. The four sections of the story tell the background on the tribe and it tells stories of creation. The tone of this article is prosaic and insipid. It lacked a flavor and a zest and it was dull and ordinary. Even though I felt that the tone was dull, I still understood the different stories of creation. I think that the author was trying to target an audience that was about high school level. The author targeted people doing research on this topic. The author’s purpose was to give information about the Iroquois.
When I first got this reading, I expected it to be a lot of information. I expected that because it sounds like an informational topic. If I could, I would cluster different paragraphs to make the background paragraph first, including different tribes and how they originated, and then I would make one long creation story with lots of details. In the reading, the author appeals to logos because a lot of facts were stated. To me, there wasn’t any good diction in the paragraphs. I think that maybe the writer derives from an Iroquois tribe and they did the research and they wanted to share this information with readers. There are inferences that I can make based on the reading. I can infer that the tribes of the Iroquois were made a long time ago and some still are around today.
There aren’t really that many short paragraphs so some of the openings of paragraphs did support the shape of the discourse. In the reading, there is nothing that the author failed to omit. I don’t think that the author used any good figurative language at all because as I stated earlier, the author did not use any word to grab my attention or the author didn’t use any words in an unusual context to make me think.
In conclusion, I think the author was just trying to educate more people to the different Iroquois tribes. There were enough facts in the reading to help me find out something new about them.
Is google making us stupid Literary Response
Steve Epting
AP English
Is Google Making Us Stupid? Literary Response
In this article, Is Google Making Us Stupid? it is basically hitting the issue right on the head. We, as Americans, are not thinking like we used to. Now, computers are doing all of the work for us. What used to take people a long amount of time to do research, now only takes a couple of minutes. The internet is “controlling” our brains to not take the time to actually read a book. We are becoming lazy as Americans. We have not been using our brains and we now depend on computers and other resources to do it for us.
When I first heard the title, it really caught my attention. The instant I heard the title, I immediately started to think to myself “Am I lazy?”; “Do I do enough research on class assignments?” This article was a great appeal to pathos because, to me, it caused me to think about what the article was saying. The reason why it was a great appeal to pathos was because of the diction. The way the words were structured explained the whole article well. An example is at the beginning when the writer used the computer as a tool to show us that we are not the only ones being hurt by not doing well- rounded research. That was a great form of writing, because it caught my attention. The overall tone of the article was poignant and pithy. It was precisely meaningful and it strongly affected emotions strongly.
“The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli.” This quote, from the article, is how the brain receives information. People learn different ways but most people learn visually and with auditory. With the internet, we are not getting the full learning compared to if we were learning in school or studying out of a book. The Internet is shaping our thought process, not in a physical sense. When we use the internet as a source co much, we tend to think that is the only way to find research. There are different forms of media such as newspaper, magazine, and television that do the same thing to our thinking but, the internet is the most common. “Midvale steel plant went to work on various metalworking machines, and recorded and timed their every movement as well as the operations of the machines. By breaking down every job into a sequence of small, discrete steps and then testing different ways of performing each one, Taylor created a set of precise instructions.” This describes what happens when we use the internet for our research.
Although there are other forms of media like television that use different programs to share information, the internet is still the worst and it is the most common. Google is not the only search engine that answers questions; there is ask, Google, yahoo, dog pile, and many more. The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method.” I think that is the best definition of what the internet is. We often search through a lot of different websites trying to find the best answer to our question. The internet is sometimes not a reliable source because sometimes we just type in a question and take the first answer that we think is correct. In earlier years, people did deep reading and research to find answers to different questions. But now, we want everything to be fast and we want it to be efficient.
In conclusion, I think that we should be able to do deep research for our questions to different things. That is the only way we are going to get the answers to our questions, and we can get the background to our research so that we can know more about it. The internet is a great resource, but we shouldn’t rely on it for every question or concern that we have.
AP English
Is Google Making Us Stupid? Literary Response
In this article, Is Google Making Us Stupid? it is basically hitting the issue right on the head. We, as Americans, are not thinking like we used to. Now, computers are doing all of the work for us. What used to take people a long amount of time to do research, now only takes a couple of minutes. The internet is “controlling” our brains to not take the time to actually read a book. We are becoming lazy as Americans. We have not been using our brains and we now depend on computers and other resources to do it for us.
When I first heard the title, it really caught my attention. The instant I heard the title, I immediately started to think to myself “Am I lazy?”; “Do I do enough research on class assignments?” This article was a great appeal to pathos because, to me, it caused me to think about what the article was saying. The reason why it was a great appeal to pathos was because of the diction. The way the words were structured explained the whole article well. An example is at the beginning when the writer used the computer as a tool to show us that we are not the only ones being hurt by not doing well- rounded research. That was a great form of writing, because it caught my attention. The overall tone of the article was poignant and pithy. It was precisely meaningful and it strongly affected emotions strongly.
“The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli.” This quote, from the article, is how the brain receives information. People learn different ways but most people learn visually and with auditory. With the internet, we are not getting the full learning compared to if we were learning in school or studying out of a book. The Internet is shaping our thought process, not in a physical sense. When we use the internet as a source co much, we tend to think that is the only way to find research. There are different forms of media such as newspaper, magazine, and television that do the same thing to our thinking but, the internet is the most common. “Midvale steel plant went to work on various metalworking machines, and recorded and timed their every movement as well as the operations of the machines. By breaking down every job into a sequence of small, discrete steps and then testing different ways of performing each one, Taylor created a set of precise instructions.” This describes what happens when we use the internet for our research.
Although there are other forms of media like television that use different programs to share information, the internet is still the worst and it is the most common. Google is not the only search engine that answers questions; there is ask, Google, yahoo, dog pile, and many more. The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method.” I think that is the best definition of what the internet is. We often search through a lot of different websites trying to find the best answer to our question. The internet is sometimes not a reliable source because sometimes we just type in a question and take the first answer that we think is correct. In earlier years, people did deep reading and research to find answers to different questions. But now, we want everything to be fast and we want it to be efficient.
In conclusion, I think that we should be able to do deep research for our questions to different things. That is the only way we are going to get the answers to our questions, and we can get the background to our research so that we can know more about it. The internet is a great resource, but we shouldn’t rely on it for every question or concern that we have.
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