PB3A

It is difficult to begin processing what you are going to do for a writing project that has a prompt like this, but it is a very unique and interesting one because there is a vast range of genres and articles that you can choose from. After a very long time of processing what I wanted to do, I decided to go with this article, “Prevention of Premature Birth: Do Pediatricians Have a Role?” It is a topic that has sprang up in my mind as I was looking for a topic to cover for this project. I am unsure if this will be the topic that I will go with, but it seems like an interesting and unique subject to tackle into separate genres. I believe that it is important to educate younger audiences, such as myself to the issues we now face in pregnancies. It is also important to educate an older audience to these issues that they may or not be aware of.

For the younger audience, age ranges from 17-25. I would like to create a magazine article for the issue similar to “TIME” magazine. I would want it to have a bold and grabbing image that depicts the issue. In this way the younger audience will be captivated and interested in knowing more. It will not just inform this age range about prematurity, but also explain how it can be prevented. Young people are more susceptible to this issue because they may have an unwanted pregnancy and may not know how to care for it, thus leading to a premature pregnancy determined by many factors. This will also educate the audience on how to better care for a pregnancy. When the time comes and they are older, they will be ready for the responsibility.

For the older audience age range form 30-50, I would like to create a podcast. The credibility and expression of a well-known speaker or physician on the topic would sure grab the attention of this audience. In this way the audience will better understand the topic at hand through listening in on the valuable information the speaker may have about the issue. An older audience may have gone through a pregnancy or child raising, so they may know more about this issue than the younger audience. This podcast would be a good way to further educate them and raise awareness to premature births. In the end this may be a difficult topic to pull off since it is very dense in information and written to appeal the scientific community, but nonetheless a good way to express the transition between genres since this is what the assignment is for! 

PB2B: Whose "moves" are better?

When we think of “moves” many of us are thinking about a way certain wrestler executes his opponent’s, or how a superhero fights against a villain. What we don’t think about are the moves used by authors in their writings as well. If we were took look at a famous author like Stephen King, we would see all kinds of different ways that he writes in his books, the specific tone he uses, how descriptive he is, and even the language used. We are going to look at the similarities and contrasts of two different authors, and all the “moves” that they use in order to make their writings unique.  

               In the Essay, Teaching Two Kinds of Thinking by Teaching Writing by Peter Elbow. The author speaks about the differences between first order thinking, which is “free thinking” and second order, or thinking “critically. First off this author could have gone a totally different route in writing then the way he did. He could have chosen to write a very descriptive, monotone piece about writing in these ways but instead he chose to add his own “flavor” to it. As soon as you begin reading he starts the essay by setting it up for the reader so that he will know what he is talking about, but he does this by adding an example about the holidays and how it relates to the topic that is going to be covered. Throughout the reading you get the sense of the writer’s tone of voice, which leads you through what he is speaking about.  He uses a lot of personal quotes to give an idea or thought on the topic that he is currently speaking about in the paragraph. The author also uses italicized words and dashes to get a certain point across.  

               Now moving into the other reading called Annoying ways people use sources, By Kyle D. Stedman. We begin to see a vast range of moves as opposed to Elbows piece. His essay is about how people seem to ruin their papers by not looking carefully on how they cite things, using quotes, or miss placing information in their essay. As the author states, this leads to a sloppy written piece that gathers criticism by most readers of the piece. Now in this essay, similar to the previous one; this author could have also taken a different route on how to write about this topic. The author could chose to go a generic, textbook route in disseminating his ideas to his audience.

Stedman starts out his paper with a personal story comparing driving to messy writing by people who are unaware about the conventions of driving on the second lane. This is an instant hook for the people that are reading his paper due to the fact that it is conversational and informal unlike the beginning piece of an informative essay that would have had you feeling dull as you start reading the essay.  What I liked about this authors way of writing in this essay is that he totally went with his own form of conveying his idea to the audience. It was very unique in the sense that he did not follow the standard conventions seen in regular writings. Throughout his essay he had numbered reasons separating each paragraph explaining what the topic meant. I thought this to be very unique to his writing and considered a move because it added his tone of voice to the piece as I read along. He also had a personal quote, “What…? But, hey…oh come on!” which he used often as a sign of his thoughts on the idea that he had just gone over. This move was interesting because it also showed his way of thinking and personality that you would not find in a textbook essay. His essay was neatly organized by separating the paragraphs by s certain topic in bold letters, like “The annoyances” and then he goes on to talk about it, gives and informal example—one that he made up but fits perfectly to the argument. He then follows this up with a paragraph starting with “The Fix” in which he gives a brief but effective example on how to overcome a certain writer’s obstacle.

Although Elbow writes to his readers in this manner, he did not have as many moves Stedman had nor did it strengthen his paper as he had done with his “moves” Instead he decided to go with his very own personal style and moves which actually worked far better in his piece as opposed in Elbows. Both writings had great essays and were very good at obtaining my attention on their certain topic that they went over. It is only that  Stedman’s ways with his “moves” made his essay stronger and more successful in portraying his ideas. 

PB2A

Today we will be comparing and contrasting the types of genre between Research articles. This will be between a scientific research paper, and one done so in humanities. The Scientific research paper comes from a random science paper generator website and the humanities articles come from the library's vast source of E-journals.  The reason I chose to compare these two articles is to see some similarities in the genre of research papers have and what are the differences that define them and set them apart.

        Out of the massive amounts of articles found in the libraries databases I decided to just randomly pick the one that first caught my attention with its title. The one I came across was called "Attitudes to school life: their influence and their effects on achievement and leaving School" Its content is vastly different from the article found on SCIgen. What is interesting to point out is that it does have some similarities to the other article. First and for most, the most obvious detail is that this research report is specifically towards a set crowd of higher education faculty such as Professors, grad students looking for information that correlates with their thesis; or a school superintendent that is interested in finding out more between the correlation of students and their feelings towards the education system they are in. These articles are similar in the way that they both present a summary at the start of their article to give the reader a better understanding on the topics that will be said in the paper. Their tone throughout these articles are the same, direct and informative as they should be because the reader will want the information given to them as quickly and effectively as possible. These articles also share an introduction which basically sets up the scene for the reader on what the research is being used for and what it correlates to in our world today. As you read further on the way sections are divided are similar, with a title explaining the main information that will be given dividing the paragraphs, this too is done in the Scientific articles. The other similarity between these two research articles are that they both use data to back up their statements and work done on their respective topics.

           As we have seen before, The SCIgen research  turns up to be about "The influence of mobile methodologies on artificial intelligence"  I  may not know the exact contents and meaning behind the information in this article, but I do know that it is a scientific research paper by it conventions and rhetorical features. We know this by quickly looking over its table of contents, its title page and how its sub sections are divided when it presents the information on the topic. the information given is concise and direct, establishing to the readers whether it be computer engineers or someone in the medical field to understand the information provided. Its tone and styles are also very formal and informative set to the field of scholars of its topic. We cannot also forget that both these articles have conclusions that are roughly the same in character, defining and putting a finishing touch to the topics that were mentioned throughout their articles.

            There are some differences between these two research articles though, one of these is that the Humanities Scholarly article uses data more in the way of charts and statistics on different subject relating to its topic rather than using plot graphs with various numerations as are seen in the Scientific article. Another thing you will notice is that the Humanities article gives a page dedicated to an appendix on the information that it had stated throughout the article something that is not seen into he scientific one. This is to give the reader the background info on what was used and said by the data that was collected in this article which is something the generated article did not give  probably due to the fact that it was not completely specified since it was not published so there was not a lot of emphasis on the data that was shared in that article.  

PB1B

There are many weird and interesting websites that you can find on the internet. One of these examples are "genre generator" websites where you can get on and generate specific conventions based on the genre it presents.

The first of these websites that I looked into was called SCIgen. When I went on I plugged in my closest friends names and it generated a paper titled "The Influence of Mobile Methodologies on Artificial Intelligence" at first glance you wouldn't know what the heck this paper is about. looking closer, you can see that the paper has all the conventions of a science research paper. It has the names of the "scientists" or researchers that worked on the project. It then leads on to an abstract, which is like a summary of the information that will be covered in the paper. Then the paper moves on to its introduction, which is basically the reasons of what and why the report was conducted. It is finally divided into sections explaining the different parts of the research. Towards the end of the paper it has its conclusion and references signaling all the data and research that was used and from where it was gathered. From first glance to a closer reading, you can tell that its wording is littered with scientific and computer jargon that one does not normally come across in our day to day lives. Its other convention is that its tone is very formal, direct and dry as compared to a novel or newspaper article. 

The next website I looked into was called pandyland.net, this was a website that focused on comic strip generating. These tend to be short 3 windowed, colored drawings of characters speaking through thought bubbles. In every generated comic strip it always had the same characters in different stances. The back ground and characters were drawn out in bright colors like pink or yellow to draw attention to them as you read their comments. The characters have short conversations that tend to have rude or profane comments. These would end up coming off as humorous tone. The conventions of this is that its scenes and dialogue pertain to a comic strip alone, its uniqueness in creating short scenes and stories based on its randomness. 

The third and final website that I looked at was a meme generator. In this website it produces and holds many different pictures of characters created on the internet with funny, witty, or ironic comments that relate to the picture. Some of these characters for example are spiderman, philosoraptor, or willy wanka. This type of genre is hilarious because a picture could be unrelated to the caption but putting them together triggers some comical senses in the viewer. The conventions of a meme are pictures of characters that have interesting captions that just want to make you blurt out laughing as you scroll by them or that they poke fun at a certain topic from society. 

After looking at these websites you can see how they help someone better understand a genre because each website follows a specific set of conventions that sets up the genre. A viewer can understand that these set of conventions are what make up the genre, for example in the SCIgen website, the way the paper was formatted can tell the viewer that this type of genre is a scientific research paper. This is also true for the other websites, it helps explain to the viewer to a genre that they may not familiar with like a meme. That genre is something very recent and many people might not comprehend unless they saw them through a website like this.

PB1A: Journal Entry

When we think of genres, we usually think about types of movies that we watch or the types of novels that we like to read. In reality, there are many more types of genres than we think! One of these, for example are Journal entries. Writing in a personal journal is like a little world to the person which whom it belongs to. Of course there are many types of journal entries but what makes them alike is that it is to serve the purpose of writing down ideas, memories, or just daily occurrences. When you write in your journal, you should always write casually about anything that's in your mind at the time or thoughts from the recent past. Your audience is more than likely yourself so you will always write in first person. There is a certain feeling that you get when you first write into your journal, I felt awkward at first since I was addressing it to myself but after a while it felt like a norm. There is always casual tone when you write or see someone else's writing in a journal. It is never the type of writing you would find in an argumentative essay or a speech, but more specific and personal to someone. It may be writing that is specifically emotional or direct to the thoughts that one may be having. It always starts out informal and leisurely, not the way you would start an essay!

For Example,

"January 11, 2015

I did not expect that at all. Camping was an interesting surprise because it was pouring rain! all our things got wet, and it was freezing! but bonding with friends was the best, hope this week is a lot brighter than it was today. "

A personal journal cannot be one without first being dated to the time that the writer wishes to begin his writings. This is something that is found throughout every journal entry. It is also an unsaid rule that your journal has to be something unique to yourself, or something that you just love writing into. This can range from a legal notepad to a red notebook. It should also come with a specific and unique writing utensil that will only be used exclusively for your journal. Another thing about having your personal journal is that you should always have a special routine that works for you. Some people may like to write during the day; as thoughts race into their mind. But others, like myself; prefer to write right before bed to empty all the thoughts looming in my mind ending the day on a good note. what makes a personal journal, a personal journal is the fact that it is specifically unique for yourself, there is no other like it in this world! It will have the imperfections and edges that you wish for it to have. Your journal will have its own personality, a specific feeling or mood that you bestow upon it.  

Blog Blurb

Hello everyone My name is David Villalva or (V-alva) for the people that have trouble pronouncing my last name lol.. I was born and raised in West Los Angeles. I am quiet and shy at first but once I get to know you I'm very open and talkative. I like to explore my surroundings and have a very fine tuned curiosity, if there is something I come across and it that catches my eye; I will immediately try to know everything about it. I guess this is why I love history! random fun facts about me: I am in a Fraternity, I enjoy going on jogs on the seashore and computer gaming on my free time. My number one pet peeve are people that are stuck up, in my opinion those are the worst!

I feel that teaching others is one of the most important qualities someone can have; because it can only be beneficial for everyone. This sparks people's mind, whether it be your siblings, your parents, or a random person that has an interest in learning something new. This is why I want to become a history teacher. Although I may not know what topic I will teach specifically, or at what grade level; this is what I want to do with my life. I am excited to be in this class and cannot wait to see what it has in store for us. I hope to meet y'all on a personal level and good luck with the rest of your other studies!