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Learning Outcome 2

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Jacob Hickey

English 110-H4

Professor Miller

Learning Outcome 2

Over the course of the semester, I have learned how to integrate quotes into my essays using specific words and phrases that will nicely set up my point while making it clear both who is speaking and how they are saying it. I have found that using quotes requires presenting enough of your own ideas and explanations in the text that you, as the writer, understand the topic you are quoting. During this semester, we have read excerpts from the informative book, “They Say/I Say”. There is one particular chapter about integrating quotes called, “The Art of Quoting”. This has been an extremely helpful tool to use when writing essays. It not only tells the reader how to properly set up quotations and analyze the quotes being used, it gives examples that clearly indicate the correct way in which to complete these.

By continuously attempting to improve my writing through use of quotes, as well as adding analysis and transitions, I have found I have become more comfortable, since the first major writing assignment, introducing quotes and giving my own perspective on the piece being analyzed. In this example from my essay “Reconsidering the Lobster”, I identify the speaker and add adjectives to describe his tone. After the quote is complete, I add my own thoughts and analyze how the quote is relevant to my thesis and to the main topic in order to establish that I understand what is being quoted and have given it thorough consideration. I write, “Wallace calls into question the morality of cooking lobsters while still alive, pondering, ‘Is it alright to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?’ (503). While humans do kill animals for our own physical needs, people ignore the fact that a life has been taken. It is as if the execution never occurred because truthfully, we cannot bear to consider killing another being, thinking of ourselves as murderers. Perhaps this is why many cooks leave the kitchen after putting a lobster in boiling water. It is challenging for us psychologically to think of loss and death. The finality that is associated with this subject has us longing to never deal with it”.

In this example of my own essay, I introduce the quote and show how it is important in providing evidence to my thesis statement, “Death can leave people feeling very alone and abandoned. It can envelope you like a cloak, making you feel isolated and deserted. It is a painful subject to address, bringing many awful emotions to the table. This is why we avoid, rather than face. Doughty remarks in her interview that the “most shocking thing wasn’t so much the decomposing bodies or the strange bodies that I saw, it was that I was alone and I was sending all these people off to their final disposition” (Doughty). What makes losing someone incredibly tough is not the actual death, it is knowing that you will never be able to talk, see, or hear from these people again”. It is very important to thoroughly think through all of your sources and find which one will best support and enhance your thesis idea. Using a quotation creates more reader interest by painting a more vivid picture of the point one is trying to make and providing an example to bring one’s thesis statement to life.

Learning Outcome 1

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Jacob Hickey

English 110-H4

Professor Miller

Learning Outcome 1

In Sommers’ selection, she highlights the importance of revision being a process. She writes, “Such blindness, as I discovered with student writers, is the inability to ‘see’ revision as a process: the inability to ‘re-view’ their work again” (Sommers). I have found this to be very true over the course of the past semester in my English 110 class. I found that writing takes time; it does not happen overnight, as it did in high school. We cannot get away with that here because it will be evident that the writing was not thoroughly thought through. This was especially obvious to me in my final essay about “Reconsidering the Lobster”. For such an in-depth and thoroughly written piece where many sources needed to be examined and contemplated, there was no way one would be able to quickly complete such a paper. It took weeks to fully ruminate over the topic. Especially true was the fact that I needed to find the shape of my argument as Sommers highlights, “experienced writers describe their primary objective when revising as finding the form or shape of their argument” (Sommers). In this final essay, I needed to re-write my whole introduction and thesis, because I found that what I was thinking about and had an opinion on further in my essay was not what my thesis stated. It took a long time and much trial and error to find the exact words to convey my thoughts. This is my final thesis of Paper 3: “Any discussion of loss has us wishing for thoughts of happier times. This is the reason we are so oblivious to certain issues. We are selective in what we want to hear and see. We are afraid to open this “curtain” of despair which may reveal unwanted thoughts, emotions, and feelings, hounding us with perpetual guilt and leaving us to question what could have been”. By allowing ample writing time, one thinks of many things that could be added to or re-worded in an essay to make it even better. Another thing that I have learned, not only in English, but in all classes, is that work is not done well when thrown together all at once. Quality work is done when the brain has enough time to process everything clearly. I have learned that time is a writer’s friend and that writing is a process. You may discover other pathways that lead away from and back to your original thesis and thought, but you will not truly know and understand this unless you give time to your writing and think through all possibilities.

IHS Post Experience Reflection

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Jacob Hickey

IHS

Professor Law-Ham

Post Experience/Reflection

Post-experience: What did you learn about the agency? What do they contribute to the community? What assets do they have? What needs/challenges do they have?

Giving back is extremely important to me. It is a way to show others you care and a way to make you, personally, feel warm inside because you know you did something that will make others happy. For this project, I decided to volunteer at my local Veteran’s Home in Augusta. Now, I have been doing this for a number of years, but every time I go, it feels amazing because I know I am makings other people’s days a little brighter, a little more cheerful. Ever since I started volunteering here, I have learned so many things from so many wise people, a majority of whom were in the service protecting our country and freedoms in times of war and violence. These people need the love and respect they deserve but unfortunately, do not often receive. However, this is why I go there, to have conversations, play games, and just provide company to these older men and women whose lives are often not ones with over excitement. Many, day after day, sit in their wheelchairs looking out the windows wishing they could go back twenty or more years to their youth. Often, these people do not have visitors and are alone. These are the people I seek out and provide company. A majority just need someone there to talk to, all I do is sit and listen as they tell me their life story. It is a great time, I have met people who were at D-Day, in the Korean War, and were on ships that battled other enemies in the deep Pacific Ocean, far from home. These people often are forgotten; however, I would love to make them more prominent in our society. They are the wise people who can give guidance to our younger generations who seems to be having trouble in terms of violence, anger, and disagreement. In the past, I have played holiday carols on the piano during Christmas time, set up 4th of July decorations on the patio, and taken people on walks outside to enjoy the crisp cool mornings of fall. I have heard countless heroic stories of war. These people need more youth to volunteer and make these people’s lives better. I often hear that it is a boring job when trying to get volunteers, however, it is just the opposite, it is fun and entertaining. Dancing during karaoke night and singing carols with them, it is a fulfilling way to volunteer. It makes others, as well as yourself, feel good. We need more of this in today’s world ravaged by war and crime. Just a little extra help can more everyone’s day brighter.

Eportfolio Framing Statement

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This is a project for my IHS class. We were instructed to write about the service learning activity we choose. I volunteered at my local Veteran’s Home. I have volunteered there for many years and I love doing it because I am giving back to all of the people who fought for our rights in this country. In this writing assignment, I feel that I adequately shared the ideas and thoughts of the veterans themselves who often are lonely and need someone to talk to. However, looking back on this essay, I could have given more imagery and description to have the readers feeling as if they were volunteering themselves.

Journal 17: Playing the Naysayer in Your Text

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Jacob Hickey

English 110-H4

Professor Miller

Playing the Naysayer in Your Text

  • This chapter “urges” the writer “to tell readers what others might say against you” (Graff and Birkenstein). It gives examples on how to incorporate counterclaims into your writing. The authors make sure to tell the writers to make sure it is in depth saying that you should, “stay with them for several sentences or even paragraphs” (Graff and Birkenstein). Going in depth with this will show readers you are confident in your own ideas and are not afraid to go against your idea if it means it will help you idea in the long run.
  • The authors also make sure to let the writer know to not “bully” your readers by not making a counterclaim, by quickly “brushing” over one, or by poking fun at certain topics. It states in this chapter that often time, “the more you give voice to your critics’ objections, the more you tend to disarm those critics, especially if you go on to answer their objections in convincing ways” (Graff and Birkenstein). Giving a voice to you objector can often times, help your own argument by making you seem to care about your topic.
  • Another topic that is covered in this chapter is the fact that your own counterclaim might be more persuasive that your own claim. If this is the case you might have to go back and rework your original claim or part of your essay to make it even more persuasive. The writers tell the readers, “to avoid having this kind of unintentional reverse effect on readers, you need to do your best to make sure that any counterarguments you address are not more convincing than your own claims. It is good to address objections in your writing, but only if you are able to overcome them” (Graff and Birkenstein). It is important to give evidence to support your own claim while not making your counterclaim overly persuasive.

Journal 16: Animals Like Us

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Jacob Hickey

English 110-H4

Professor Miller

Animals Like Us Journal

In today’s culture being a vegetarian is common, it is a fad or trend, if you will. Health and providing nutritious food for one’s body is increasing with outlets such as television commercials, magazines, and online stores taking aim to provide people with “healthy alternatives”. People are having trouble deciding between taking this route of living a healthier life, versus satisfying the wants of fast food and common meals such as Mcdonald’s cheeseburgers, Wendy’s fried chicken, and eating a Stadium hotdog. Then comes into context the morality of eating other animals. Many in today’s society are increasingly having trouble consuming many common creatures such as cows, pigs, duck, and chicken. However, that yummy, juicy, medium-well hamburger still calls everyone’s name now and then because of our culture. We live in a fast food and junk food world where we are constantly bombarded by signs and advertisements of McDonald’s and Burger King. Some people are better blocking out this noise than others and some are having trouble deciding whether to go the ethical, not eating meat or animals route, versus eating that juicy burger or piece of meat.

Humans are often egocentric beings. People are groomed and cultured to feel as though they are better than other animals we share this earth with. Many individuals can learn about themselves by meeting animals and being with them. I personally know many people that are with animals a lot who find it horrific that people eat them and thus go the vegetarian route because they can not fathom eating and killing these animals. In their opinion, they view people as no different from other animals, we all share oxygen and the great things earth has to offer. The only difference, in my opinion is that we have higher mental functions and abilities than other animals. Other than that, I feel we are all the same. However, a majority of people in the world, especially this culture, view themselves as better than animals and they justify this by eating them, including myself. Wallace provides examples of this when he describes people eating lobster, “A detail so obvious that most recipes don’t even bother to mention it is that each lobster is supposed to be alive when you put it in the kettle” (502). Personally, I am a sucker, now and then, for a great steak, chicken breast, or lobster as Judith Black was as described by Herzog, “Within a week, she was chowing down on cheeseburgers” (Herzog). People are omnivores who are built to eat meat which is why we have such a tough time staying away from it.

Hal Herzog in his passage, “Animals Like Us”, shares the experiences of being a vegetarian and what it is like in the view of Judith Black, who is the person being highlighted in this passage. Black viewed herself as a vegetarian even though she still consumed fish. Her husband, Joseph, tried to convince her, “there is not a shred of moral difference between eating a Cornish hen and eating a Chilean sea bass” (Herzog). This is interesting to note because David Foster Wallace in his own essay, “Consider the Lobster”, described the horrific and gruesome way in which lobsters are cooked such as this example, “the immersed lobster suffers from slow suffocation, although usually not decisive enough suffocation to keep it from still thrashing”, this sentence alone would make many readers think twice before they ate another lobster (507). In both writings, they consider sea life to be the same as other animals. In my opinion, they are viewed differently by many people because many lack arms, hands, legs, and feet, which are what many psychologically consider to be animals, like us. In the case of Judith, fish did not feel like animals as Herzog writes, “ While it is obvious that dogs and cats and cows and pigs are animals, it was equally clear to Judith that fish were not” (Herzog). This differs immensely from Wallace’s essay in which he makes the reader feel at times as if you are putting one of your loved one’s in a pot of boiling water, making the reader feel incredibly guilty for ever cooking or eating any type of animal as he describes, “lobsters boiled incrementally often display a whole bonus set of gruesome, convulsion-like reactions that you don’t see in regular boiling” (507). I know people who do it this way and learning how much lobsters suffer from Wallace would make me never want to cook lobster in this way.

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