Learning Log

English 2010

15 January 2019
“Donald J. Trump, Pope Francis, and the Beef That Defied Space and Time”
-Benjamin Soloman

1. “Trump understood that his supporters—both current and potential—weren’t so

much interested in elegant sentence structure and internal logic as they were in
the threat of terrorism and the promise of power and safety.”
2. “Next time you encounter a public beef or disagreement, pause for a moment to
observe how both parties use language to do much more than just “express
themselves”—how in fact, they use language as a powerful tool to take action,
create meaning, and shape identity.”
3. The author of this article accomplished their purpose of showing how people
use language to do things, make things, and be things in the world. Examples of
Donald Trump and Pope Francis are used to show that their words have greater
meaning.

17 January 2019
“So You Wanna Be an Engineer, a Welder, a Teacher? Academic Disciplines and Professional
Literacies”
-Marlena Stanford and Justin Jory

1. “But viewing college simply as a necessity can lead to a troublesome way of

thinking about what it means to be a student.”
2. “Therefore, using schooling to acquire the knowledge and language of a
discipline will afford an individual with ways of thinking, reading, writing, and
speaking that will be useful in the professional world.”
3. Language can take many forms and what you say can be taken differently by
various people. There are specific ways of using language that need to be
learned in order to convey a professional persona.

22 January 2019
“Genre in the Wild-Understanding Genre Within Rhetorical (Eco)Systems”
-Lisa Bickmore
1. “So a genre is an act of language—for our purposes here, mostly acts of
writing, in particular—that behaves in typical or characteristic ways, which we
can observe in repeated or persistent situations.”
2. “Genres take their shape in recurrent situations because the communications
that occur in recurrent situations tend to be remarkably similar.”
3. I do not think that genre makes our writing robotic. Although with a genre there
are many similarities, you can still change it up but have it fit with the specific
genre.

24 January 2019
“Writing for Community Change”
-Elisa Stone
1. Still, research shows that what makes people truly happy tends to involve
working toward a cause outside of their own immediate needs and wants: in
other words, service to others actually improves your own well-being.
2. Did you know, though, that service learning actually enhances student learning,
and that it leads to greater employment opportunities?
3. If money and time were no factors, I would engage in service opportunities in Africa.
This would include helping to provide for the citizens and animals there that are in need.

28 January 2019
“The Elizabeth Smart Case: A Study in Narrativized News”
-Clint Johnson
1. When officers approached the trio for questioning, they discovered Mitchell,
Barzee, and, disguised in a gray wig and veil, Elizabeth.
2. Smart testified in the presence of Mitchell for three days, recounting nine
months of rape, sometimes multiple times a day, and being forced to watch
pornographic films and drink alcohol to erode her resistance.
3. I would say what made the Elizabeth Smart story so universal and long-lasting was the
confusion it caused. It was also long-lasting because her family did not want to give up
on Elizabeth.

30 January 2019
“Writing is Recursive”
-Chris Blankenship
 1. “In modern English, recursion is used to describe a process that loops or “runs
again” until a task is complete.”
2. “Unlike student writers, professional writers, like Steven Pinker, don’t view
each part of the writing process as a step to be visited just once in a particular
order.”
3. The second image is a more accurate way for measuring writing because it is
not in linear order. The best writing tends to involve revisiting certain stages in
no particular order until the desired output is complete.

1 February 2019
“Making Choices in Writing”
-Jessie Szalay
1. “It’s up to you to select the best, most rhetorically effective, most interesting,
and most beautiful option.”
2. “Rather than starting with an empty page, I sometimes feel like I’m starting
with every possible phrase, thought, and a dozen dictionaries.”
3. Five strategic choices that I will make for my upcoming letter will be about my
word choice, sentence structure, tone, modes of appeal, and organization. I
would like to have a humorous yet educated tone that appeals to both pathos
and logos.

5 February 2019
“Dear Italy”
1. “Slowly but surely though, ​Italy,​ you revealed some of your charms to me.”
2. “You influenced the way I dressed, the way I ate, the way I thought.”
“An Open Letter to High School Students”
1. “In my letter, I told students that if they wanted to be ready for college they
needed to love reading, they needed to read for pleasure, and they needed to do
a lot of reading overall
2. “A great deal of research has been done on the importance of free choice in
building engagement with reading, so choosing what you are interested in is a
great way to start.”
 1. Both of the open letters that I read gave a message. They directly address a
particular audience while keeping their paper open to everyone. There was also
personal insight given in both letters, and situations that motivated the letters.

7 February 2018
“Peer Review”
-Jim Beatty
1. “If they are convinced they have a good thesis statement and they don’t,
however, then you can help them by identifying that.”
“Resist the powerful urge to get defensive over your writing.”
“Call on people outside the class whom you trust to give you feedback.”
2. What makes a peer review activity worthwhile is when both participants
actually take the time to think about the entirety of your essay, including ideas
and structure. It is not worthwhile when both participants just give positive
feedback and do not help to correct.

11 February 2019
“Personal Literacy and Academic Learning”
-Marlena Stanford
1. “These various literacies are much more than skills; they are practices:
observable patterns of behavior that we enact over time as we work in
particular knowledge frameworks and use particular technologies to
communicate.”
2. “We might think about how we can facilitate the process of contextualization
while we’re in college in order to ease the transition and better use the skills
and literate practices we bring with us to support our academic goals.”
Reading/Writing Timeline
I remember I remember I remember I remember I remember I remember
the first creating a writing writing my writing creating an
time I was book and songs about first essay letters to my eportfolio
able to spell journal of situations in in class. family in far with all of
and write my life. my life. away my major
my name. locations. works.
13 February 2019 ***
“You Will Never Believe What Happened: Stories We Tell”
-Ron Christiansen
1. “We all tell stories. For humor. For clarifying our view of the world. For
asserting our identity.”
2. “We narrate our experience in order to connect with others and validate our
own experience and self-worth.”
3. Because telling stories helps us clarify our view of the world, reading stories
helps us see other individual’s views of the world. This puts us in touch with
our humanity because we can either agree or disagree with the perspectives that
other’s hold, thus aiding ourselves in finding who we are.

15 February 2019
“It That a True Story?”
-Ron Christiansen
1. “I would argue, however, that one thing is clear: the minute we start to retell a
story from our past we are constructing it from our point of view, so there’s no
need to get too worried about getting every detail correct.”
2. “What really matters is whether people are making something meaningful and
coherent out of what happened.”
3. Truth can be complicated because there is more than one aspect to truth when
writing stories like memoirs. While some may not remember the exact, every
detail of a story, they can still truthfully convey the emotions that they felt.

21 February 2019
“Adding the Storyteller’s Tools to the Writer’s Textbook”
-Clint Johnson
Five writing techniques
1. Add in meaningful scenes that the reader can picture by using great detail.
2. Add in stories to your writing.
3. Add in descriptions that connect with the five senses.
4. Add in powerful and distinct voices and quotes.
5. Add in competing interests to create conflict.
Quotes
 1. “You know that every good story is about conflict because conflict means
people care.”
2. “When people make claims about what is good or bad, effective or ineffective,
or true or false, we automatically compare the claim to our lived experience.”

February 25 2019
“Memorability: 6 Keys for Success”
-Nikki Mantyla
1. “We can’t always be brief, but we can stay focused.”
2. “Writers who incorporate the unexpected in strategic ways—with a shocking
statistic in a report or a fresh take on a classic recipe or an unheard-of position
on a controversial subject—are more likely to hook their audience.”
3. “On the other hand, showing with concrete details means readers experience
firsthand input and draw their own stronger conclusions.”
4. “Writers can also buy cred by touting their own expertise: experiences with the
topic, relevant places they’ve worked or volunteered, observations that
sharpened their perspective, surveys or interviews they’ve done, classes they’ve
taken, even their age.”
5. “Aim for the kind of vibe that best fits the audience and purpose, and find
effective ways to solicit those emotions.”
6. “The best story type for each piece of writing will depend on its situation and
purpose and audience.”

February 28 2019
“Story as Rhetorical: We Can’t Escape the Story No Matter How Hard We Try”
-Ron Christiansen
1. “Maybe stories are talked about less in writing classes because they are too
fun.”
2. “But regardless of Newkirk’s claim, the discipline of writing has often viewed
narrative writing as insufficiently rhetorical.”
3. “And while Newkirk doesn’t dismiss the thesis, he argues that too often we, as
writing teachers and students, get too focused on placing it in the right spot
rather than thinking carefully about how we will communicate the journey it
took us to uncover that thesis.”
 4. A story is an argument because when we write we are giving insight to our
point of view. The stories we write are experiences and examples of why we
feel a certain way about a topic.

4 March 2019
“The Narrative Effect: Story as the Forward Frame”
-Lisa Bickmore
1. Stories can help to play out the consequences of particular life situations.
2. Stories help the audience to understand why the topic is important.
3. Stories help to develop a sense and view of the world.
4. Stories help readers to understand how they feel about multiple types of
individuals and their characteristics.
5. Stories can help the audience create a sense and understanding of a certain
situation or event.

6. “But no matter how the writer manages the timeline, in a story, a reader expects
to be anchored explicitly in time, and to be able to orient him or herself in time:
when s/he comes upon an event or anecdote within the narrative, the reader
wants to be able to say, “Okay, this happened before story-event X, but after
story-event Z.”

6 March 2019
“Punctuation, Memes, and Choice”
-Nikki Mantyla
What’s new to you?
1. Parentheses are used to de-emphasize, as in a whisper.
What’s interesting?
1. It is interesting how much the way you use punctuation can completely change
the context of the sentence.
What finally makes sense?
1. Semicolons are used when you have two complete sentences placed together,
but with colons you do not need a complete sentence afterwards like a single
word or list.
8 March 2019
“Peer Review”
-Jim Beatty
“The least helpful thing you can do when peer reviewing is correct grammar and
typos.”
1. Correcting grammar and typo errors in writing can is one of the easier things to
fix out of any paper, but it does not provide to be the most helpful. I once had
someone peer review my paper and the only thing they wanted to fix was
grammar. It did not help my essay in the end because I can fix grammar errors
on my own. I wanted feedback on my ideas and structure.

“The best writing comes out of a communal effort.”

1. Throughout peer review, and life in general, I have noticed how great it can be
to combine others’ ideas. My classmates have given me great ideas to help my
essays that I would not have thought about myself. I believe that the more
insight from the minds of others can help an individual grow in many ways.