Wow, it has been quite a wild ride being in Writing 1 and 2 with you, Beth. We have had many new world and country events during our finals week and for the whole Spring Quarter, and you still managed to teach all of us so well. With me, I will take away many new writing skills and fun stories from being with you Winter Quarter, and again having you virtually this quarter. Being taught from the very beginning by writing a story about “Save the Skunks” or honestly just learning how to write because I sucked before this. And then all the way to this quarter to ending with paper about genre and all that good stuff….just wanting to say a huge thank you for putting your time into our lives and staying so committed to your students and classes. You are really a wonderful person.

AND! I really enjoyed the projects we did in writing 2, and how they were all connected in some way, unless one decided to change them. I liked how you still had us write blogs and had meetings for peer review because that always helps with my writing! One thing I am still trying to catch onto is genre and how some genres are very weird like the “How to” one, but I have definitely increased my knowledge in that area. I feel as if I could have written about something else as well because I wrote about Flathead Lake a lot, but hey, it also makes for a good story. Anyways, while this quarter was crazy and so much happened, I am still so thankful for everything you have taught me and the time you put into this class! Stay safe everyone!!

Reading “Lovely Hula Hands” was very interesting and caught my attention. Trask provides the comparison of the tourism in Hawaii to a woman being a prostitute, and explains how those two transformations are similar. She describes that Hawaii is no longer being used for it’s beauty and culture, but rather only for economic purposes. Trask also argues that the tourism industry is only benefitting larger companies, not everyone because the profits tend to go back to the countries where they came from. As she said, “…tourism has appropriated and prostituted the accomplishments of a resurgent interest in things Hawaiian” (Trask 24).

What caught my eye the most was her descriptive example of the “hula dance”. She explains how the meaning of the dance has simply gone away and has become something only for entertainment and profit, rather than understanding and appreciating the Hawaiian celebration of human nature. Trask presented a word that we sometimes use away from Hawaiian culture, “Ohana”. Some people use it to say “Ohana means family” just to make it seem like distantly-related people are close together like a family. But Trask uses it to help the reader understand how women are the lifegivers of the nation, and that their culture holds traditional sexual values. She continues to compare it to Hawaii, and how it “is the female object of degraded and victimized sexual assault” (Trask 27). Instead of their lands being a source of land and shelter, or for a woman, her body as something so pure, it is now a place for profit and money only; being used. In conclusion, cultural degradation is what seems to be causing Hawaii it’s many problems, as Trask explains. While tourism brings more jobs, and less unemployment for local Hawaiian’s, it does make them blind-sided to the fact that it is ruining their culture and only being used for profit.

While I was reading David Sedaris’ “Guide to Santa Barbara”, I was very intrigued and interested in his writing. I liked how he hated on Santa Barbara, but also was saying how good it was but including the money, the food, and the nice hotel. Although, I was a but confused on the smoking portion of it and what he meant at the end of the article. When he said, “Then I quit smoking….found even more reasons to be disgusted”. Did he mean that since he quit, he found how gross things could be or was it that he was annoyed with California because it is so nice. I appreciated how he took his own story or personal issue and incorporated it into the guide. It made it interesting to read. I also liked how it wasn’t too long so you didn’t have to read forever in order to understand the whole story.

After reading Seeing England For the First Time by Jamaica Kincaid, I was a little confused on the writing at first but then understood what it is about. It seems to me that a young girl is taught to worship England and show her how important England was in her daily life. Kincaid uses imagery to compare England to a place in the bible, Jerusalem. I was not so sure of the topic because the relationship between a girl and England seems a bit weird. I guess the passage was written to inform readers of the effect that England had on the little girl. Overall, there was a lot of repetition and words to describe the girls feelings and emotions, and it kept me engaged but I liked the travel guide better.

Man it has been quite a long week….and it is only Wednesday. Anyways, the Research Exploration Project….

Going into the project, I was excited and ready to write about my summer in Montana, and all of the amazing things about it, but then I realized it is only about one specific aspect and that is it. I had to think about what would be fun in finding information for it and how much I could actually write about it. We also had to put it into conversation and for me that was a bit difficult because I kept wanting to talk about my experience instead of the information I learned from researching it.

What worked for me best was being able to summarize the sources and talk about in conversation. What didn’t work was probably everything else.. but I have no negative thoughts about the project, it was just the topic I chose to do. After looking over the possible things to research, I ended up with the Milky Way. Now I thought this was such a good idea and I was thinking it would be super interesting to learn about but it was actually very confusing and difficult to find the sources I wanted.

So far, my rough draft is looking pretty good but I feel like I could have done it wrong in some way, or that I added too much about my story when really it is just supposed to be research. I found it hard to grab information from the sources and summarize it without having to add more and more so the reader could understand. I ended up using a good amount of my research, but I also limited it because there was too much to write down after reading LITERALLY everything about the Milky Way.

Overall it was an alright experience. If we are being honest, I enjoyed our last project more or some from writing 1 HAHA but that’s just because I like to write freely about my personal stories.

After exploring many places over virtual tours, I started to grow a liking for them. Although, I did discover that even though they are very similar to being there in person, they are not nearly as breathtaking or magical as if you were actually there. All in all, virtual tours have clearly become more popular as the corona virus has taken away most travel, and kept people from going on their planned vacations. It has become something that people are very interested in, possibly because it is way better than a flat picture.

I decided to take a virtual tour through The Great Wall of China, The Eiffel Tower, The British Museum in London, and National Aquarium in Baltimore. Personally, I chose these because I have never seen any of them and wanted to take a tour to see if they were worth seeing in person in the future. Obviously, most of them would be good to see because they are very famous and popular, and ranked as some of the world’s best attractions… but I wanted to get a small glimpse beforehand. The tours were very enjoyable and cool to see, but some of them caught my attention more than others. For example, The Great Wall of China was difficult to navigate and did not have the prettiest views, while the Eiffel Tour was much easier to use and the views were amazing.

I know I shouldn’t have judged it by the view, because I bet it is a spectacular thing to see in person… I just hope that this virus will end sooner than later and we will all be able to get back to our regular life safely.

Research projects have always been a fun thing for me, although the research part of it can tend to get a little annoying. The part I like about it is that you know about the place or thing you are researching and it allows you to write freely and express emotion. Which you may not get to if you were writing about a book.

After reading “Literature Reviews” from UNC Chapel Hill, I found that we will need to summarize and describe the arguments and facts stated within the sources we use and not include other statements. When doing research projects, I always include my own opinion and personal experience, which is maybe something I need to work on. Another tip they suggested was to narrow your topic and in my case, this may be difficult because I could narrow my topic down to multiple ones. I also have a hard time connecting the sources together… maybe this time it will be easier because I can try to lead them all back to the same topic of soulmates or star-crossed lovers, but we will find out.

My organization of research papers has never been good. I throw each source in different paragraphs and make it all confusing. Last quarter I was actually in Anthropology and we had to find a topic to research and write about. Mine was on the relationship of K-9 Officers to their dogs and how each breed is different. This was easier because it was already focused on breeds of dogs and K-9 officers specifically, but I am not sure what to do with my paper. It could be teenager soulmates, water sports, the milky way… ALL OVER THE PLACE.

The last thing I want to note, and I need to work on, is my ability to summarize the sources without adding too much information, and including some of my own. I need to be able to limit the quotations and keep it simple because the readers only want the main facts of the sources in an organized way. Overall, research papers are exciting and fun when you find new information to work with.

Mondays…. man they always seem to get me. It seems like something bad is always bound to happen. I don’t know maybe I am just being annoying. But HEY, this is my favorite part of the day… sitting in bed being a crackhead and talking to friends… OH and binge watching shows and eating tons and tons of food. Getting fat from snacks= number one favorite part of the day, but least favorite thing to look at in the morning HAH. Okay anyways you all probably think I am crazy, or for those who know me… this just might be me on a daily basis.

Today I have for you a quote. You can interpret it any way you would like. As for me, Mondays are bad days. I try to make the most out of them, because I am so thankful to be alive another day… but like sometimes life is just shit man. I don’t want to type up a blog of positive words that I myself am not even feeling (thats fake). So rather today, if it sucked… I am with you on that. But I also know that tomorrow is yet another day to make life worth watching. To live out your dream. Laugh at yourself cause we currently have no friends. And to just live in the moment.

Heres the quote:

So let’s get real here. lets make friends with our imperfections because they are the side effects of being human, and there’s medicine in me, too. lets laugh at ourselves: it sure beats the hell out of the alternative. lets agree that normal isn’t a thing, and unlovable isn’t either. let’s not be dicks. there are already enough dicks. let’s reframe our mistakes as lessons and start kicking ass at learning. and let’s use honesty and humor and heart to leave this place a little better than we found it.

-Emily McDowell

It is currently Saturday afternoon and I am sitting inside at my desk writing a blog about genres…needless to say, I would never be doing this if I weren’t in quarantine. Anyways, after reading Kerry Dirk’s “Navigating Genres”, I became somewhat confused on how a genre can help people accomplish goals. The fact that we have been “participating” in genres throughout or whole lives kind of threw me off a bit. I began to read more and more, and found that a genre is actually nothing more than a specific category. While I found that each genre also has it’s own characteristics under multiple categories, I was still confused on what defines a genre. Could anything be a genre? Fruit? My pet frog?

I understood the part where Dirk talked about how people and writers look back on the genres they know, and use those to shape new genres. I know that a lot of my writing is obviously based off of prior knowledge on subjects, but it is also used to make new ideas for my writing. When it came to the rhetorical features of genres, I just got lost and confused and it made no sense to me. Dirk also mentioned that as a writer, you should be aware of the different genres, rather than being an expert in all of them.

I had to eventually go online and look up the main definition of a genre. Yes, I am dumb. I realized, wow, it is something like drama, non-fiction, or fiction, or even a type of art. Dirk did a nice job of explaining examples of it, but I needed to know the basic definition before starting to analyze examples.

After reading Anne Lamott’s article on “Shitty First Drafts”, I immediately thought of how I write and that many of her methods were similar to my own. I always find myself bringing an essay together by starting off with a bunch of crazy, random ideas that will hopefully lead me to my next idea. I throw stuff into my first drafts even if they may not belong, just so I can get any idea possible onto the page. 

I do not make a bunch of separate drafts, but rather combine most of them together, and add and develop them as I go on. Once I get my body paragraphs all lined up and my introduction, thesis and conclusion are in order, then I start to write with detail and make sense of my ideas. Sometimes it takes me a couple weeks, but mainly just a few days to get it all together and start bringing in the final draft.

When others help me and revise my papers, my writing obviously becomes better and easier to understand, even for myself. Anne says in her article that it tends to be after a shitty first draft, when you can finally organize and structure your ideas to make sense. 

I like to find a quiet space with snacks by my side and a ton of fresh air blowing in my face to get my ideas started. Some days, as for many, can be dead and full of nothing but I know some ideas will eventually flow in. I like to at least try and think out of the box, with something that would impress my professor or make the paper better, but sometimes my ideas could also be very basic. A lot of my writing comes from my personal experiences and the way I look at life in a positive manner, because I tend to be inspirational in my words (or so I’ve heard).