Miranda’s Site

Division and Equity Thanksgiving is a special holiday to many as it facilitates the gathering of close relatives and friends to share a meal and conversation. Family members from all over the states with all different upbringings convene to discuss recent schooling or sports achievements, family news, and eventually, polarizing topics. Suddenly, the peaceful and joyous environment of Thanksgiving dinner is ruined as a relative mentions something, or holds a view, which makes the table erupt with angry discourse. It…

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Before this semester, I was pretty certain that my writing needed little improvement when it came to sentence level error. I could not have been more wrong however, as throughout the semester, with help from peers and Professor Brod, I was able to acknowledge some glaring issues within my writing. The two biggest issues I had to face were passive sentences and overuse of semicolons.  While passive sentences are usually popular in scientific writing, they do not provide a very…

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I have never really struggled with my citations in the past, but practice is always a positive thing. The thing I focused on most was using signal phrases more often and making sure my parenthetical citations were in the right place. Below is an example of a signal phrase quotation in my essay #2 (image 1): I got a lot of practice with parenthetical citations and quotation placements in this course, some examples of which I have shown below (see…

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Peer review was an extremely different experience in this class compared to my high school peer review. In high school, I dreaded peer review as usually I’d hand my paper to one of my classmates and get it back with little to no suggestions for improvement. It felt like a waste of time when I put in effort to honestly critique a peer’s piece only to get one back that was devoid of any substance. This class however, gave me…

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Active reading was a concept I disliked prior to this semester. In high school, annotations felt like busywork. I struggled to find ways to address my thoughts on a piece I was meant to annotate when the entire time, the end goal of said annotations wasn’t clear. Often, I felt like annotations had no point and were just there to waste time, but my work this semester has proven this to the contrary. I had a much easier time doing…

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One of my least favorite parts of my English classes in the past was taking sources and rewriting them in my own words. I was once told to put the source first, and just respond in a way that furthered the source’s ideas most of the time. This class, however, took a different approach to source material as a whole and made me rethink how I integrate the ideas of others. Emphasis was placed upon putting my ideas first and…

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Prior to this class, I was not the best at revising my work. Usually, I would write something and that first iteration was the final one, with little to no changes coming upon a second read through. Most of my issues for revision are rooted in my lack of practice in the process, something which I think I gained a lot of improvement on over the semester.  Improvements on my global revision process rested mostly on ideological organization. As I…

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[C1] “Eating Jack Hooker’s Cow” by Michael Paterniti exemplifies the value of belief templates in people’s lives as described by David Foster Wallace in his speech “This is Water”. [I] According to DFW, [Q1] “…the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people…two different belief templates…two different ways of constructing meaning from experience.” (David Foster Wallace). [E] DFW posits that while people can have the same experience, they will always see it differently based on…

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Which images from Lameris’s poem resonate most with you, and why? The imagery in this poem is very strong. In particular, the part about people pulling their legs in and saying thank you to the person handing you a coffee. I feel like I can see all of the instances brought up in the poem and relate to them strongly. This poem makes you think of how we have evolved as a human race over the years, and the images…

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In his essay, Paterniti uses “close 3rd” point of view as he describes each of the main characters. How does his choice of point of view impact your understanding and impression of motel owners Jack and Bout, specifically? This point of view choice forces the reader to see the world through the context of the people in the story. The vivid imagery of the piece really helps play this up too. For Jack and Bout in particular, Paterniti uses a lot…

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