Part One: Thinking Critically as a Writer and an Individual in Society
Learning to summarize larger bodies of work will be beneficial to me as we move forward in our curriculum, because it will not only help me prove to myself that I have digested the information that is important in a given text, but it will also help me to simplify the most important information into a more concise explanation, making it easier for me to organize my thoughts on the given subject. Learning to think critically both as a writer and as an individual in society will help me to challenge and analyze any information I am taking in. It is not only important to critically understand the information in any given situation, but it is also crucial that I am able to form an opinion and a sufficient argument regarding these situations. In order to contribute to society in an intellectual way, I believe it is important to be able to do all of these aforementioned things sufficiently. Learning to view different texts varying from advertisements, Tweets, blogs, articles, letters, etc. has shaped my understanding of writing and authorship, because each of these different texts have very different approaches to writing style. For example, advertisements often use some sort of appeal (Logos, Ethos, Pathos) to persuade an audience to take a certain action. Tweets offer opinion in a very informal and concise way due to the 140 character limit. Blog posts offer fairly subjective information in a simplified summary form. Articles generally offer factual information based off a pool of research done by the author. Letters generally offer the emotional opinion of the author/speaker. It is important for me to understand the differences between these writing categories so that I can transfer the techniques used in these to my own writing. For example, in Professor Nathan Brown's "Open Letter to Chancellor Linda P.B Katehi," he has a very emotional approach to his writing in order to persuade his audience (in this case being Chancellor Katehi) to take a certain action. His ultimate goal is to persuade Chancellor Katehi to resign. He specifically uses a large amount of Pathos and Ethos to establish a stronger argument. Furthermore, in our first Twitter post, we had to simplify our own opinions about a given text into 140 characters. This character limit was important, because it forced us to synthesize our thoughts into a short and coherent text.
Moreover, this advertisement conveys a very emotional response through visual. The visual representation of the gun shadow evokes a very specific emotion (Pathos), making it clear to the audience that smoking kills. The goal of this specific advertisement is to persuade smokers and even non smokers not to smoke. All of these text categories achieve their desired purpose through different techniques, and it is important for me as a writer and individual to be able to analyze them.
Part Two: Academic Summary-"Combating Myths About Distance Education" Todd Gilman
Todd Gilman, an academic librarian at Yale University, has two main purposes in his writing. These purposes are to argue that online courses require just as much work for the students and staff involved, and to inform his audience of teachers how to properly structure an online course. Gilman claims that the unfavorable attitude toward online courses is due to the bad reputation those few unsuccessful online courses have gotten, and he also claims that "the attitude also seems to be connected to the very idea of online teaching, as though no real college-level content could be delivered or absorbed without face-to-face interaction between teacher and students" (100). He also describes the bad reputation that online teachers, like himself, get at universities. To combat this reputation of online teachers and courses, he includes that he has also taught traditional face-to-face courses and that good "traditional" teachers can transfer this good teaching to their online courses (logos/ethos). Moreover, Gilman acknowledges the other side of the argument by evaluating the argument that "any number of possible factors could affect the quality of instruction" (101). He successfully refutes this side of the argument by stating that "crucial factors in online instruction are organization and, related to that, course design or presentation of material," while including that both of these components must be present in online and traditional courses, or neither will be successful. He later claims that the responsibility of students in online courses is just as high, if not higher, as that of traditional courses, due to the amount of self-accountability in these online courses. He states that "students have to be up to the challenge of learning online, meaning that there is a level of maturity required that is less necessary in a physical classroom" due to the inevitable amount of "spoon-feeding" that goes on in traditional courses (103). Furthermore, he informs his audience how to properly design an online course through the proper use of courseware, course organization, and a welcoming attitude to students that would be present in the traditional classroom. Some of the courseware options he includes are eCollege, WebCT Vista, Blackboard, Blackboard Vista, Angel, and Sakai. The welcoming attitude he is talking about portrays sufficient availability and approachability in online classes that would be available in traditional courses. All of these things are a combination of how Gilman believes an online course should be structured.
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