Blog Post #1: Close and Critical Thinking for P1

Part 1:

Condensing hefty literature into smaller text is an idealistic way in order to understand the author’s purpose, hit key points, and prove an overall understanding of the context. Essential skills needed not only in class, but in life too - such as critical thinking - play a huge role when summarizing text. After reading a sizable piece of literature, deciphering what the overall text was saying might be fuzzy. Reflecting back onto the text, answering “why did the author write this?”, and building a habit of this will ensure comprehension of almost everything we read in class. By summarizing text, we are breaking it down into more manageable and clear parts. Many times in life, we need to critically analyze things which concern us at complexity. By breaking it down (like summarizing) we can more efficiently conciliate with it.

With the recent outburst of social media we have an agglomeration of topics written in many different forms. Whether it’s advertised, tweeted, blogged, posted, or even texted there’s a huge assortment of various view points. It’s not only important but also interesting to see how people react to things differently, and express this opinions in different forms.

In  the entry “An Open Letter to Chancellor “ by Nathan Brown he doesn’t hesitate on making his purpose clear and valid. He came across with lots of pathos to show his accusation, and persuade his audience into his thinking which tags along with his usage of ethos.

Part 2:

“Combating Myths About Distance Education” by Todd Gilman is a well-written essay that explores the topic of online courses. Todd Gilman is an academic librarian at Yale University with a second job as an online course instructor. Throughout his essay, he constructs an argument regarding online courses and advises his audience how to build courses online in a way that will benefit the teacher and the student. A major point Gilman expressed is that online learning is a different learning tactic that requires students to take on much more responsibility than they would in a regular classroom. He pointed out that “students aren’t physically in class they may feel like there is less pressure to participate in class, which may affect their grades” (Gilman    ). As far audience appeals Gillam utilizes pathos to further explain and support his main points. He claims how he is said to be Pinocchio (Gilman 102) and how he’s not a “real boy” (Gilman ) or rather a real teacher in his case.

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