Blog #4 Literature

Literature is a very broad topic with many different perspectives and is used to portray so many different messages in many different forms. In my opinion, I don't see literature as something that has to be in a written form in a book. I can define literature as a form of work that portrays some form of artistic merit. So for example, a book, movie, music, etc. Generally someone would say that a movie or music isn't literature, but the screenplay of the movie or the lyrics of the song are literature because they are words you can read. I see movies as a way to see your book come to life and music as a way to experience literature in another form having all sorts of feelings and emotions that you can't truly get from just reading a book. Technically you could ague that this blog post is in fact literature because you are having to read words on a screen, but I wouldn't say it's literature because this blog post lacks artistic merit which is needed in all forms of literature.

Literature is very important to not only ourselves, but of course everyone around us because it helps us establish a special connection with the people around us and the experiences or characters within a specific form of literature. For example, a person could relate greatly with the main protagonist of a book or the main character of a movie because of the experiences that protagonist/character undergoes throughout the story. With so many different forms of literature, we are able to see so many different perspectives of a story and be able to experience the differences between them by just reading a simple book or watching a movie. My favorite piece of literature at the moment would have to be the movie "Goal! The Dream Begins". This movie explains the life of an illegal immigrant from Mexico that moved to the United States at a very young age, but he copes with his many problems throughout life with his prowess in soccer. He is later given a chance to go to England and make a name for himself in the professional league. I believe this is literature because it shows artistic merit and also has that connection to many people around the world. This movie also teaches valuable lessons to always follow your dreams no matter how hard they may be to reach because the only thing stopping you is yourself. Overall this is my favorite piece of literature because I really enjoy the message it brings and I can relate to the sport of soccer which is a big focus in the movie.



Questions:
1. I learned how to be more descriptive with my writing and show rather than tell a message. I also learned many different types of essays such as a synthesis essay or an analysis essay which all helps make a great research paper that will help me out when I go to college.

2. I believe my writing has become stronger over the course of this year and I feel like writing the research paper was very helpful for not only next year, but also college.

3. I really struggled wish the showing exercises we had at the beginning of the year and also with finding rhetorical strategies to analyze in a piece of literature we had examined.

4. I wish we would have done more with film and revised a whole film and maybe written an essay on it. I really enjoyed finding rhetorical strategies within a film.

Rhetorical Situation Report: Voter ID Laws

I will be researching the issue of whether or not the United States government should require voters to provide some form of identification, whether it is photo identification or just simply some sort of legal document. I chose voter identification laws as my topic because I find it interesting to know that the United States government is the only country in the world to not require people to show some form of identification to vote. I also find much controversy involved with this topic.

Recently we had the mid-term elections that featured the election of Senators and House of Representatives that would be in office. As of right now, 34 out of the 50 states require some form of identification in order to vote. The other 16 don’t require this for people to vote. Out of the required 34 states, Texas is described as one of the toughest in the nation for a photo ID law being required. Many people believe we should put into effect these voter ID laws because it reduces the risk of fraud, which can be an important issue in close elections, and strengthens the validity of the election results. Due to these concerns, this would keep hundreds of thousands of voters from casting a ballot in Texas. Because the Supreme Court allowed Texas to enforce their strict voter ID laws, this would manly harm the large population of African Americans and Hispanics that live in Texas. On the other hand, not requiring voter ID laws would increase the percentage of people wanting to vote but can’t. The issue is important to minority voters as the United States has a history of suppressing the voting rights of minorities particularly in the South. Many Americans believe that requiring an ID to vote disproportionately affects minority voters, like the mid-term election in Texas, and is a violation of voting rights. Thus, there is a great controversy whether the U.S. government should require voter ID laws or not.

The audiences most affected by this would most likely be minorities that have been known to be suppressed from their voting rights and just voters who don’t have an ID to vote. People without an ID and are in a state that requires some from of ID to vote are going to go against wanting to enforce these laws. Many proponents of voter ID laws would want these for the sense of security they may achieve by needing to have an ID to vote. 

http://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/voter-id.aspx

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/2014/10/18/0439b116-5623-11e4-892e-602188e70e9c_story.html

Postman's "The Medium is a Metaphor"

Neil Postman shares his philosophy in chapter one, “A Medium is a Metaphor”, of his book Amusing Ourselves to Death. He mainly argues that we as a society have been slowly going away from our sophisticated ways of communicating with the invention of the television and telephones. I would have to agree with Postman. Even though this book was written in 1984, we have only progressed further away from our sophisticated ways of writing such as physical text on letters and more face to face interaction. Having email and text messaging on personal cell phones has made it very easy for our generation to avoid any of these refined ways of communicating. Another clear example of Postman's argument deals with our 27th, William Howard Taft and how big of a factor the television is. Postman argues how a President that weighs 300 pounds or is bald would not get elected when people had access to televisions. He says this because people care more about appearance than they do about the certain ideas a person puts forth has when they run for president. Back when there weren't any televisions, people didn't see that Taft weighed 300 pounds. They cared mainly on his ideals and not his appearance. In this generation, it would be very unlikely that a person like Taft would be elected because of how vastly our society has changed its ideas about other people. We are all affected by our televisions and this has hindered our realization of what the norm is because we have set such high expectations for everything in life.

Postman defines the "medium" in "The Medium is a Metaphor" as something through which we enforce our understanding of reality. This understanding we have has many similarities to what it was back in 1984. However, the only difference between 1984 till now, is that we have gotten progressively worse in our understanding of what the "medium" is. For example, we went from have simple house telephones where you could call your friends at night and interact with them even if it wasn't face to face, to having personal cellphones where you only text message your friends because you are too lazy or too tired to talk to them over the phone and hear their voice. Through Postman's humor and examples he gets his point across to us and helps us to understand what his understanding of what the "medium" in his world is.

Blog #1 Freedom of Expression

In Gwen Wilde's essay, she is very persuasive on the way she portrays the idea of having the phrase "under God" removed from the pledge of allegiance. Wilde makes multiple points about how you may be affected if you are a non-Christian. For example, many people who aren't Christian might be called unpatriotic because they don't feel comfortable saying the phrase "under God". She also talks about how people can't feel like they are patriotic towards their country because of this phrase. I strongly disagree with removing the phrase in the pledge due to the fact that I am Catholic and I attend Strake Jesuit. I also believe that this country was founded through the help of God. In Bok's essay, he makes many point regarding censorship on college school campuses. He supports to no censorship even if people will get offended, but he does not support the campus police from stopping someone being harmed. In my opinion, the difference between an act being harmful or an act being offensive is that an act that is harmful would cause physical pain towards someone, while an offensive act would probably cause some mental harm. It's very hard to truly determine between the two, but I disagree with Bok's view on censorship. For example, I feel that if someone puts up a confederate flag then a lot of people will be offended and it's safe to say that they should probably take down the flag. There is no need to allow behavior like that even if someone can't express how they feel. I think there should be a limit to how much you can censor someone and that should have helped decide this dilemma. An example where I was personally violated of my freedom of expression was when I posted a comment on social media that was removed most likely because the person may have found it offensive. I believe that in this example it's fine to allow people to have the power to remove any comments they feel are offensive or harmful towards them. While many students may not agree with me, I feel that administrators have the right to do what they want if anything offensive is posted about the school, but the administrators shouldn't be able to punish a student if they are just expressing themselves freely on their social media. I don't feel like the government really needs to get involved as long as administrators don't blow anything out of proportion with what students say.