PB2A

I decided to go with a psychological article that was based on a study which tried to identify if there was any correlation or actually connection between psychopathy and Intermittent Explosive Disorder (IED).

After having read the article and thought ab bit of it as well as skimming through it a second time, I noticed that there were many citations within the text, especially within the latter portion of the paper. In the first two section of the article—the introduction and methods section—most of the citations were based of other research or in reference to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manal of Mental Disorders 5^th Edition (DSM-5) and its test for diagnostics. In the second portion of this article—the result sections—the citations were mainly in reference to the data that was collected from the experiment performed for this study. The addition of the many citations is mainly used a source of ethos to gain credibility on the way that the participants were going to be analyzed and how the test being made actually legitimate.

A very noticeable rhetorical feature in this article is the tone of the article. From the very beginning of the article—by this I mean the title, authors, and the paragraph before the actual article starts—the reader is subjected to very formal, scientific, and informative tone. These thing present the tone through the addition of each of the authors field of study and formal introduction to what IED is and what this paper will be about.

Another noticeable feature is the exclusion of personal pronouns which is meant to give a less biased view to the article and make it more about going straight to the point with little “fluff”. This functions as a way to make the article see more reliable since it is purely factual and is also based on an analysis the data of previous studies to see if they missed anything for not taking into account what was being taken in this study.

From an overview of the article there are many noticeable conventions that can make this article be classified as a “scholarly” article. A few such general conventions would be the inclusion of data, graphs, and a reference section with many references listed—because as Dirk tries to explain, pieces of writing build on each other to become better pieces of said genre. Another convention in this article would be the division of the article into three pieces—an introduction, the method (how the study was done and the data), and the results.  A certain convention for this article could be the inclusion of paragraph that came after the title, but before the start of the actual article. As stated before this paragraph function as an introduction to the study and gave the reader a sense of what he/she could expect to read, pretty much a warning as to who might be interested in this article—answering the “who cares” (So What? Who Cares?)

The main question posed in this article was: if there was any link between psychopathic behavior and IED. The question was answered by analyzing over a thousand individuals through test certified by the DSM-5. Concepts such as IED, anger, aggression, impulsivity, and many different disorders were defined all by the DSM-5, but they were all operationalized by the many test taken by the participants which gave empirical data as to whether said participants could be diagnosed with the disorders.

The two most important aspects of this scholarly piece, in my opinion, would have to be the division of the article in to the three main pieces—the introduction, the presentation of the experiment and the data, and the discussion of the results—and the tone encountered through the article. The division is important because I present the article in a manner that is easy to follow and understand what is going and being presented. The tone is important because it give the article a non-biased view that will only be informative and present the data as it was calculated.

Thlog W4

It now week 4, which is hard to believe. This week in class we had no reading which gave us a good break to mainly focus on finishing writing our WP1.

On Monday we mainly focused on our WP1 and began to analyze them ourselves to see what they had, were lacking, and what needed to be improved.  We also learn a very quick tip on when to use whom, apparently it’s after prepositions, something I never knew. The really important thing we learn on Monday were reverse outlines—a sentence that summarizes a paragraph and through which the writer can tell if it (the paragraph) relates back to his thesis. Most useful part of Monday’s lecture was the very ending in which we got into groups of two gave feedback to each other, just in case we needed to make last minute changes. I really got a lot of the last ten minutes because I that I really needed to add more quotes from the readings and that I needed to change my thesis, or least make it clearer.

The best part about last week was that we had finished our WP1 which lowered my stress levels by a lot. The reality check of this week was that WP2 was now in progress, starting with PB2A.

Second lecture was mainly about introducing WP2 and what we were to focus on with this writing assignment. The tip of day was an interesting one even if I didn’t find much use to it, but I thought it was a good idea to explore new text and see how it could embody us and also give us a new inspiration. I am still loving the class and can’t wait for the next lecture.

Thlog W3

This week was mainly about focusing how to prepare for our writing project 1 and getting feedback on them. The first reading of this week was very useful because it gave me a different perspective to write in to focus more having a stronger essay that a reader could easily understand and get my message through to them. It also made me start thinking about how I should write certain sentences and make them have a stronger effect.

In our first lecture we went over some great writing tips—how to use hyphens and dashes—which was very helpful because I had completely forgotten about how dashes could be in English and I learned how to correctly use hyphens for the first time in my life. This lecture was also very useful because I was a bit confused when doing the assignment that was due the previous Wednesday, but in class seeing all the other examples really helped clarify how we were supposed to do them and it also cleared up the little confusion I had with our first draft of the writing project.

While reading the second assigned reading of the week, I felt like I already knew most the things being said, like I had something very similar back in high school, although it was a good refresher to remember to ask question instead of pointing out what was wrong, even though you should still do that—positive criticism is the way to go.

Now our final lecture of the was, in my opinion, the most important one since I let my fellow writers read my essay. I knew it wasn’t great, but they pointed out somethings I never noticed, like how I rarely wrote about the conventions I mentioned at the beginning, so I had to change those and make my argument clearer. These were the most important things I got from that lecture and they were really helpful.

WP1

Hector Nava

Writing 2

De Pierro

Rap: Sex, Drugs, Love, Change

To this day most people still associate rap with drugs, sex, gangs, and violence, but that isn’t always the case—especially now with rappers like Hopsin, Logic and J. Cole; rappers such as these are now revolutionizing the rap genre and sending positive messages through their lyrics. These rappers rap about overcoming something (like an addiction), changing for the better, and growing up.

Hopsin, J. Cole, and Logic all rap in very different styles, but their song all includes lyrics that rhyme, have profanity, and up beat tempo, references that could be considered misogynistic. All of the conventions previously mentioned make these rappers appear like they have the typical lyrical skills I mentioned in the first sentence, but that’s is not the case as will be proven.

“Ill Mind of Hopsin 5” is the name of Hopsin’s song. The lyrics of this song talk about how people of this new generation are being consumed by what they hear in songs. “When I say the word fun, what do you envision? Probably drinking and smoking out with your crew and chilling with clueless women you try and bang, bumping new edition” The first third of the song is a wake-up call directed toward the young adults—millennials—who feel like they are self-entitled people and must do no work to obtain what they desire. This third also functions as a criticism to how we have been influenced by other rap songs depict drugs, alcohol, and women as views of a fun and lavish life. In the second third of the lyrics, Hopsin goes on to discuss the problems with women, more specifically those that make poor decisions in life and have tendencies to try to get into relationships only for the possible benefits it appears to have. Even though these lyrics may seem misogynistic to all women, the listener must reader that they are meant only for women who fool themselves and that their sole purpose is to get them to realize that they have to change if they wish to live better life’s. African Americans are the final kind of people to be acknowledge in this song. Hopsin refers to African Americans as “Neanderthals” for being in gangs and going around killing each other committing crimes. He also asks the question, what a “real ni**a” is, referring to how most people think being a ni**a is someone who is a badass, but Hopsin would define it differently—more like a person who has his life together and doesn’t need to prove anything to anyone, but himself. “Ill Mind of Hopsin 5” is a fighting song trying to address various problems in our society, trying to get the younger members of society to learn that they must work hard if they wish to get anything done. This song is like an assailant to all other rap song that depict the famous, drug, cool, gangster life. Hopsin wrote it to bring awareness to the influence of the rap genre in our society today and to get those have been affected by it in a negative way to get their life in order and change before it’s too late.

Life is important, but deciding whether to give it or end it before it begins is just as important; J. Cole’s song, “Lost Ones,” is literally a debate about the topic of abortions. What makes this rap song unique, besides its message, is its convention of having a back and forth argument—of course giving from two different point-of-views. The premise of this song is a young man gets a young woman pregnant and now they must decide what to do, whether to have the child or for the woman to get an abortion. The lyrics of this song depict that man as scared and lost about having a child; these feeling/emotions help the listener to make a connection between this character and themselves by expressing how most men would actually feel if they were in his situation. The man in this case sides with getting the abortion because he feels as if having a child would be to overwhelming. J Cole’s lyrics, “How we gon' raise a kid by ourself? Handle biz by ourself A nigga barely over twenty, where the hell we gon' live? Where am I gon get that money I refuse to bring my boy or my girl in this world When I ain't got shit to give 'em And I'm not with them niggas who be knocking girls up and skate out Girl, you gotta think bout how the options weigh out. Whats the way out?” capture the man’s insecurity spot on and make the listener want to agree with what he is saying. Now on the other side we have the pregnant woman who is certain that she will have this child because it’s her child and would not want to take a life. She attacks that man by calling him out saying how she anticipated this would happen if she ever got pregnant and even comparing him to his dad who left him as child, putting into question his manhood. The woman even mentions how the man hated that his father left him and how he stated he’d never leave his child. These couple of verses, would get the listener thinking to themselves about who was right, the man or the woman; this is power that the rap genre can have, it can make people think about a situation and analyze it, give them, the audience, a way experience something new and poetic. This song is clearly meant for people who are in the same shoes the couple form this piece or anyone interest in the topic of abortion, a very controversial topic to this day. It is meant to demonstrate that there can be more than one correct view-point and that both sides must always be taken into account when making life changing decisions.

The rap genre can be and effective way to tell a life changing story; Logic’s “Nikki,” is great rap song about overcoming an addiction. What makes this rap song unique is that the song is an analogy to cigarettes and nicotine. Logic does a beautiful job at personifying nicotine and while keeping the lyrics almost as like a goodbye letter. This song is the story of how Logic and his “Nikki” ended. When the song first introduces Nikki, the listener can assume that Logic might have a really deep passion for someone, but as soon as he mentions, “You the only girl I need I gotta have you back even though you turn my lungs black,” the connection can be made that that Nikki represents cigarettes. Through the lyrics the listener gets a glimpse as to how dependent Logic was to cigarettes and how it was not easy for him to end a cycle that he has been doing for some-time now. A great example to prove just how weak he was in the lyric, “What will they write upon my grave A free man born as a king, who died as a slave.” This lyric demonstrates that even he knew he was beginning to have to control over his addiction, giving the song an even more relatable scenario. By referring to cigarettes as a person, Logic manages to appeal to a younger audience and also make it possible for others to identify their addiction as someone rather than something, causing people to be more likely to acknowledge them and take action. This rap song is not only just a song it’s also a promise, because upon the release of this song, Logic promised that he would never smoke ever again, probably inspiring his fans and others to quit too making a big impact on their lives.

Many people may think that the rap genre is definitely not changing and think it will continue to focus mainly of those vices mentioned at the beginning. Most rap songs do still pertain to such group of rap and it is likely that many more similar rap songs will release in the future. One cannot deny that are changes being made in the genre, especially when one of the most influential rappers of this generation, Kendrick Lamar, is an advocate of rap with stronger more positive messages; along with Hopsin, J. Cole, and Logic, the rap genre is surely on its way to changing.

The three songs rap songs mentioned all had positive messages to be heard, but they were all told differently. Upon reading the lyrics its clear to notice that Hopsin is very direct with his message while J. Cole and Logic prefer to tell their messages through a story, either way it is easy for the listener to identify the main-point. The main difference between each of these three songs are the topic each one chooses to address. Hopsin talks about society, J. Cole about love for oneself, and Logic about overcoming obstacles; the main reason for this could be that each of them sees such problem as having a bigger effect on society or themselves—it’s like J Cole’s song, there are various viewpoints, especially when it comes to social problems.

The rap genre is constantly evolving and adapting to newer styles; rap songs with more prominent positive messages are starting gain popularity because they keep the same conventions commonly identified with the genre—cursing, fast tempo, catchy chorus, misogyny, and drugs—but work with them to point them out and address such troublesome topics. 

Thlog W.2

This week in class we only had one lecture, which was quite unfortunate. Although we only one lecture it was a very productive one. The best thing that happened is that we got feedback on what we wrote. I now know that I must work on identifying correct genres and more specifically that 1 book can’t be its own genre since of course there would be nothing to compare it to. I also need to work on giving concrete evidence to support my claims, while also attracting the reader even more, which of course is always the end goal.

During this week’s reading, when reading the introduction to Carroll’s essay, I began to think about the Lego Movie; this is because of what she said, “If we refuse to stop and think about how and why it persuades us we can become mindless consumer who buy into arguments that make us value ourselves and what makes us happy.” In the beginning of the Lego Movie, the citizens of the city are portrayed as such people who base their lives on all the advertisement they see without ever thinking twice about them. Before reading this essay I had been introduced to the concept of rhetoric in and English class before, but I never quite actually learned, or remembered, what it was. Now I understand that rhetoric is everywhere and influences practically every action in our life. Rhetoric is pretty much based on how we choose to send a message to someone and how we wanted them to react to it, rhetoric itself is the art of persuasion.

I have a few ideas about what I want to write for by WP1, but I have to decide which would be the best and I would be most interest in. Hopefully by the end of class on Monday I will know which one I want to write about.

PB1B

Disclaimer: I won’t be using the first website because it always generated the same thing with the same information, it just changed the names in put into the generator.

The task at hand is to go online see a couple of websites, see conventions within different genres, and then to explain how such websites can give people a better understanding of what exactly a “genre” is.

Pandyland is comic strip website; the creator of makes a comic out of three boxes and then uploads them to this website; this website then randomly selects three of the many boxes and makes a single comic strip out of them. The best part about this website is that most of the time the strip that is generated makes no sense, but even though they make no sense I still find them funny. Most of these generated strips tend to have at least one box that contains a violent action, either the characters assaulting each other, or of them doing self-inflicted damage. Another convention in these strips would definitely have to be the vulgar language; the two characters consistently curse at each other and sometimes reference their genitals. I’m not too certain about this being a convention, but I noticed that in some of the strips, the comic starts off with what people would call a conversation starting, and by the end, most of the time, the comic has nothing to do with what was presented at the beginning. The final convention I could find is that you could make a comedic strip by only using two of the chosen boxes and completely ignoring the other one that could possibly be making the strip incoherent.

Prior to this assignment, I had never really looked at memes. I now know that certain memes contain text that go with them; it could be said that meme has their own conventions. A really popular meme is the one with the dinosaur; his memes are always captioned with, what I think are meant to be, thought provoking questions. Why this is so, is unclear to me. The memes containing “the most interesting man in the world,” mostly have to do with how the man does things; they all start with the, “I don’t always…” phrase. Something all the memes have in common are their witty captioning; they are all meant to be funny and easy to understand. This captioning is also always in big white bold letters so that they capture the attention of the reader. Obviously since they are memes, they must include a picture or drawing of some sort. These pictures are usually something that went viral on the internet and stood out enough to able to be associated with something that somebody thought others would find funny.

While searching online for some genre generator, I thought about book titles and found a decent website, Fantasy Name Generators, whose purpose is to create titles for different genres ranging from sci-fi, children, humor, horror, and many more. I’ll only be considering the conventions for the aforementioned genres. From what I gather, sci-fi genre titles, according to this website, tend to have words in the title that deal with robot/androids and of course outer space, encompasses aliens. The children genre was dominated by titles that included names of animals or other simple nouns, such as flowers, buildings, or imaginary things. This website has a weird humor generator because the tiles it was suggesting were all terrible. These titles consisted mainly of two completely unrelated words being connected by conjunction.

There are a wide variety of different genres so understating genre can be difficult, but by using websites, such as these that create random genres, one can learn to identify what makes up a genre, its conventions. All of these websites had obvious repeating patterns when they each gave out their random genre. For example, as stated earlier, the comic website usually had violence and profanity, the memes website had those bold words and iconic viral pictures, the title generator had couple of patterns for each genre they had. The point is that genre is just a big broad picture of everything because within the subject of genre there are many sub-genres, that can have even more sub-genres. A Genre is like a group that consist of many pieces of writing or any medium that incorporate certain conventions, but even these conventions can have conventions, thus making those conventions possible genres, very specific genres.

                                                        

PB1A

Last year, I was introduced into Charles Dickens, more specifically to his novel, Great Expectations. Great Expectations had a unique aspect to it; it was novel that had many holes which let the story move on, but towards the end they all were answered. While the novel wasn’t necessarily a mystery, more of a coming of age, it still had that strong mystery aspect, so that’s what I will focus on, the mystery aspect of the novel Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. 

The mystery aspect of this novel comes into play always when you think that nothing will change. For example, in the beginning the main character Pip is present as a regular boy in a lower class family, but then after a few years of going to this one house and coming to an age where he should be getting an education, he happens to come across some money being given to him by an unknown person. Most would assume that it is the woman who is the owner of the house he has been going to, but that assumption is wrong. It is possible for the reader to sometimes figure out some explanation that will make sense, but that thing that make the correct in these stories are sometime based on the details that the reader was introduced to, but never paid much attention to them.

Dickens’ incorporates the mystery aspect into his novel to keep the reader at distance and wanting more to figure out whether their, the readers, conclusions are right; of course the main target of audience for this novel aren’t people who are into mysteries, but rather those who are into novels of coming of age, a life story, and realism, but the mystery portion is just an added bonus that gives this novel its uniqueness and adds to strengthen its plot. The style of giving some insight and then ignoring it till the end, was very effect and just as Dirk said, “when something new happens that requires a response, someone must create that first response. Then when the situation happens again, another person uses the first response as the basis for the second,” and other people base their response on both responses, “…resulting in the basis of a genre.” (Navigating Genres, 252) The novels influence can be seen in movies such Pulp Fiction where the director gives us parts of the story through different points of views, but in the end they all come together to form a well narrated piece of cinematography. One of the best reasons why the mystery aspect incorporates so well into this novel is because of the gloomy and dark tone set which always correlates well with a mystery aspect of anything.

Another unique aspect that makes up a Charles Dickens mystery in this novel is the way every hole gets filled. The amount of creativity it takes to come up with the resolution to each one is just awing. He sets them up from the very beginning and towards the end they each begin to unravel one by one.