Synthesizing Sources: Entering the Conversation
synthesis_the_language_comp_chapter_4.pdf | |
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Using Sources to Inform an Argument
Laura Hillenbrand
(born May 15, 1967) is an American author of books and magazine articles. Her two best-selling nonfiction books, Seabiscuit: An American Legend and Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption have sold over 13 million copies, and each was adapted for film. Her writing style is considered to differ from the New Journalism style, dropping verbal pyrotechnics in favor of a stronger focus on the story itself.
Both books were written after she fell ill in college, barring her from completing her degree. She told that story in an award-winning essay, A Sudden Illness, which was published in The New Yorker in 2003. She was 28 years with Borden Flanagan, from whom she separated by 2014.
Her writing style belongs to a new school of nonfiction writers, who come after the New Journalism, focusing more on the story than a literary prose style:
Hillenbrand belongs to a generation of writers who emerged in response to the stylistic explosion of the 1960s. Pioneers of New Journalism like Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer wanted to blur the line between literature and reportage by infusing true stories with verbal pyrotechnics and eccentric narrative voice. But many of the writers who began to appear in the 1990s ... approached the craft of narrative journalism in a quieter way. They still built stories around characters and scenes, with dialogue and interior perspective, but they cast aside the linguistic showmanship that drew attention to the writing itself.
Both books were written after she fell ill in college, barring her from completing her degree. She told that story in an award-winning essay, A Sudden Illness, which was published in The New Yorker in 2003. She was 28 years with Borden Flanagan, from whom she separated by 2014.
Her writing style belongs to a new school of nonfiction writers, who come after the New Journalism, focusing more on the story than a literary prose style:
Hillenbrand belongs to a generation of writers who emerged in response to the stylistic explosion of the 1960s. Pioneers of New Journalism like Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer wanted to blur the line between literature and reportage by infusing true stories with verbal pyrotechnics and eccentric narrative voice. But many of the writers who began to appear in the 1990s ... approached the craft of narrative journalism in a quieter way. They still built stories around characters and scenes, with dialogue and interior perspective, but they cast aside the linguistic showmanship that drew attention to the writing itself.
from Seabiscuit
Gerald L. Early
(born April 21, 1952) is an American essayist and American culture critic. He is currently the Merle Kling Professor of Modern letters, of English, African studies, African American studies, American culture studies, and Director, Center for Joint Projects in the Humanities and Social Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.
He also served as a consultant on Ken Burns' documentary films Baseball, Jazz,Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, and The War. He is a regular commentator on National Public Radio's Fresh Air. His essays have appeared in numerous editions of Best American Essays series. He writes on topics as diverse as American literature, the Korean War, African American culture, Afro-American autobiography, non-fiction prose, baseball, jazz, prizefighting, Motown, Miles Davis,Muhammad Ali and Sammy Davis Jr.
He also served as a consultant on Ken Burns' documentary films Baseball, Jazz,Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, and The War. He is a regular commentator on National Public Radio's Fresh Air. His essays have appeared in numerous editions of Best American Essays series. He writes on topics as diverse as American literature, the Korean War, African American culture, Afro-American autobiography, non-fiction prose, baseball, jazz, prizefighting, Motown, Miles Davis,Muhammad Ali and Sammy Davis Jr.
from A Level Playing Field
www.diversityinc.com/news/measure-diversity-one-u-s-pro-sport-meets/
Using Sources to Appeal to an Audience
Steven Pinker
(born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-born American cognitive scientist, psychologist, linguist, and popular science author. He is Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and is known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.
Pinker's academic specializations are visual cognition and psycholinguistics. His experimental subjects include mental imagery, shape recognition, visual attention, children's language development, regular and irregular phenomena in language, the neural bases of words and grammar, and the psychology of cooperation and communication, including euphemism, innuendo, emotional expression, and common knowledge. He has written two technical books which proposed a general theory oflanguage acquisition and applied it to children's learning of verbs. In particular, his work with Alan Prince published in 1989 critiqued the connectionist model of how children acquire the past tense of English verbs, arguing instead that children use default rules such as adding "-ed" to make regular forms, sometimes in error, but are obliged to learn irregular forms one by one.
In his popular books, he has argued that the human faculty for language is an instinct, an innate behavior shaped by natural selection and adapted to our communication needs. He is the author of seven books for a general audience. Five of these, namelyThe Language Instinct (1994), How the Mind Works (1997), Words and Rules (2000),The Blank Slate (2002), and The Stuff of Thought (2007) describe aspects of the field of psycholinguistics and cognitive science, and include accounts of his own research. The sixth book, The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), makes the case that violence in human societies has, in general, steadily declined with time, and identifies six major causes of this decline. His seventh book, The Sense of Style (2014), is intended as a general style guide that is informed by modern science and psychology, offering advice on how to produce more comprehensible and unambiguous writing in nonfiction contexts and explaining why so much of today's academic and popular writing is difficult for readers to understand.
Pinker has been named as one of the world's most influential intellectuals by various magazines. He has won awards from the American Psychological Association, the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Institution, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society and the American Humanist Association. He delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 2013. He has served on the editorial boards of a variety of journals, and on the advisory boards of several institutions. He has frequently participated in public debates on science and society and is a regular contributor to the online science and culture digest 3 Quarks Daily.
Pinker's academic specializations are visual cognition and psycholinguistics. His experimental subjects include mental imagery, shape recognition, visual attention, children's language development, regular and irregular phenomena in language, the neural bases of words and grammar, and the psychology of cooperation and communication, including euphemism, innuendo, emotional expression, and common knowledge. He has written two technical books which proposed a general theory oflanguage acquisition and applied it to children's learning of verbs. In particular, his work with Alan Prince published in 1989 critiqued the connectionist model of how children acquire the past tense of English verbs, arguing instead that children use default rules such as adding "-ed" to make regular forms, sometimes in error, but are obliged to learn irregular forms one by one.
In his popular books, he has argued that the human faculty for language is an instinct, an innate behavior shaped by natural selection and adapted to our communication needs. He is the author of seven books for a general audience. Five of these, namelyThe Language Instinct (1994), How the Mind Works (1997), Words and Rules (2000),The Blank Slate (2002), and The Stuff of Thought (2007) describe aspects of the field of psycholinguistics and cognitive science, and include accounts of his own research. The sixth book, The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), makes the case that violence in human societies has, in general, steadily declined with time, and identifies six major causes of this decline. His seventh book, The Sense of Style (2014), is intended as a general style guide that is informed by modern science and psychology, offering advice on how to produce more comprehensible and unambiguous writing in nonfiction contexts and explaining why so much of today's academic and popular writing is difficult for readers to understand.
Pinker has been named as one of the world's most influential intellectuals by various magazines. He has won awards from the American Psychological Association, the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Institution, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society and the American Humanist Association. He delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 2013. He has served on the editorial boards of a variety of journals, and on the advisory boards of several institutions. He has frequently participated in public debates on science and society and is a regular contributor to the online science and culture digest 3 Quarks Daily.
Examples of Indirect Speech
from Words Don't Mean What They Mean
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from The Stuff of Thought
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from Evolutionary Social Psychology of Off-Record Indirect Speech Acts
evolutionary_social_psychology_of_off-record_indirect_speech_acts.pdf | |
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CULMINATING CONVERSATION:
Mandatory Community Service
synthesizing_sources.pptx | |
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Sources
1. Barack Obama, from Commencement Address at Wesleyan Univ.
2. Frank Bruni, from To Get to Harvard, Go to Haiti?
3. Lily Lou, The Downside to School Volunteer Requirements
4. Corporation for National and Community Service, Volunteering: A Pathway to Employment (infographic)
5. Detroit News, Volunteering Opens Teens Eyes to Nursing
6. Eliza McGraw, from With a Homeless Center on Campus, Students Have an Unusual Chance to Serve
Barack Obama, Wesleyan University Commencement Speech
Frank Bruni, from To Get to Harvard, Go to Haiti?
www.nytimes.com/2016/08/14/opinion/sunday/to-get-to-harvard-go-to-haiti.html
Lily Lou, The Downside to School Volunteer Requirements
www.theprospect.net/op-ed-the-downside-of-school-volunteer-requirements-38685
Corporation for National and Community Service, Volunteering: A Pathway to Employment (infographic)
Volunteering Opens Teens Eyes to Nursing
In the human interest story, "Volunteering Opens Teen's Eyes to Nursing," (2008) John Prueter, son of Keith and Barbara Pruter of Esssexville, explains how his liking towards to old people helped make him choose to go and study nursing. He organizes his statement by first claiming how he got into helping old people through his great-grandmother, frequently visiting the elderly, and to then be able to communicate and feel more at ease when he helps them. Using examples from the story, such as, "He's willing to help Alterra's staff with any activities," he volunteers to take care and help Alterra just for the good of it without requesting any sort of reward.
Eliza McGraw, from With a Homeless Center on Campus, Students Have an Unusual Chance to Serve
Youth Attitudes toward Civic Education and Community Service Requirements
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CULMINATING CONVERSATION: The Dumbest Generation?
Sources
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1. Mark Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation
2. Sharon Begley, The Dumbest Generation? Don't Be Dumb
www.newsweek.com/culture-dumbest-generation-dont-be-dumb-89891
3. Mizuko Ito et al., Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project
digitalyouth-twopagesummary.pdf | |
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digitalyouth-whitepaper.pdf | |
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4. Nicholas Carr, Is Google Making Us Stupid?
"Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains" (alternatively "Is Google Making Us Stoopid?") is a magazine article by technology writer Nicholas G. Carr highly critical of the Internet's effect on cognition. It was published in the July/August 2008 edition of The Atlantic magazine as a six-page cover story. Carr's main argument is that the Internet might have detrimental effects on cognition that diminish the capacity for concentration and contemplation. Despite the title, the article is not specifically targeted at Google, but more at the cognitive impact of the Internet and World Wide Web. Carr expanded his argument in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, a book published by W. W. Norton in June 2010.
The essay was extensively discussed in the media and the blogosphere, with reactions to Carr's argument being polarised. At the Britannica Blog, a part of the discussion focused on the apparent bias in Carr's argument toward literary reading. In Carr's view, reading on the Internet is generally of a shallower form in comparison with reading from printed books in which he believes a more intense and sustained form of reading is exercised. Elsewhere in the media, the Internet's impact on memory retention was discussed; and, at the online scientific magazine Edge, several argued that it was ultimately the responsibility of individuals to monitor their Internet usage so that it does not impact their cognition.
While long-term psychological and neurological studies have yet to yield definitive results justifying Carr's argument, a few studies have provided glimpses into the changing cognitive habits of Internet users. A UCLA study led some to wonder whether a breadth of brain activity—which was shown to occur while users performed Internet searches in the study's functional MRI scans—actually facilitated reading and cognition or possibly overburdened the mind; and what quality of thought could be determined by the additional presence of brain activity in regions known to control decision-making and complex reasoning skills.
The essay was extensively discussed in the media and the blogosphere, with reactions to Carr's argument being polarised. At the Britannica Blog, a part of the discussion focused on the apparent bias in Carr's argument toward literary reading. In Carr's view, reading on the Internet is generally of a shallower form in comparison with reading from printed books in which he believes a more intense and sustained form of reading is exercised. Elsewhere in the media, the Internet's impact on memory retention was discussed; and, at the online scientific magazine Edge, several argued that it was ultimately the responsibility of individuals to monitor their Internet usage so that it does not impact their cognition.
While long-term psychological and neurological studies have yet to yield definitive results justifying Carr's argument, a few studies have provided glimpses into the changing cognitive habits of Internet users. A UCLA study led some to wonder whether a breadth of brain activity—which was shown to occur while users performed Internet searches in the study's functional MRI scans—actually facilitated reading and cognition or possibly overburdened the mind; and what quality of thought could be determined by the additional presence of brain activity in regions known to control decision-making and complex reasoning skills.
www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/
5. R. Smith Simpson, Are We Getting Our Share of the Best?
R. Smith Simpson helped found Georgetown’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy. In a 1962 Foreign Service Journal article entitled, “Are We Getting Our Share of the Best?” Simpson wrote that “an educational system that turns out graduates lacking the simplest … knowledge about their country is not an adequate educational system.” He spent 23 years in the U.S. Foreign Service and later helped select future diplomatic officers, which showed him that many candidates’ knowledge of international geography, culture, and sociology was deficient. In particular, Simpson created Map of the Modern World, a required course for all SFS students in which students learn the locations of contemporary states and their major geographical features.