Nearing the end

Well we are nearing the end of the semester and I feel that thanks to this class my writing has improved to some degree. This class was certainly unique and unconventional and because of that it was refreshing. My portfolio still needs some work, but I feel it will be ready by the deadline.
On another note, Thanksgiving break was certainly interesting. I caught up with many old friends and had a Thanksgiving feast like no other. It was complete with Maine lobster, filet mignon, and pork chops, but no turkey. I hate turkey.

Reflection on Initiating Action Project

I feel that my initiating action project was a bit lacking because I was missing some necessary supplies, such as a color printer and glue/ a glue stick. As a result, my poster look bland and devoid of color and as if I had just slapped on pages of text onto it. Unfortunately, I am not the artsy fartsy type so I'm not very good making designs and I'm also somewhat uncreative when it comes to presentations. After reading the comments I received, I realized that despite the appearance of my project people still gain some valuable information from it when they took the time to read it. Thus I believe that my project's content was interesting, while its presentation was not.

Genre

According to various websites and my own experience of what a good flyer is, it is not very hard to create an attractive flyer if you put effort into it. Some fundementals for flyers are to be very conservative and economical with your text. If you hit a reader with a wall of text they will probably go "tl;dr" (too long; didn't read) and toss the flyer away. It is important to keep in mind the age old cliche " a picture is worth a thousand words" and in the case of flyers pictures are infinitely more important than words. However, everything must be done in moderation because if you put too many pictures and enough words then your message might not get across. Simplicity is also a key factor in making a good flyer because fundementally things that are simple are easier to understand in a brief amount of time. This is important because if you can have the reader understand what your message as they recieve the flyer, the more likely they are to react.
The people that write in this genre all people seeking to advertise something. Another reason for using flyers is to increase awareness for a cause. I have as much freedom as my imagination allows considering my genre.

sources:
http://ezinearticles.com/?How-To-Make-Irresistible-Flyers&id=743362
http://www.esf.edu/org/seac/flyering.htm
http://www.squidoo.com/flyerdesign

Awkward

So this morning around 3.00 AM I am about to go to sleep. As I hit the sack, my roommate says, "By the way, I am gay. Hence why I care." Earlier during the week California passed Proposition 8 which banned gay marriage. My roommate was rather incised about this, but I didn't really make much of it since I am heterosexual. Anyway I was rather taken aback at his sudden confession. Personally, I don't have a problem with homosexuals and I'm not homophobic, but still his declaration was still rather unsettling. I wasn't really sure how to respond so I said, "Okay." and an awkward silence ensued. I am ashamed to say that his statement still bothers me even though I say I am not biased or prejudiced.

Midnight Release!

Wednesday night I went with two of my friends to the midnight release of the highly anticipated "Wrath of the Lich King" expansion set to the ever popular online roleplaying game World of Warcraft. As most people know WoW (World of Warcraft) has the greatest number of subscribers to any online roleplaying game so it was no surprise that the there was a fairly long line at the local GameStop. Personally, I don't play WoW because I'm not particularly fond of the visuals in that game and thus I didn't pick up a copy. The reason I went was so I could see what all the hype was about and to be part of the mania that night. While, most of the people in line waited dilligently, there were some who had dressed up as characters from the game. There was even some give away posters as trivia game prizes. All in all, it was an eventful night.

Project Idea

The main objective of my project is to raise awareness and offer some solutions to some of the problems that members of my community face. The audience to whom I am addressing with be my fellow gamers and the problem I would address would be obsession and addiction to a game. The method I would use to bring about awareness would be either flyers or a video. For the flyers I would not try to flood the reader with a wall of text, but keep my message concise and to the point while having some pictures to interest the reader. For the video, I would probably do a skit where I document the life of a "pro" gamer and demonstrate what kind of futures members of my community will have if they do not change their habits. There will 3 stages in the progression of the "pro" gamers life; the time where he is first introduced to the game, then a time where he starts neglecting things that are necessary in order to focus on the game, and finally when the gamer secludes himself "offline" society and only makes contact with the "online" society. The gamer will also ignore everything including basic needs in order to focus on the game.

Response to Prof. Scott's Suggestions

Professor Scott brought up that since my introduction didn't really seem too relevant to the rest of my piece. After rereading it, I agree with Professor Scott and the introduction seems more like unnecessary fluff. Not only is it fluff, but it could cause the reader to lose interest, which would not be conducive to my goal. I like her suggestion about starting the essay off with a story or a conversation that happened in a game. I think that adding player-to-player conversations would add a lot of humor to my essay as well as adding clearer explanations of some of the terminology and jargon that is used in my essay.

Response to Suggestions for my Essay

After reading the suggestions from another classmate, I realized that he mentioned many areas that I already knew that needed improvement. For example, he said that while my essay was informative, it tended to throw facts at the reader rather than pique the readers interest while enlightening them. He also said that although it was nice to know that I knew what I was talking about from the scholarly way I wrote my essay, he mentioned it would have been nice to know my opinion on the things i was discussing. Perhaps my point of view for this essay was too objective.

“Encountering the Essay” and “Essayists on the Essay.”

In my opinion what constitutes a good essay is most how it presents its content and whether or not it can keep the attention of the reader. A good essay should be descriptive, but not excessively wordy. It should also have a enough content for the reader to take something away after reading it, but it should not drown the reader in facts.
I think that areas in which my essay can improve upon are how to put new information out there for the reader while not boring them with too much technical jargon. I think my main goal should to impart some knowledge about the relationships within my community. I think that my intro could probably use some more improvement in the "hooking the reader" department.

Draft Comments

After reading Professor Scott's comments, I realized that there is still a lot of improvements that can be applied to my draft. For instance, in my introduction I only hinted at some of the results that I expect to receive from my research, but I could have cited some results that professionals have found and written in books or articles. It was noted that my cover letter said my proposal for funding, however in the acutal proposal I didn't mention a request for funding. I have to admit that when I first wrote my research proposal i didn't really have a specific audience in mind which lead my writing to be vague and kind of sloppy. I agree with Professor Scott that my methods section needs to be longer and be more structured, perhaps have some of the questions I am going to ask, instead of just saying I am going to use Ventrilo and as some questions. I also need to figure out which sections are actually necessary for my proposal, rather than having sections in my proposal because they were in other proposals.

Best American Essays

Regarding the essays we read earlier this week, the reason why I feel they are great is because they all paint vivid pictures in our heads as we read the words. They embellish and flesh out many details, be they minute or grand. I think the reason why they pay so much attention to detail is to maintain the attention of the audience. Conversely, I feel that too much embellishment can cause the audience to lose interest, thus it is a balancing act to find the right amount of elaboration.

A good example would be this except from The Stunt Pilot, "Rahm smashed up in front of King Hussein, in Jordan, during a performance. The plane spun down and never came out if it; it nosedived into the ground and exploded.....He just dove right down into the ground and his wife was there watching." .

Another component that is essential to a good essay is a solid conclusion that gives closure and hints possibly at the future. A conclusion that was well done was the one in Ali in Havana, "Castro's interpreter at first fails to understand what Bingham is saying. 'He wants you to keep it, ' Bingham repeats. Bingham enters the elevator with Ali and Yolanda. Before the door closes, Castro smiles, waves goodbye, and stares with curiosity at the rubber thumb. Then he puts it in his pocket." .

Chapter 5 Page 99 Questions

What's your project? What do you want to accomplish in this essay?

My project is to research the psychosocial effects of prolonged consumption of video games. What I hope to accomplish is to convince the National Institute of Mental Health that my research is something that is worthy of being funded.

What works? How can you build on the strengths of your draft?

In my opinion the best part of my paper would have to be my introduction, but I'm not saying that my paper is good in any sense. In my introduction, I mentioned some of the results that I expect from my research, however I could build on that by including some examples from books or articles.

What else might be said? How might you acknowledge other views and possibilities?

I can entertain other views of the topic of my research by including comments and inputs from people that I interview and some information that has been written by professional psychologist and social observers.

What's next? What are the implications of what you have to say?

The implications of what I have to say is obsessive gaming is quickly becoming an ailment in our society and that if we discern the causes and symptoms we can formulate a method of curing or lessening its effects.

Site visit

For my site visit/interview, I went to my steam community's ventrilo server. Ventrilo is like a mass voice chat room, its just like talking to someone on the phone, except its like talking to a bunch of people at a time. In ventrilo, you use an alias and not your real name. In addition, members of our community come from all over the western hemisphere, like Sharocko from New Orleans, Dire from New Jersey, Blackrain from California, Nihilistoic from Florida, Bud from Brazil, Bullseye from Canada, and the list goes on. Fortunately, I have administrator privalages in that server and I was able to create a private channel and drag other members into the channel to interview them. I asked why they thought we were a community. I received a variety of answers to that question so this is definately one question I am going to reword or make more specific. After reading some of my classmates' comments regarding this post as it was work in progress, i don't think it was hard to get information from my community because ventrilo is like skype except that it is a better program. Ventrilo is like an online speech program so its just like talking face to face with someone and you heard all the changes in their tones of voice. Returning to the interview, I also asked questions like, " What is your favorite genre of all games?" and "What are some major problems facing gamers today?". Once again I got mixed responses for all my questions except for, "What is your favorite genre of all games?" to which the majority of the members responded FPS( First Person Shooter). I didn't get very many answers that were representative of the whole community so I think I am going to refine my questions more before I interview them again this week.

How do you know?

On Friday, we discussed the reading selection, "How Do We Know?"and we concluded that fact is something that is established by irrefutable evidence. Although we had an accord on what is fact, we disagreed on the truth. I believe that truth depends on context because even a lie can be the truth given the correct circumstances. However, my group felt that there is no such thing as the truth thus it doesn't even depend on context. We also decided that when two experts disagree, it is most likely they are both right and we should decide for ourselves what to believe or perhaps take both sides into account when tackling the subject. Another subject that i disagreed with my group on was if there was always a "right answer" for something. I believe that only "natural truths" like math, physics, and other sciences proven with empirical evidence will always have a right answer for a problem. Conversely, I believe that everything else might not a definite "right answer". My group thought that there is no such thing as a "right answer" for anything. I don't feel worried that much of what we know is constantly changing rather than static because as I believe that as a human I will learn to adapt as things change. This belief goes perfectly with my mantra to go with the flow and roll with the punches.

Research Communites

Chances are I think my research community will have something to do with internet sub-culture or gamers or something along the lines of those. I'm not exactly the most creative of individuals unfortunately. =/

The beginnings of incoherence

Oh hai thar!... or in proper english, "Oh hello there!" . I'm Rob from Herndon, VA and I'm also in Prof. Scott's freshman honors english class. A major part of my life is the internet and its sub-culture, thus I tend to use memes and not a lot of proper english. Anyway, this will be a beginning of my success/failure of english in college.

Wish me luck,

Rob