Monday, March 10, 2008

Reflection of Writing Class

Ten weeks have past b so fast, four more days our secong quarter will be finished.
With in these ten weeks, I have learned a lot in my writing class. The face book project helped me learning different ways to communicate with others, using appeals of pathos worked very well and it was fun trying to hook up with the peers that you don't even know who they really are. We went into the second part of our class, writing refections upon the newspaper articles we have read. It was fun breakin up the article, figuring out what kind of appeals the editors were trying to use. It doesn't feel like the editors from the newspapers are so special any more, they always make mistakes, I have found that out during this part of my writing class. I could write a paper to the editor telling him/her using different appeals will make it more readable to the audiences.
Besides the skills, writing is about understanding. I do a better job now after learning different appeals and that i should use different tones writing to different audiences.

Sunday, March 9, 2008

new version of the letter to denver post

Dear Editor:
I totally agree with the article “School nest eggs need explanation”. Almost every university/ college increases its tuition every year. What we have to pay for our education is getting ridiculously unaffordable.
As an international student, I come from China, students like me have to pay much more tuitions than what U.S. citizens; plus a higher living costs, I don’t know how long my parents still can pay for me while the schools are increasing their tuitions 15% a year. That means when I graduate from college my parents will have to pay at least $220,000 just for my tuition!
The spokeswoman of CU, Gigi Reynold said that 90% of the money CU collect from students will be donated somewhere outside of the school. I understand that with the extra budgets schools can be able to give out scholarships and improve the campus like building a nicer gym. But school is the place for education after all, and not every poor student is lucky enough to get scholarship, many of them lose their chances to go to a good school because of money problems.
Let us not change the true meanings of schools.

Write About Declaration of Independence

In the document Thomas Jefferson has made many ethos appeals. He gave his audience facts to prove that his points of views were right. “To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world…” This sentence was from the transcript of the document. And because of all the ethos appeals, the document seemed more forceful, and easier to fall for, to believe in. At the same time there are a lot of appeals to logo as well. There were about twenty similar sentences followed up: started with the letter “he”; He talked about the England King and his ridiculous rules and laws to his people. But if you read the sentences, and if you have gone through those facts, then Thomas Jefferson would have used appeals of pathos as well.
He talked about the British King’s Laws to his people, and put himself into his people, here I mean there are many “we” and “our” used in this document. It is an appeal to pathos.

Monday, February 25, 2008

Unit3:Writing Proposal

Every student concerns about campus safety, so do the parents. Many tragic had already happened before on the school campuses in different states, from the minor problems to the deadly cases: stealing; robbery; rapping and killing. There are some crimes going on in our living environments on campus, there are now just some minor problems, but if we don’t pay attention to them, the small problems will turn into the deadly viruses someday.
Last week in Centennial Halls, our dorm buildings, there were several cases of stolen properties. Students told us the suspects came into their rooms at night while they were asleep, took the electronics out of their rooms. Students went to the front desks and campus safety for helps, but unfortunately no one could help them. There weren’t any cameras on the floors besides the main lobby, the suspects could be outsiders, and they could be one of us who live in the dorm buildings. If that’s the case, we won’t have much chance to find out who actually did the stealing. There are cameras in the elevators, and we need to access the elevators with our student ID cards even though we are in the building, but the cameras aren’t recording all the time, they only record when someone in the elevator press the emergency button. Let’s say that the cameras are on and record all the time, it is hard to tell who the suspects are since almost everyone uses the elevators. There is another way to avoid the cameras. That is using the stairs, with the access from the student ID cards, after you getting into the stairs. There is no camera to record your moves.
The security system in our dorm buildings is kind of effective to the outsiders, but it’s useless to the insiders like us. With the student ID, we can do whatever we want, walk out to the lobby with stolen items in our backpacks, who can tell if they aren’t looks for your classes that you are going to? We should be grateful that they were only crimes of stealing not anything worse. But we sure need to fix the problems to prevent the worse cases from happening.
One good way to do it is to install more cameras in the buildings, on every floor and in the stairs cases as well. We need full time records on the paths where all of us use to go up and down stairs. There we can at least have something to work on when the troubles hit. I know many of us will complain of losing their private times of living on campus, but it is necessary if we want a safer campus.

Monday, February 18, 2008

Declaration of Independence

In the document Thomas Jefferson has made many ethos appeals. He gave his audience facts to prove that his points of views were right. “To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world…” This sentence was from the transcript of the document. And because of all the ethos appeals, the document seemed more forceful, and easier to fall for, to believe in. At the same time there are a lot of appeals to logo as well. There were about twenty similar sentences followed up: started with the letter “he”; He talked about the England King and his ridiculous rules and laws to his people. But if you read the sentences, and if you have gone through those facts, then Thomas Jefferson would have used appeals of pathos as well.
He talked about the British King’s Laws to his people, and put himself into his people, here I mean there are many “we” and “our” used in this document. It is an appeal to pathos.

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Peer Review: letter to Sam

Sam:
In the writing you talked about yourself as a well experienced snow boarder and skier, and how you don’t agree with the author’s ideas. Even a well experienced snow boarder like you, don’t use the slang words “shredders” or anything else than that. You made a good point here, but not everyone know what you really mean here when you said “Teens all over the world know what I’m talking about.” Because of the culture differences and not everywhere have the environments for people to snow board or ski, I had some problem understanding what you were trying to say.
And the sentence “Terrain Park pass is not to instill good behavior in the ‘shredders’ and ‘free riders’, but to keep people who do not have the skills to negotiate the Terrain Park.” Second part of the sentence doesn’t really make sense, besides that you did a good job telling readers about your knowledge on mountain culture. That makes me believe what you say without a doubt.
Everything else seems very good.



Sean Hu

Peer Review: letter to Hannah

Hannah:
Your letter to the editor talked about the “Clean Energy Progress Fund”, how this fund will affect the environment we are living right now, if the funds cannot be collected in time, we will lose a lot of the world’s great wonders.
According to your writing, the main claim is that we should have our “Colorado Clean Energy Progress Fund” collected in time before our living environment has more damages.
This piece of writing has used appeals of logo and pathos. The examples: warming temperatures, the contamination of water and so on support that if we don’t do what we can do, the world will lose its beauty. And talking about the fact that the pine forest will be dead in three to five years makes the appeals stronger.
It is only a three dollar fund, it makes me think of how much money we use every day for food or anything else, three dollar is nothing to most of the people, you made a very good connection here with the readers. It would be nice if you can put another environmental damage that has already happened, I think it is easier for some of us to remember what has already happened than imagine what will happen in the futures.


Sean Hu

Sunday, February 10, 2008

Letter to Dr. Schonberg

Dear Dr. Schonberg:
How are you?
Through out these first five weeks of the quarter, I have learned so much about writing. I didn’t even have the feelings that half of the quarter has already gone until I am doing this Mid-term Portfolio homework.
As a writer, my arguments in the writings are much more clear and powerful. Instead of writing about nothing and going nowhere, my goals are easy to be found. This half of the quarter, we mostly put our minds onto finding arguments from other writings; and make our own arguments with appealing to the audiences. And there are three branches of appeal to audiences: Emotional appeals; Ethical appeals; and Logical appeals. And I enjoyed learning all these appeals with the ways Dr. Schonberg you provided for us:
I had problems with writing my whole life, not because I can’t write, it’s just the horror feelings every time I started writing a paper. I don’t enjoy reading my essays in front of the class or doing anything close to it, because I know that my works are usually worse than any other classmates’.
But at the beginning of this course, our first project was a facebook chatting assignment! One of the BIG rules was not to tell others in the class who you really are as a facebook character. What a surprise to me, I could be able to practice my writing and reviewed by my classmates without knowing who I am. I loved it! I started to learn how to write in a better form. As a writer, I learned to find arguments. Everything is always started with an argument, there are logics behind it. Now I look at writing as doing some logical problems. Following the steps, find the arguments, then tell the audiences if you agree with it or not, and prove it. It is very straight forward if you know what you are going to say.
My first writing assignment was an in-class free writing; I talked about my first year seminar last quarter. I had a long first paragraph, writing about the seminar itself. Second paragraph I wrote about the writings I have done last quarter and then I talked about what I did for writing in high school. The writing ended after I finished talking about nothing, really. No arguments, no my own opinions. It was a lame article I will say. I couldn’t see how bad this piece of writing was when the course first started. I want to talk about the writings I did recently. Facebook project, I analyzed the comments my friends sent me, think about what appeals they have used while sending me the comments. During facebooking, we all learned the ways to chat with opposite sex. Logical appeals didn’t seem too helpful in this case. But emotional appeals were the main prescriptions. Unless you are very into figuring out the true meanings of arguments, emotional appeals would work very nicely. Ethos didn’t work as well as pathos.
Look back to the beginning of the class, I could tell that I am more of a writer now. Knowing how to argue makes me even more outstanding than the others when an argument comes up. I have improved a lot from reading the text book as well as the newspapers. The second project we are doing now is reading the newspapers, finding the arguments from articles. The writers from the newspapers are not as mystical as I thought they were, because I can make arguments to their writings now, so many little things I can break a hole through. I enjoyed making arguments to the writers. My improvements are also related to the reviews and evaluations from you and my classmates. I am very grateful for the comments. They helped me understand myself more, the audiences can easily tell what is going on wrong in this article, but it takes more time to figure it out ourselves because we wrote the articles. From the peer review I found many more of the arguments I could write about as well.
Writing takes skills and practices. With the helps from Dr. Schonberg, and my classmates, I can see myself improve rapidly. The goals for the second half of the quarter are going to be: open my mind wider to accept more ideas of arguments; to be more active to the in-class studies; and write more for the class as the quarter goes by… There are many good writers in my class right now, I can learn a lot reading their pieces, I wish we will have more chances to read others’ writing, but keep the group size as small as possible. I found that the smaller size of the group the easier to understand the purpose of what their writings are about for me. It is not hard to write, if you can catch the right ideas of what you want to write and what you are arguing about.
I am getting even more excited going to my writing classes than the beginning of this quarter. Thank you for your helps in writing Dr. Schonberg. And I am looking forward to actually send an effective essay to the Denver Post editors.

Sincerely,
Sean Hu

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

forth letter to denver post

To Denver Post:
The article “Caucus system excludes many who want to vote” makes me concern how close are the votes for presidency to who the people really want. Think about the situation more thoroughly, there are so many voters left out because of the bad weather. And I am sure that no employers want to give their employees a day off just so they can go to vote. In their (employers) minds, whoever is going to be the president does not bother them. And as a college student, there are many of us who are old enough to vote but there is no time to do so. Two nights ago I could hear many of us asking others if they want to go vote. Most of the answers were either “I have a group meeting to go to” or “so tired I want to stay in bed…” and etc. Maybe because it is the first time for most of us to vote, we still don’t have the idea of how important each vote of ours means.
But there are many elderly people who are not able to drive in the snow to vote, there are so many things limited the elderly from voting. And I think there should be at least two to three dates for us to vote, different time frames as well. So that the ones couldn’t make it to the first voting date may have the chance to come to the next one. Dates are not what matters, the votes of the people are. More flexibility and more advertisements for the young voters may help us picking the next right president.

Sincerely

Sean

third letter to denver post

To Denver Post:
I have read the article about children cares: “What about mothers who choose drugs over kids”. And I want to talk about it.
First of all the claim in this piece of writing is very straight forward, that there are the mothers to blame before blaming the government when there is child dies. The government is trying to give unqualified mothers helps so that their children can have better environments to live. Because every child should be treated the same or at least be treated fair when they are not old enough to live on by themselves. I have seen it happened in my life, my uncle’s daughter has two children, and they are adopted, two kids’ original parents had problems with drugs, the court gave them chance to keep the kids if they could stop using drugs for three months. But I guess it was not as easy as it sounds, the parents started doing drugs again. The kids are having the most wonderful life here with my uncle’s family. No one is perfect, and it is not necessary for everyone to have the same goal. In this case I’m talking about the children. You can have a lot of money, get a exotic car and wreck it, I’m sure that many car lovers will be heartbreaking. But kids are different. They are not just some decorations at your house, or cars. They are parts of the mothers. We gave them lives, it is reasonable to give them a fair living environment to stay in as well. It is ridiculous blaming the governments not taking good enough care of the babies. It should be the mothers’ failures not doing their jobs.
With a true story happened in my family, I am touched when I first read the article. We should be appreciated for what the society is doing for the children safe program. And put more focuses onto the mothers who originally caused the troubles. We all need to stand on the same side to against the problems.


Sincerely

Sean

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

To Editor of Denver Post

The article “School nest eggs need explanation” reviewed some of the wealthiest universities’ annual income. Almost every university has increases its tuition. The money we have to pay for college is getting so ridiculous that the U.S. Senate has to put pressure on them to keep tracking where our money go.
As an international student, I can definitely feel the “pain” my parents are having. It costs a lot of money just going to school in a foreign country, with a 15% increasing tuition each year, they might have to consider if I still can go to DU the next year.
The spokeswoman of CU (Colorado University), Gigi Reynold said that 90% of the endowment from CU will be donated with specific causes of mind. And that is too general, not specific enough to comfort civilians. Harvard University offers financial aids to poorer families, but editor doesn’t think it is a good idea for every school, because some other schools don’t have as much endowment. Editor used ethos in this part of argument. Instead of collecting so much money from the students, then offer them scholarships and any other kind of financial aids, I think they can drop the tuitions a little, to achieve the same goal.
This article doesn’t have any pathos writing pieces in it, since it is a documentary kind of writing. At the end, editor said that “we’d prefer they remedy the situation I can see ethos has been used here. It shows the editor’s emotion, and his opinion about reducing the tuition. This article is very straight forward, easy to understand where editor wants to lead us to. Very little ethos has used. I think it is a good idea if more of the examples about how unaffordable school tuitions are to the average income families.

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Letter to Denver Post

Dear Denver Post:
After reading the article “Silencing science won’t prevent global warming”, there are a couple things I want to point out. First of all, multiple arguments and opinions about different matters should be acceptable in this world, and I’m sure they are.[Ethos] Without argument I don’t think we could ever progress. The theories that we have proven are developed throughout a long period of time. We have proven ourselves wrong for so many times before we have finally got the true answers. We need different thoughts and arguments to be able to keep moving forward.
There is nothing wrong telling the high school kids both sides. You are making them to believe in what you say if you just to give them one perspective. Plus those high school kids are old enough to know what they want to believe in; or whether if they should say yes to the things we give them.
The speech by Running should have given, even though the “globe warming” theory is unproven. But we sure can see what we have done to the environment. The skies on crowed cities are not as blue, some of them you can’t even see the blues anymore. Unexpected weathers are in our daily life. We know that sea level is increasing rapidly, due to the melting of ice in both poles. There are huge snow storms in central China this year, which is very rare to see. Do you know how much heavy metals you can find from freshwater fish and some of the meat we are eating? Nothing is natural anymore. Who caused all these to happen? We did. There is no point to prove “globe warming”, it is happening in every way. We really need to take this seriously.

Saturday, January 26, 2008

Smoking?

This article "The right to smoke" says that if letter-writer Brian Cook had his way, no one will have the permission to smoke at their own houses any more. Writer Maxwell doesn't smoke, but he couldn't stand that Brian Cook was about to limit the activities you can do at your own property.
I believe that everyone would agree with writer Maxwell to go against Brian Cook. No one has the rights to control anyone else's private life, especially at their own places. But in this case, we are talking about smoking. I believe that there are many of us out there, trying to convince others to stop smoking, because smoking is just not good for anyone. In this case, it is not a bad idea to stop people from smoking at their houses.
The idea of doing whatever you want to do at your own houses is very good, but i doesn't really work out with smoking here. Emotional appeals can not lead many of us to think the way writer Maxwell does. I think he did poorly on this piece of writing.

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Talk about Pathos.

Looking at the picture from article "Troops just 'military property'", I can see this soldier is wounded, he has one of his leg wrapped, walking with crutches in the snow. His head is lowered, you can see the pain he is suffering on his face. I feel sorry for him just by seeing the picture of the article. The notes tells us that troops wanted this injured soldier to be back on duty even though his doctor comfirmed that he is not fit fr duty. At the beginning auther mentioned that the wounded soldier is her brother-in-law. It is a personal matter, most of the readers must be moved emotionally. In this article, we are against the troops, author made the troops the bad character, because her brother-in-law has to return to the war with injuries. Readers can feel the emotions easily, this is an good article for the usage of pathos.
But the article "Mail ballots not secure" doesn't work out as great. The writing method is boring, author tells us it is unscure carrying ballots through mails, he said "I would have walked away with hundreds of ballots". He tol readers his idea, but seeing a mail delivery truck driving with doors opened doesn't happen to many of the other people. I can not feel what author wants me to feel. Pathos does not work out successfully.

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

i love this class..

Well this week we are workng on our facebook project. There are so many funny comments and interesting things going on on facebook. It was hard for me to make up stuffs which doesn't exist at the first place. But I think I am getting it now, I love the imagination side of me.
Monday Dr. Schonberg pulled out thirty minutes from our class, gave us time to post comments on facebook. It felt weird sending messages to each other but you dont know who you are actually talking to. But I had lots of fun, there were a big number of us trying to find out who they were talking to by sending out funky comments and see who laughed.
I chatted with three of the female friends, and it seems that our conversations are going very well. Ethicl appeals can be seen all overthe places, i need to switch into some other rhetoricals.
I am starting to like writing now, this is fun.

Sunday, January 13, 2008

A letter to my instructor

Dear Dr. Schonberg:

How are you?
My First Year Seminar class last quarter was a science related class, called Models of Computing. In this class we studied automata. Automata are some kind of virtual machines which model computation. In order to increase the capability of computers, automata are termed deterministic finite automata (DFA), pushdown automata (PDA), and Turing machine (TM) three major branches. Compare to other first year seminar classes, I didn’t have much writing assignments in my class. But my professor was extremely strict about our writing. He wanted us to be able to write out statements to explain our solutions good enough, so that anyone who doesn't have to have a computer knowledge background can understand and know how to solve the problems. In another words, he only accepts papers with high quality writings.
Last quarter all the classes I had were science classes, the only time writing skills could be used was on lab reports. But I found out that it is easier to write out a lap report than free writing. I can write better when I have a goal to aim to. And it is easier to write when you understand what you are really writing. I learned a lot from my first year seminar professor. But my practices are far away from enough.
I was a sophomore in high school when I first came over from China. Because of my international student status, I have gotten many “passes” for my writing assignments. And now I have realized how much time I have wasted these three years.
To me, writing is a fun thing to do, if I don’t consider it as homework or assignments. I write journals daily, it is fun to just sit and write down what happened that day. It makes me laugh so hard reading what i wrote a while ago. I used to write in Chinese when I first started writing journal three years ago. It’s easier to write in my first language. But after staying here for long enough, I slowly started writing in English instead. It was so nature. I didn’t even notice it at the beginning. Now I find myself having a harder time writing in Chinese than in English.
Everyone used to write letters to communicate with one another decades ago. But with the technology these days, we mostly use phones, webcams or e-mails to replace letters. And there are smiley faces in between sentences, not too many of us still use written English fluently. We write down how we would speak. It’s easier to understand each other that way as well. Today’s writing is very different than old days’.
I don’t think I have had enough preparation from first quarter for my writing. As a writer, I am lacked of vocabulary and the ideas of writing, and I know these two things takes a long period of time to make up, but my goal this quarter in writing is to improve my ideas of writing and to build up my vocabulary capacity. And I am looking forward to graduate your class with a huge improvement in writing.

Best wishes.
Haixiang Hu