Since my second entry in the Ethnography Notes, I have had an influx of writing assignments, particularly manifesting in essays and analyses of other people’s writing. By now, I have quite a lot of practice in writing essays, but the fact that I have been working on three in quick succession gave me time to …
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Commonplace 10
These are some of the lyrics to the song Waterloo from the band ABBA: one of my favorite songs from one of my favorite bands. The whole song is an extended metaphor using Napoleon’s final defeat at the Battle of Waterloo as an example of how a person has been overcome by a lover’s advances …
Ethnography 2
Since I wrote my first entry in the Ethnography Notes, I have started to change the way I write in my log. For one, I have started to use choppier sentences, closer to how I actually speak in real life. This is probably because I have become aware of how I was writing before, and …
Ethnography 1
I very rarely write in a non-formal setting. Aside from writing essays for class, most of the writing I do is either for The Caravel newspaper or for emails. The one exception to this is that I began keeping a log of everything I do in a day for future reference, so that I can …
Reading Summary 4
In one chapter of Winning Arguments titled “Academic Arguments,” author Stanley Fish claims that the world of academic discourse, which attempts to give the appearance of presenting facts in an unbiased and opinionated manner, is in fact beholden to an unwritten decorum. He theorizes that modern academics have formed an “interpretive community,” defined as a …
Reading Summary 3
In her essay “Says Who? Teaching and Questioning the Rules of Grammar,” Anne Curzan argues that the way schools teach English to students is fundamentally flawed, in that it insists invariably on a set of arbitrarily selected and enforced rules. According to Curzan, this type of language, which she refers to as Standard English, discorages …
Reading Summary 2
In his essay “Getting Rid of the Appearance-Reality Distinction,” Richard Rorty argues that the philosophical trend of searching for a supposedly purer form of existence – or as he calls it “Reality with a capital R” (67) – is flawed and unnecessary. His reasoning is that the overwhelming majority of the world pays no heed …
Reading Summary 1
Casey Boyle argues in his article “…something like a reading ethics…” that there are fundamental flaws in the way that schoolchildren are taught to read through academic texts. Specifically, people are taught to read “in only one moment of our lives with only one type of material and in only one way” (Boyle), that being, …
Commonplace 9
I saw a video about populism that used this quote in relation to how news organizations can present the same event using different language in order to reinforce the opinions of their target audience. What Michel de Montaigne is essentially saying here is that falsehoods come in several forms, varying in the degree of separation …
Commonplace 8
I find this quote to be especially powerful because I, like many people, often find myself concerned about things that I can’t control, even if they don’t affect me in any meaningful way. Even the most powerful people on earth (that is to say, not freshmen students at college) have a limit to what they …
