I chose to read chapter 10 in “They Say I Say”. This chapter is talking all about meta commentary. Meta commentary is is like a “second text that sits alongside your main text”. It is almost like telling your audience how to think about something. For example, you could say something in a conversation like “You’re probably not going to like what i’m about to say, but ________”. Meta commentary can play an important role in the writing process and is important to clarify and elaborate. This can just help to make things more clear even if you plainly state something. A reader can always get lost in facts and some writers with proper meta commentary can provoke a certain thought process on an idea. No matter how up front and straight forward you write, people will always need help to grasp certain concepts.
My overall goal for revision is to take into account all suggestions made by Elisha and my peers. If I feel it will make my paper better, I will make the change. First, I am going to fully read through both peer reviews and the one reviewed by Elisha. Next, I am going to decide which suggestions I like best, and include them in my final draft. Lastly, I am going to reread my entire final draft to see if there is anything else that must be changed. My biggest challenge is decided what to keep in the paper and what to just delete and rewrite. I will have to read through it a couple times to make sure that I am doing everything how I should be. If I cannot figure something out, I usually refer to Google to see if I can find anything because it is the quickest and easy way to access information. If that does not work, then I will look through the texts for the class or email the professor with any questions I think she would be able to help me with if I could not find the answer elsewhere.
All together I think that this is a great start to your paper. You support all of your claims with solid examples from your life and from the text. You connect your ideas right back to your life in very personal ways to make that connection. Do not forget to add a narrative project to the essay, find one that connects to what you are trying to say and add to to your citations. Make your intro more of an intro and try to give it a focus, it is kind of all over the place and just needs to be pulled into your thesis. I liked how you added both pictures of you and things that you have accomplished in your life, adds a nice touch.
This was a very interesting paper for me, and really caught my attention. My whole life i have always thought of memories as stories and almost always remember things to be able to retell them. All new memories in my head, along with old ones, are stored like a little short story in my head. There is a start to the story, and end to the story, and many important details in between. Storytelling, in my opinion, is one of the best ways that you can open up to someone and become closer. By creating a narrative of past experiences, people are able to better understand and follow along. Strawson seems like he does not like sharing about his past. He mentions many times that he does not remember things in order to retell them as stories, only as a memory in his head. There is no start or finish, no details n between, it is just what happened, lodged into his brain. This seems to me as a mindset that he does not like to share about his past. I believe that however you want to remember experiences is not wrong, it just depends on whether or not you like to share life stories. I think of myself as a singular self, I do not relate to the many selves idea that he has. Everything in my mind is a life story that i myself lived through. No one else can tell that memory as well as i can and no one can recall the moment like my brain can.
The first things that caught my eye in this text was when she was talking about people life stories, and how they are not just a collection of facts like a Wikipedia page. Rather than just being the facts about someones life and what they have done, it is how the integrate that into who they are and how they internally utilize it. Next, she talks about how when we tell other people about an event in our life, we tell it as a timeline in a narrative way. When we think of these things in our head tho, rather than thinking of it as a story, it is an experience or even a “representation of their existence. Lastly, she talks about optimism and finding the good in even the worst of situations. She believes that people who are able to look on the bright side of things “have a more complex sense of self and greater life satisfaction.” I agree with this statement and it really made me think. I always try to look for even the smallest bit of good and often times people around me will look at the negatives and change the way they think about something. If you only focus on the bad and never the good, there would be no hope in the world.
Linked it a lot to yourself and backed up your point very well, would just change some sentence structure and word choice to make it flow a bit better. Great use of quotes throughout the paper, you introduced the person along with what the quote meant and how you felt about it. Also, strong ways of showing both sides of the argument, not just yours. Helped to bring a nice touch to help understand what angle you were approaching it at. Your thesis is very strong and the intro is a good hook for the rest of the paper to get the readers attention and to get them aware of what the goal of your paper is going to be.
Free writing is the main way that i usually brainstorm. A lot of the time I don’t really know how i want to attack something, so i will just start writing. If it works, i keep it. If not, i think of ways that i could improve it and do it. I like to just start free writing just to get something on the page and it usually will spark something in my head of what i want to accomplish.
Yo-Yo Ma and pinker are trying to argue similar things, but from completely opposite angles. Whereas Ma is arguing that art must be incorporated in the sciences and other aspects of life, Pinker says that science is “indispensable in all areas of human concern, including politics, the arts, and the search for meaning, purpose, and reality.” Although they are going at it at different angles, they are coming to a similar point. We cannot keep all of these things separate, they must all be incorporated with one another. They only help in the understanding process of each other. They can help you think in different ways than you usually always would in that field.
The main argument in this piece is that the human brain cannot comprehend all aspects of science, and that science may not have all of the final answers. He talks a lot of a physics and neuroscience throughout the writing. Physicists work long and hard to try and solve the sole fabric of reality. They try to find the possibility of other dimensions and things like time travel. His argument is that the human brain cannot fully understand the idea of string theory, or the possibility of another dimension. We must then result to metaphor to understand what is happening. Out human minds cannot comprehend these ideas and arts can help us in the understanding process. We cannot fully fully on cold hard science for all of the answers.
Reductionism – The practice of analyzing and describing a complex phenomenon in terms of phenomena that are held to represent a simpler or more fundamental level, especially when this is said to provide a sufficient explanation.
Synapse – A junction between two nerve cells, consisting of a minute gap across which impulses pass by diffusion of a neurotransmitter.
Epiphenominon – A secondary effect or byproduct that arises from but does not causally influence a process.
