Heathertex's Blog

I am so glad blogs are over!  No offense to anyone who likes writing them, but I have NEVER liked blogging.  I do not need to share my emotions with the entire interwebs…but if it is required for a class then of course I will do it.

Looking past to the beginning of the semester, not a lot has changed in my writing process in terms of rough drafts.  Usually when I write rough drafts I do not pre-write or outline or anything of that nature, because I just like the ideas to flow organically and usually the points I want to make will arrange themselves naturally.  My brain works that way…the most important point is always last to have an impression on the reader.  Maybe it is my debate background that makes me think like that.

One thing that I will take with me from this class is the idea of writing a rough draft, a first submission, and a second submission.  Usually I only write a rough draft and that is like the first submission, and then someone will revise it and I’ll turn in a final paper that is the equivalent of a first submission.  But I have found that writing a second submission is indeed helpful.  The problem is that most teachers or professors do not require meetings with students about papers they have written so I will have to go out of my way to schedule one.  That is another change I will make: actually meeting with professors.  I have never gone to tutoring in my life, and I  have never felt the need to ask teachers for help on anything.  Usually I do not need their help because I will figure out any problems I have for myself.  And actually I do not have any problems.  But of course college is harder than high school and I am learning that the hard way.

One area of writing that I think has improved for me since the beginning of the semester is my comparing of different sources.  Usually I will only use sources that support my own point of view so that my argument has the illusion of being really strong.  But in this class we have to use sources that disagree with our point of view, and basically argue against them.  That helps me by building a stronger case.  There are no more loopholes in my logic, because I have considered the opposing view point and formulated an argument against it.  Although sometimes it is frustrating when I can not come up with an argument that holds water to the opposing point of view.

Besides those things I really have not changed as a writer.  I am someone who does not enjoy writing, I would rather read something aloud or make an impromptu speech or sing, so my writing is often rushed because I wait until the last minute to write it, due to the dread I feel for it.  I do not think that will ever change.

So I just finished writing my second submission.  There is one major change in my ideas that just came to me and I decided to roll with it.  In my other blogs I have been talking about how my fourth point was going to change from the “right to life” argument to the “cruel and unusual punishment” argument.  But upon further thinking I decided I should stick to my right to life argument, because this argument is universal, not just an American issue.  I even use the United Nations as an example to back up this issue, and I felt it had a greater impact on the concept of capital punishment in general, not just in America, like the previous points in my paper.  So instead of changing the argument I just tweaked it a little bit, and elaborated more on the issue of the social contract.  In my argument, I said that it is a given that if one commits a crime, one surrenders their right to liberty to the government.  However, I argue that the right to life is not necessarily forfeited to the government if one, let’s say, kills someone else.  It really boils down to the issue of states rights’.  But I also tie in the fact that jails are meant to rehabilitate and not solely punish, therefore bettering ones’ own life and the lives of everyone around them.

I also changed the Works Cited to fit the format correctly.  I had no idea  how wrong I had been!  And also I had no idea that Times New Roman was not the default font, it is actually Callibri.  And when you switch fonts, it makes a HUGE difference!  I had a half of a page less when I converted it.  I was not sure how to fill that half page up because I had summed up my argument pretty clearly already and did not want to risk sounding redundant.  It is almost a full seven pages, I think there are three lines to spare, but again, I could not think of anything else to add because I had already said exactly what I needed (and wanted) to say.

One thing I had an issue with was the title.  Originally it had been called “Capital Punishment”, but Instructor Sullivan had said that she wanted a creative title in class, so I went back and tried to think of a clever title.  But that is not really my forte and the best I could come up with is “Why Capital Punishment is Wrong”.  The reason I chose this title is because my reader will know exactly what I am going to address in this paper.  Since it is a research/argumentative paper and NOT a creative process paper or media project, I figured that it should be represented for exactly what it is.  If someone wants to read a research paper on a certain topic, the title is what gets their attention.  If I had had a more creative title, the reader might not know what my paper is about, and then my whole point of writing the paper would have been lost.

Before my meeting with Instructor Sullivan on Tuesday, I went to the Student Writing Center on Monday.  I had never been before so I was a little nervous about how my writing would be critiqued.  It turns out that my tutor never showed up, but thankfully there was another tutor who did not have an appointment and saw me instead.  I asked her if she could just read the whole paper and tell me what she thought I could improve on.  Also, I asked her to consider Instructor Sullivan’s comments throughout the paper.  She read it out loud and then went back and looked at the comments.  After she had read through my paper once, she honestly had nothing to say.  She literally told me that she had no negative critiques, and that overall she could not believe that I was a freshman because my writing style was so sophisticated.  Most of the comments that Instructor Sullivan wrote were not really comments that the Writing Center tutor could analyze, because they were about the paper itself and whether or not it followed certain formatting guidelines and things of that nature.  I got a 45/50 on the first submission so I was feeling pretty confident that I did not need to change a lot to get close to a 50.

The next day I went to see Instructor Sullivan about my first submission.  The main issue I wanted to resolve was whether or not my paper was an argumentative research paper, or a case.  She told me that my paper was written like a case, which I agreed.  However, I would have had to write the creative process paper if I wrote a case and honestly I really did not feel motivated enough to do that.  So, I decided that I would re-write the paper in a less “debate” like way.  Another comment that Instructor Sullivan wrote was that my formatting was completely wrong on my Works Cited page.  Fortunately, Luke emailed me the template later so now I have the correct formatting.  Another concern that Instructor Sullivan had was my right to life argument.  I agreed that it was the weakest argument of the four that I presented.  I decided to cut that point out altogether, and instead look at the idea of the death penalty being considered “cruel and unusual punishment” in the United States Constitution.

One point that Instructor Sullivan wanted me to save was the idea that jails are not a true penal system; they are meant to rehabilitate character, not purely to incarcerate and punish.  I had not developed that idea fully in my first submission, so I am going back through and thinking of things that I could add to that point to make it more effective.

Now I just have to go back and edit some parts of my first submission before I turn it in tomorrow as a second submission.  Hopefully it will not take very long since I do not have a lot that I need to change.

My process for revising the rough draft and turning in the first submission was not a very long one.  I had already pinpointed the things I wanted to change, and organized the paper a little bit differently.

The biggest revision I did was move a paragraph from the conclusion to my fourth contention in the paper.  The specific idea was about repentance by people who are on death row.  Another revision involving my conclusion was that I added the last sentence to the last paragraph instead of having it sit by itself.  It seemed very abrupt the way it originally was.  I also added onto some ideas I had gotten from my sources.  I just delved more in depth in terms of analyzing an idea and backing it up with a specific part of a source.  The law review from Northwestern was the most helpful in that respect.

I took the comment Luke made into heart about the whole “eye for an eye” ethical statute.  In my paper I suggested that that specific practice had not been used since Hammurabi’s Code, but then Luke reminded me that places like North Korea and China still somewhat use that code today.

Besides those revisions I really did not find any other problems with my paper, besides changing up a few sentences to sound more fluid and less choppy.  When I turned in my first submission, I felt pretty confident.  I really need an A on this paper so I really am pulling all the stops and doing everything I can.  I plan on doing all four extra credit blogs and I have an appointment at the Writing Center (in the Student Success Center) at 2 pm tomorrow (Monday, April 26th)!  I am a little nervous because I have never been to tutoring before IN MY WHOLE LIFE.  I am not sure what to bring or really if I am supposed to ask questions or if my tutor is just going to read my paper and kind of take the reins.  I guess we will see.

Ironically, in my judicial process class, our paper #4 is supposed to be about a “legal controversy”.  After talking with my professor, he wanted me to write about the death penalty as well.  He wanted to hear my point of view but he wanted to challenge me by only using court cases and legal reviews as my sources, and he also stressed that I was to be completely objective until the last part of the paper.  This actually I think will help me with this English paper, because through my new sources I find for the judicial process, I can apply different ideas than I originally had thought of.  It also helps me with the legality of the issue and the morality of the issue versus public opinion alone.  And reading the Supreme Court Judges’ opinions on death penalty cases is quite helpful in forming arguments and counter-arguments.  One point I might try to work into my second submission, if I need to, is the idea that capital punishment is cruel and unusual punishment.  But for now I am comfortable with my paper.

Capital punishment is wrong because it is a financial burden on states, there is a chance of convicting an innocent person, it does not deter violent crime, and it violates the basic right to life.

I am pretty confident with my paper so far.  The style that I went with was a very stoic, factual approach, kind of like a case I would have written back in the day when I was on the debate team.  I list out four very clear points on why the death penalty is wrong.  My first reason is because it is a monetary burden that states simply can not afford.  My second reason is that there is a chance for error, so it is not acceptable to simply guess a conviction when dealing with human life.  An opposing viewpoint to this would be that the capital punishment system as a whole is so thorough that there is no chance for error.  My third point is that it does not serve as a deterrent for murder and violent crime.  Another opposing viewpoint can be argued with this point: most people who agree with the death penalty are in concurrence because they believe it stops further murders and violent crimes to be committed.  It’s almost used as a fear tactic.  However I have evidence that shows this is simply not the case.  My final point is that it is simply unnecessary when there are alternatives.  This contention is the one in which I argue the morality of it all.  If there are other alternatives, such as switching an inmate to life in prison without parole, then it should be used.  There is no more loss of life, therefore no one’s right to life is being violated.  I then give an anecdote about the effects of the  death penalty on families and conclude my paper.

After reading the peer review sheets, I did not really learn anything that I did not already know.  I knew that my conclusion was poor; it is, after all, only one sentence.  I also added what you could call a “mini-point” when summing up all of my points, and I should have added it to my fourth contention and expanded on it.  Some other criticisms of my paper was that the language was somewhat flat.  However I am not sure if I will change this, because I am writing it more like a case than a narrative.  It is not supposed to be clever  and interesting language, because that takes away from the legitimacy of my points.  I want the reader to honestly only have my facts influencing their opinion, not the language I use or the clever punchlines I might throw in.

Another thing I am going to expand on is alternatives that the experts give to using capital punishment.  I do give the option of moving someone to life without parole, however that is only one alternative.  I am not sure if there are more alternatives that would be acceptable considering the crimes the convicts committed.  Most likely there is not a better alternative.

Overall I am in the process of thinking about any new ideas I can incorporate into my paper, and also how I should word certain things before the first submission is due.

Writing this paper was much more difficult than the first process assignment we did.  The first assignment did not require us to find a critical source and analyze it, and that was the hardest part of the second paper.  It took me forever to find a critical source that actually applied to the prompt I was writing about.  The first source I found was about the technological impossibility of ice-nine coming into existence.  Obviously, that did not help me write about a social issue in Cat’s Cradle.  By the time I found a suitable critical source to use, the first draft of the paper was due the next day.

This paper was definitely worse for me than the first paper.  The first paper was asking you, personally, how the advertisement utilized the five domains of the rhetorical situation.  You could put your voice into the paper and my ad was pretty straight-forward, so I really did not have to dig very deep to find meaning.  But in the second paper, it was almost impossible for me to analyze Kurt Vonnegut.  The most difficult part was trying to separate the narrator of Cat’s Cradle, Jonah, from Kurt Vonnegut himself.  And if that was not hard enough, then you had to figure out Bokononism.  Vonnegut warns us at the beginning of his book that Bokononism is based on a bunch of foma, or lies.  So then you would think that Vonnegut was trying to take a jab at Christianity and other religions.  However, as the book moves forward, the reader starts to get the sense that Vonnegut is actually in favor of Bokononism, which makes us question whether or not he really is against the idea of religion that we all thought at the beginning of the book.  It was indeed very confusing and I would have enjoyed the book more if it was solely reading for pleasure, not for a class, because I am quite frankly sick and tired of this book.

For this next assignment, I think I will do a much better job.  It’s asking us how we view a certain social issue in Cat’s Cradle that Kurt Vonnegut brings up, rather than his stance on the matter.  This fits my style of writing SO MUCH BETTER.  I love writing argumentative papers.  Maybe it is due to the fact that I was on the debate team in high school or that I want to be a lawyer.  Argumentative papers are just easier to write, in my opinion.  And I also like the research for this paper 3 as well.  I like doing research when it is not limited to solely peer-reviewed articles, but rather opinion columns and news organizations.  I am not sure whether or not I will write an essay for paper 3 or do another multimedia form of the assignment.  My gut is telling me to just write the essay because writing argumentative cases are what I do best.  Also, it is something that I can do while laying on the beach in Florida over Spring Break. 🙂

I have got to be completely honest…I am getting really fatigued with finding the five domains of the rhetorical situation in every single piece I read.  Sometimes I just want to enjoy the piece for what it is, and when I have to continually dissect it, it gets obnoxious.

My critical source is entitled “Vonnegut’s Humor and the Limits of Hope”, by John R May.  It is a critical look into the different works of Kurt Vonnegut and his determination of the concept of hope within each of them. The genre of this piece is simply an article in a scholarly journal.  Twentieth Century Literature is the name of the journal, and it is produced quarterly.

The media/design of this piece a little boring.  I downloaded it as a .pdf file and there is a cover page, but that it about the only interesting part of format it brings to the table.  The rest of the piece is written like an analytical essay, not trying to get anyone’s attention, but rather inform the readers who usually subscribe to Twentieth Century Literature.

The audienece for “Vonnegut’s Humor and the Limits of Hope” are scholars.  Scholars are older, which would explain why there are no gimmicks, format wise, in this piece.  I would also imagine that the scholars who would be particularly interested in reading this piece are educators with an emphasis in English or Science, since the topic is about Kurt Vonnegut, a science-fiction author.

The purpose of my critical source is to analyze Kurt Vonnegut’s different works and how there are affected by his views on life and beyond.  This is probably because Vonnegut’s pieces are not exactly easy to understand.  If John May can explain why Vonnegut is a pessimist, it could enlighten readers and help them further fathom the books they have to read or are just reading for fun.  Personally, I believe this article achieves that goal.  It helped me further understand the concept of Bokononism, which can be difficult to separate from the rest of Cat’s Cradle.  The most confusing thing about Bokononism is that the book is largely based on the idea, yet one has to constantly remind oneself that Bokononism is based on a bunch of foma, or lies.  So any time Kurt Vonnegut seems to agree with the false religion, one has to ask the question, “Does he really believe this, or is this just another lie since the premise of the whole religion is a lie?” It can be quite frustrating at times.

The final component of the rhetorical situation is stance.  John May’s stance on Kurt Vonnegut is pretty clear: He thinks Vonnegut is a black humorist still holds on to the concept of hope, but does not necessarily believe that what he hopes for will happen.  May justifies this claim with references to such works as Cat’s Cradle, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, and Player Piano. He also gives a brief background of Vonnegut’s history and links it in with his stance nicely.

My critical source is called “The Source and Implications of Ice-Nine in Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle“.  It’s an article written in November 1974 by Wayne D. McGinnis, a professor at Norfolk State University in Norfolk, Virginia.

The first thing I underlined was a paragraph about Kurt Vonnegut and his interest with the world of science.  McGinnis says that Vonnegut turned to a science professor at the University of Southern California to create a weapon in his book that seemed real.  The professor, in turn, told Vonnegut about how Russian scientists had already isolated and created a form of ‘ice-two’ and ‘ice-three’.  Vonnegut wanted to capitalize on the fact that not only was this substance extremely dangerous, but that the Russians had it in their possession.  He wanted to stay current, and at the time Cat’s Cradle was written, it was during the Cold War.  So when readers read about ice-nine, they would feel a very real fear towards the Russians.  Kurt Vonnegut was playing on America’s trepidation.

McGinnis later says that scientists debunked the validity of ice-nine, saying it was physically impossible.  But that wasn’t the point for Vonnegut.  Vonnegut said, “Be that as it may, other scientific developments have been almost that horrible.  The idea of Ice-Nine had a certain moral validity at any rate, even though scientifically it had to be pure bunk.”  Kurt Vonnegut, I think, is alluding to the atom bomb as one example when he says “other scientific developments have been almost that horrible.”  This is not a far stretch, since in Cat’s Cradle Vonnegut seems displeased with the atom bomb, to say the least.

Another sentence I underlined was, “Like Job and Candide and Rasselas and many other parables, Cat’s Cradle uses extraordinary devices as metaphors for age-old, universal problems.”  I completely agree with what McGinnis is saying.  Vonnegut likes to point out what’s wrong with society, and as time goes on, societal issues don’t necessarily resolve.  I’m sure when Kurt Vonnegut wrote Cat’s Cradle, he didn’t see an end in sight for the Cold War.  Perhaps he wrote the ending the way he did to warn the world about what could happen if the stalemate war continued.  But I also think he really saw the world ending in a nuclear war, or with upgraded weapons like ice-nine, and wanted to prevent it from actually happening.

McGinnis has one more idea that I noted in the margins to re-read a couple of times.  He suggests that ice-nine can be compared to Robert Frost’s poem “Fire and Ice”, and morally can embody evil.  He also says that scientifically, ice-nine is closest to the “Second Law of Thermodynamics’ proposition of the concept of entropy”, where all matter and energy in the universe collides. Vonnegut viewed this as an icy result.

While I did enjoy reading this article, I had a hard-time really finding a lot of substance that I could use in my paper for Assignment Two.  I think I might go to the library and find another critical source, maybe one pertaining to religion like I had originally wanted.