warm-up question

Warm-up question:

If you get rich by  doing anything on Earth what would it be?

inquiry essay intro/ brainstorm

An Inquiry on the Sleep Deprivation of a College Student

I have been effected by lack of sleep since I have been here so I have decided to do my paper on this. To do this inquiry essay correctly, I need to perform an experiment. To do this, I am going to go to other classes of other majors and see how many other people suffer from lack of sleep (sleeping in class). I will also see how many people on my hall stay up into crazy hours of the night or take part in things like alcohol or tobacco and see if those habits have an effect on sleep. I have written my intro below.  

Intro:

While in high school, I never found myself too busy to sleep. I would wake twenty minutes before school started, do all of my work during my classes, and be asleep by 1030 every night. Since I have been enrolled at Virginia Tech, I haven’t gone to sleep before midnight due to the massive workload and an active social life. Combining this tragedy with classes starting at 8 AM, office hours, and extracurricular activities, there just aren’t enough hours in the day to get the seven hours of sleep required by the brain. A seemingly simple solution to this problem is a midday nap, or maybe going to bed earlier and pushing the workload back until the next day. Some students turn to energy drinks, while others skip classes to catch up on sleep in order to combat the problem. These solutions may seem to work temporarily but have long term effects that can really ruin the student’s life. They can do this by harming their permanent health, and hurting their chances in the future by allowing their grades to suffer.

Future student

Dear future students,

First of all, congrats on making it this far. If you’re a first semester student of Sean Conaway, congrats on getting into Tech, it’s great. If you have him second semester, congrats on not failing out because trust me I know it can be hard. What you can expect will be pretty normal classroom activities and assignments. In the beginning of class for the first couple of weeks he does some icebreaker questions that are pretty fun to do and I got a laugh out of them. Almost every class there is a blog post assigned for homework. He gives the option of them not being due the next class, but instead they are all due at the end of the semester. I chose option 2 and I a regretting it because along with studying for finals, I am also writing 12 blog posts in the last week. Sean’s class is a fun one to be in because he keeps you involved. For each of the 3 papers that are due during the year, they get a little harder as the year gets on. He offers a writing day the class period before the paper is due. This writing day is optional but if you go in he can help with your paper and it’s just a quiet place to get some writing done-definitely attend this class. These were the most helpful parts of the class. The end of the year presentation was kind of nerve-racking for me because I didn’t really prepare so I would definitely do that. Overall, I would expect an engaging class with a great teacher. He is a cool guy and easy to talk to. Like I said, doing the blogs and other assignments on time is pretty crucial to doing well in his class, but that is the case with all of your classes so you’ve just got to manage your time well. Good luck and go Hokies.

Parker

iGod

iGod

Nicholas Carr writes an article about a very real fear of the American people and people around the world. To get a grasp on what this question, one needs to look on the next to last page of the article where Carr adds a list of multiple questions. The questions involve the future of technology and artificial intelligence. Questions like: “Will it alter the way we conceive ourselves and our relationship to the world?” Thoughts like this swirl around the population which create fear among the population, which makes improving technology tougher. Even though artificial intelligence is a tough topic to wrap your head around, Carr adds analogies and other stories to help the reader better understand it. An example of this is when he talks about the supercomputer off of 2001: A Space Odyssey. He uses the mishaps of that supercomputer and ensure that something like that wouldn’t happen in today’s world. All of this helps the reader understand what scientists’ end goal may be, and provide some sort of comfort to the less intelligent. He references books like “The Religion of Technology,” and “Machines Who Think,” to help build his article’s credibility. Even to someone who knows nothing about the topic, titles like that make iGod seem more reputable. So, he appeals to pathos by creating understandable references, and he appeals to ethos by referencing relevant articles, but how does he appeal to logos? With a topic like the future of technology, just the material itself can appeal to logos. Consumers that aren’t well versed in the topic may read this and not understand, or be scared, but the combination of ethos and pathos help form an appeal to logos. They do this by making the article more human-like, which provides it with some logic. Carr writes later in the article about the computers and how they aren’t as dangerous as some people may think, which helps the appeal to logos. Saying things like, “Computers have been getting better and better at providing answers- but only to questions that programmers are able to ask.” This single quote both documents the progression of technology, but also helps lessen the fear of the reader. 

p. 419 blog, inquiry or not?

p. 419 blog

Personally, I couldn’t really tell if this is an inquiry essay because of many reasons. For starters, it seems like a lot of personal anecdotes and stories. Saying this, I enjoyed reading the article because it was like a fictional story that you would read for a book report in high school. The beginning of the story provided no facts or quotes from other articles to back up her assertions up. She says, “We can’t go places because of gangs…We can’t go to the mall…I just hate it.” This may be true, but there is no factual evidence that backs up her story. As the story continues however, she adds quotes from the “New Yorker” to support her thoughts on racism. One of her sources though, was the black entertainment television channel, which is a very liberal channel so it is a biased source. The second half of the article seems much more like an inquiry because it adds conversations and facts from the other side of the political spectrum. You can tell this when she says, “I don’t want to sound racist but it is the black kids a lot of the times that have the attitudes and are always talking back to teachers.” So, in my opinion, if the article was split into two halves, the first half would be just a fictional story or personal tale. The second half adds some reputable sources along with personal anecdotes to provide for a fairly decent inquiry essay. 

Brooklyn Gang

Brooklyn Gang

Since the assignment was to read this article and make the blog post good, I am slightly confused on what to do. But, I am going to write on how this article, The Brooklyn Gang, is a pretty good inquiry essay despite its extreme bias. One of the reasons I think this article provides a great example of an inquiry essay is because while it is an informative article, it seems more like a story you would read in a book. The beginning of the article helps to set the scene, grab the attention of the reader, but not reveal too much about the article. As the article continues, the story begins to unfold and instead of the author just writing descriptively about the event, he acts more like a narrator. He does this by writing in first person, and allowing the reader to keep up with what is happening by giving a play by play description of what he sees. The author pays attention to each little detail, like the weather or street names, which allows the reader to put themselves in the author’s shoes. These methods the author uses make the story very easy to read, similar to a novel maybe, but it’s actually a very accurate representation to what the Occupy Portland movement was really going through. The only real problem I have with this article is that it is extremely one-sided. The author speaks of his hatred towards republicans, which is totally fine, but when he tells the reader about the interaction between the policeman and frail boy, the author is seemingly sympathetic towards the boy, but says nothing about what the policeman may be going through. If he had done that, the inquiry article, in my eyes, would’ve been an even more accurate representation of what was really happening in that time rather than just what one side of the battle. 

black holes

Black holes

For me personally, anytime someone speaks about space, all my mind can do is race at 1000 miles per hour. The thought that there is an infinite amount of space outside of our world is just mind-boggling. Having said this, the author already had an advantage when writing this article: the idea of the unknown. I don’t know much about space or black holes or math or physics, but reading this article still kept me interested until the very last word. The author did a tremendous job of intertwining scientific terms with common words that the average reader could understand. Using similes and metaphors like “The vast majority of physicists say, yes, black holes exist, but they are the ultimate Fort Knox,” allows the reader to compare an unfathomable concept. Making the story interesting was only half of the battle though. In order for this article to seem credible, the author had to provide facts that were true, which this author does well. Statements like, “The black hole at the center of the Milky Way, 26,000 light-years away, is named Sagittarius A*. Sgr A*—that’s the standard abbreviation; its surname is pronounced A-star—is currently a tranquil black hole, a picky eater. Other galaxies contain star-shredding, planet-devouring Godzillas called quasars,” is a perfect example of the combination of scientific syntax and common vocabulary. Personally, I didn’t think there was anything wrong with the article as I was glued to the screen from beginning to end.