Group Work

I have not had good encounters with group work. One reason is because a couple people usually end up doing all the work. The main reason though, is that you usually dont meet outside of class to do the stuff, so when we only have two weeks to do this project and not much class time to work on it, it is going to be tough to get anything accomplished with this project.

Homeplace

Waking up along the riverside. The smell of the river lingers in the air. Looking out the window and water stretching as far as you can see. Water as if a glass mirror. Taking the boat out for a morning spin, feeling the cool morning breeze in your face as you skip across the water. Fish jumping in and out of the water trying to get their morning breakfast. Growing up on the Mississippi was a wonderful and peaceful thing that you really learned to appreciate.

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
This piece, I feel, talks a lot about living your life the way you want it and to not just go on with your everyday life doing what everyone else does in this world. Be different and enjoy life. Its also saying you never know what is going to happen so live everyday as it is your last.

The Making of a Marginal Farm
In this piece, the author is trying to show us how you can live off a small farm and the importance of using the land around us. The family in this piece planted a lot of there own food and did it without using all the fertilizers that other big farms did. I think this shows a good example of how we can use everything around us to survive without using a lot of excess materials to do so.

Helping out

In our building that my roommate n I live in right now, there is a nice little trash shoot that is on every floor. A lot of people use this trash shoot, including my roommate and myself, almost ever week. What the building doesn't have is a place for recycling on every floor. If you want to recycle anything you have to walk all the way around the building to do so. It is very easy to just say whatever and throw everything in the trash and save yourself some time. What we have been doing now though is making sure that we do separate everything up for recycling instead of just throwing it in the trash. By doing this we are doing our part in trying to save the world. Its not a lot, but its our way of trying to help out.

Personal Mission Statement

I am committed to living a happy life. I know I am going to have some regrets, but I want to try and limit those regrets as my life goes on. I want to try to live as care free as I can and any chance I get to sit back and do absolutely nothing, I am going to enjoy it. I am going to enjoy all the little moments in my life for what they are. Sit back and enjoy life as it comes to me. At the same time I am going to go after things that I really want and make sure they don't pass me by. I want to keep all connections with everyone that is close to me in my life.

Sociology and Social Change

This piece really makes you think about things in a bigger picture that you normally would not. I really enjoyed the facts at the beginning of the paper as well, because they are statistics that people would never know about without reading it in this piece. It also really makes you think about how every little thing you do and how you communicate with people can affect everyday life. I liked the piece and how it brought out a lot of very valid points and made you think about all of those points in many different ways.

Silent Spring

Delivery

The author of this piece really uses delivery as a way to get you to understand it the way she wants you to. She chooses what she is talking about and goes into great depth and description about it so that you can create a picture of what she is talking about in your head. Pictures in this piece would almost take away from what she is trying to do in getting you to imagine it in your head. An example of this is when shes talking about the birds at the beginning and you really get a picture in your head at what she is talking about the birds.

A thousand-mile walk to the gulf

The author structures the essay by starting off starting off talking about alligators and how everyone looks at them as mean creatures. The reason for this is he is setting up for what he really wants to talk about in this piece. The creator who made everything and the reason he made everything he did. This piece could be looked at linear or fragmented I feel because of the way he laid everything out.

Polemic: Industrial Tourism and the National Parks

What kind of rhythm does the writer create? Is there a variety of sentence structures?

The author has a very relaxed rhythm in this writing. I believe this is a very easy read and the author uses different type of sentence structures. He mostly uses regular sentences, but sometimes chooses to list things out at certain times.

A First American Views His Land

Look at the transitions between paragraphs or between sections. How does he or she make these transitions? What effect do they have on the forward momentum of the piece?

The transitions between paragraphs in this piece are very good. The author does a great job of tying everything up that he wanted to talk about in the current paragraph, but also does a good job of setting up what he is going to talk about in the paragraph to come. By doing this the author keeps the piece going without the reader losing track or interest of what the author is trying to get across.

A

Walden vs. McCandless

The two of these individuals both believed a lot of the same ideas. They both wanted to break off from the regular everyday world and get out into the wild and discover the greater things in life. It would take a lot to drop everything you are used to and go out and live in the wild like these two. I really wish I had what these two have and was able to do something like they did. I feel like you would get such a better perspective on life and enjoy things a lot more for what they are.

I see
the faces of the people
and taste
bitterness in their mouth
and feel
sorrow for the city
and hear
hurt in their voice
and want it
to be over

This is from when we had the major floods in Iowa a couple years back and see how hurt all the people were.

Blood Dazzler

How does the writer structure the essay and to what effect?

The writer starts the book off by talking about the a possible tropical storm that has begun in the Bahamas. The writer then goes on in order of events that will eventually lead up to Hurricane Katrina. Even though the book feels like it is mostly linear, I do not like how the writer jumps around and sometimes dates the poems but other times it does not. I feel like the book is a little difficult to understand what the writer is trying to get across.

Snapshots

I was only 5 years old, but I still remember it like it was yesterday, my mom and I went to Florida with some of my other relatives. It was the last day we were there so we woke up early and went out onto the beach before we left. I will never forget looking out into the ocean and seeing the sun come up and 3 dolphins jumping through the water as the sun shines down on them.

Sitting at that table in front of my high school with the two people that made everything possible for me, I was about to sign a letter of intent to play football for Iowa State University. It was the most incredible feeling to finally have all the hard work pay off and even more incredible to have the ones that mean the most to me be there to celebrate and enjoy the moment with me.

It was a summer night when I was laying in the grass out in the country and looking up into the sky. It was my last week before I left for college and I was trying to take everything all in. Think about the things I was leaving behind and what was new to come. Looking up at the stars and being thankful for everything that I've been privileged to do, Its was in that moment that I realized to enjoy life and appreciate all the little things in life that are yet to come.

The Summer Day

Does any particular image run throughout the essay?

The image that goes through my head while reading this is someone that is worried about wasting their life away and wants to make sure that they live their life to the fullest. The reason I feel the author is trying to say this is because the way she talks about the grasshopper in her hands and then starts talking about life and how she has been strolling through the field all day (I believe when she says this she means she has just been strolling through life), then asks the reader what else she should have done. After she asks that she asks the reader what they plan to do with their life as well to make sure it is wild and precious.

The Ninemile Wolves

Question: How does the writer structure the essay and to what effect?

Answer: The author starts off by giving a bunch of facts about wolves and people. The author then goes on to get you to feel sympathy for the wolves. By doing this he hopes that you will sway your opinion to how he feels about the wolves. The way he ends it is by discussing how the wolves are coming back slowly and that we should help protect them. The writing is linear. It does not jump around like the other story did.

Reading like a writer

What specific details stay in your mind? Why? How do these small details lead to larger ideas?

In the reading from Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, some of the specific details that stay in my mind are when she is talking about the bombing in Utah and how whenever she goes to a certain area she remembers a flash of light from a long time ago. Also another detail is when she is talking about how a lot of women in her family has gotten cancer from the radiation from the blast. This eventually leads to her later talking about how she had a dream about some women that were protesting and how they went to the site of the bombings to try and stop them from continuing the bombings. They were eventually arrested, but it showed that the women were going to do anything it took to get them to stop. She later went on to do something similiar and was arrested and released right away.