Blog Reflection

Before enrolling in English 110, I had never used a blog in my life.  I really had no idea what a blog even was.  But now that we are nearing the end of this course, I am glad I was introduced to blogs.  My experience with blogs this quarter has been pretty positive overall.  I see now that they are a very efficient way to connect to a large group of people at the same time.  I believe that using blogs in more classes in the future would definitely yield positive results.  It is a nice, simple way to connect all of the students in a class to one another and give them the opportunity to interact more easily.  This is especially useful in a college course because they can be enormous, which makes individual interaction very difficult.

"Teenagers" By My Chemical Romance English 4/27

My primary source is the music video of "Teenagers" by My Chemical Romance.  It is a song about the relationship between the teenage sector of society and adults.

So far, my primary sources include: an analysis of the music video by a Christian center for parent/youth understanding, a blog post that analyzes the video, and an interview with the lead singer of the band.

I plan to use these resources in various ways.  The Christian review is the most intriguing to me because it is a completely different viewpoint than the other two sources.  It is also new to me since I am not a Christian.  It makes an attempt to relate most of the videos content to aspects of the Bible and to God,  This could be very useful, especially since the Bible is a book full of meaning.  Any apparent Biblical messages in the video would be very interesting to analyze.

English 4/20

Claims and evidence have a very close relationship.  Evidence is pretty much the foundation for your claims.  They are tools used by the writer that have the ability to justify claims he or she may make within their writings. This evidence is also used to test and refine these claims instead of simply trying to prove them right.  They allow the writer to alter and perfect their claims throughout the writing process.  This is important because instead of looking at evidence with the preconceived notion that your claim is correct, it allows the evidence to speak for itself.  The writer then has to decide if their claims hold up after analyzing the newfound evidence.  You can apply this very easily to academic writing, especially when secondary sources are involved.  Secondary sources introduce new perspectives and information on a topic in addition to your primary source.  Sometimes this information can conflict with your primary source.  This forces the writer to reevaluate their claim and review all of their sources with an unbiased opinion.  The result of the analysis of these secondary sources is that your claims are pretty much always "in the making" and are constantly being altered.