Theory of Writing

Going into English class, I had what I now consider a warped view of what writing should be. Having been a bookworm during high school, I had developed a five paragraph essay that could achieve good marks in almost any setting; I thought I had it all figured out. The only problem with my essays was that they were unbearable to write. The process took hours because I had to think about each word and analyze the effectiveness of it before putting it on paper. I got into class and the teacher told us that the structure that had been hammered into us since sixth grade could be the downfall of our writing and that satisfying a purpose did not have to come down to five paragraphs with two examples and analyses each. From that moment on, my definition and process  of writing have been evolving, and writing has become much easier for me, as a result. To me, writing is thinking and feeling actively and putting those thoughts and emotions into words. Each piece of writing is a soul search for answers or an exploration of one’s feelings. Good writing serves its purpose and is from the heart and brain of the writer. As long as a piece of writing can do these two things, then it can be considered good. Even if the purpose of a work is to serve as therapy for the writer, satisfying that purpose sincerely would demonstrate good writing. When I write, I consider only the purpose of the writing. In order to be sincere, I just write. I do not try to be sincere, because trying to be sincere undermines the goal of sincerity. I use this idea of good writing in everything I write, only changing my approach to fit structure guidelines in school assignments. Over the course of the year, I have become a more creative and personal writer, which were my goals for the semester. I feel as though I am having a conversation when I am writing now. My definition of genre has also changed. Before, the writing for every genre had certain attributes and I felt that those elements had to be present in order to write sufficiently. Now, I see a genre as a word to describe the audience, purpose, and medium of a piece of writing. Since the beginning of the semester, my goal was to get out of my own way—to leave the tone and vocabulary of my writing be—because I wanted the assignments to be done by Kenneth Sisk, not by the android, KS1217. If I do not have a stake in what I’m writing, I try to create a hypothetical person who does have a stake in the matter, and then I empathize with that person. I have come to think that writing that is not your own is worthless, and strive to let each piece come from my heart and brain.

This I Believe

Rough Draft - Peer CommentsRough Draft - Teacher Comments

This I Believe - Final Draft

The Gift of Life

Kenneth S. Sisk

            My mother and I walked down the corridor of the local Salvation Army and got in line, where the more charitable were serving lunch to the homeless. We filled our plates and looked for two seats beside each other in the dining hall. The thought of taking handouts disgusted me, but I needed the sustenance—besides, the occurrence was becoming commonplace, the feeling customary. My mother urged me to go back for seconds. As I approached the line, I saw a grizzly man with a tattered shirt and jeans with paint permanently stuck to them. The man walked up to me and said, “You got a Union Bay shirt? Alright!” I was confounded. I had just received the red polo shirt earlier and thought nothing of it; it was another donation from the Salvation Army, and I associated Union Bay with bargain stores, such as Walmart. What perplexed me more than the man’s appreciation of the shirt was the fact that the man seemed genuinely happy and excited for me, because somebody managed to get what he considered to be a great thing. Despite having absolutely nothing, the man felt joy over the good fortune of someone else—he was happy to be alive to witness it. This event helped ignite a new moral flame of humanity within me, which burns to this day. With seven words, that grizzly old man taught me to truly appreciate life in its entirety; he showed me that in the most meager circumstances, there are things to still be thankful for. And so I carry this moral with me, and I believe I have become a better person because of it.

            After that day, I took pride in my Union Bay shirt. I walked around with it on as if nothing was wrong, because misery is merely a state of mind. I eventually grew out of the shirt, but as I matured, I realized that other things could be regarded as the shirt had been regarded. Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that life itself is a gift, and conscious perception proves to be an even greater gift to go along with it. Life is great, but a tree has life. As a human being with five senses, I have been given the ability to experience my existence and influence it. I have been given active participation in the goings on in the universe, and I feel that I am obligated to get the most out of it. As far as is known, we only get one life in this dimension, so I strive to make life positive, not only for myself, but for others. Just as I have learned to appreciate the things around me, I have learned to be thankful for my intrinsic attributes. In doing that, I have been able to acknowledge my talents and use them to earn acceptance into college—into a better life. As a result of learning to appreciate things, I have created more things to be grateful for. I also committed to complimenting people and helping them see the greatness in themselves. After all, we’re all wearing Union Bay shirts, and I want everyone to see that.

Intro to Portfolio

This blog started out as an outlet of creativity, suggested by our English teacher; it evolved into a writing portfolio to be completed at the end of the semester. Throughout the year, we have been trying to learn how to write effectively. At the beginning of the term, our instructor had us work to define "good writing". Most of us, having come out of public school, thought that five paragraph essays with a hook in the introduction and many rhetorical devices constituted good writing. We came to find out that not only are there other forms of good writing, but that an impeccable essay may not be good writing. This revelation made us gasp, because we have spent our whole education attempting to master the five paragraph essay, only to be told it may not be enough. We learned that good writing must satisfy its purpose while being original. The class caused our hearts to beat again, when before, we were merely robots in the writing world. Hopefully, the portfolio will illustrate my evolution from stiff to fluid.

Music: My Other Passion

Writing What Moves Me

The piece that I chose that moved me was a speech given by Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson. His speech was actually an answer to the question “in your years as an astrophysicist, what is the most astounding fact that you have come to know”. Since this was on the spot and vocal, not much attention can be paid to rhetorical devices, because nothing was planned, but without planning, Dr. Tyson was still able to move me in a way only music has matched.

            For the first half of the speech, Dr. Tyson gave the audience a brief history of the origin of life, as defined by the big bang theory and primordial soup theory. What I really liked about his introduction was the polymerization of story-telling and scientific knowledge that he put into describing the birth of the universe as we know it. Tyson said “the atoms that make up the human body are traceable to the crucibles that cooked light elements into heavy elements in their core under extreme temperatures and pressures”. The doctor was simply describing nuclear fusion, but he was able to do so with vivid imagery. He said that “crucibles cooked light elements into heavy elements”. To an upcoming scientist, I could just picture a large bowl (which is a crucible, in chemistry) in which the nuclei of atoms were being fused together. Even though this is not what happened in the slightest, Tyson gave a clear picture of a process that produced everything we know. To someone who is not science-oriented, a crucible would assume its primary annotation, and the person would still be able to picture elements being cooked. Later on, Tyson said that the stars “went unstable in their later years” and that they “collapsed and then exploded, scattering their enriched guts across the galaxy”. In this sentence, the speaker created great imagery with the words “collapsed”, “exploded”, and “scattering”. The word that came to my attention in that assertion was “guts”. This man, world-renowned for astrophysics, still considered himself human enough to use as elementary a word as “guts”. This diction epitomized everything we’ve talked about in English over the past couple weeks: speaking sincerely. With as much fame as Dr. Tyson has, he still stayed humble enough to use a normal vocabulary to describe an extremely complex process. A place where the speaker used some rhetoric was toward the middle, when he said “we are part of this universe; we are in the universe”. By utilizing parallelism, Tyson was able to reinforce the face that we (humans) are in this vast universe. This reinforcement paid off when the speaker said “the universe is in us”. This created a deep feeling, because I had never thought about the myself in relation to the universe in this way. Dr. Tyson has demonstrated the type of wonder I want to have for the universe throughout my entire childhood, and through this speech, he has allowed me to appreciate the universe that much more, as well as my own life, because he made me realize that my atoms also came from stars.

Inquiry Blog Post II

I plan to conduct research on social conformity. Humans seem to have the need to fit in, and some will go to incredible lengths to do so. I do not have a lot of formal knowledge on the subject, as my research has been focused on physical sciences, but I do have a great interest for social science, and conformity has always been interesting to me, since I've seen people change with the times throughout primary, middle, and secondary school. I actually lost my best friend in middle school to conformity, so I have a personal stake in the inquiry. My friend had been the same ever since I had known him, but the possibility of popularity caused him to change his clothes, his taste in music, and eventually his personality entirely, and I had too much pride to let that happen to me. I hope to compile some reasoning behind conformity and I hope to gather some good examples of it, as some I have seen have been rather humorous.

It is astonishing how the man in this video goes against all logic, just because he's afraid of standing out. He plays it safe by turning around like a boob. This is the best display of conformity I have seen, thus far.

This is another great example of conformity: Apple Inc. I don't know how they've done it, but Apple has made people think they NEED their products. People flock to Apple stores to get redundant products the day they come out for ridiculous prices. For example: You can get an iPhone 4 now for $0.99, or you can get the new iPhone 5 for $200. They are the same product, less the extra 0.5" of screen, and yet people still come in droves for this.

This is a dramatization of a real scientific study conducted by Solomon Asch in 1951. The results were impressive. Only 25% of participants failed to conform. The rest let social pressure override logic-- evidence of a belonging complex humans seems to have.

The Gift of Life

The Gift of Life

 Preface: "This I Believe" is a website that accepts essays that people write expressing their main belief(s) in life. Our English class was tasked with creating essays to submit, and this is my submission (less the preface, obviously). This assignment has allowed me to come to terms with my past, which I have tried to block out of my mind in the past. I think I have come out healthier in this experience, because I have learned to embrace the experiences I've been through.

            My mother and I walked down the corridor of the local Salvation Army and got in line, where the more charitable were serving lunch to the homeless. We filled our plates and looked for two seats beside each other in the dining hall. The thought of taking handouts disgusted me, but I needed the sustenance, and the occurrence was becoming commonplace, and the feeling customary. My mother urged me to go back for seconds. As I approached the line, I saw a grizzly man with a tattered shirt and jeans with paint forever stuck to them. The man walked up to me and said, “You got a Union Bay shirt? Alright!” I was stricken. I had just received the red polo shirt earlier and thought nothing of it; it was another donation from the Salvation Army, and I associated Union Bay with Walmart and the like. What perplexed me more than the man’s appreciation of the shirt was the fact that the man felt genuinely happy and excited for me, because somebody managed to get what he considered to be a great thing. Despite having absolutely nothing, the man felt joy over the good fortune of someone else—He was happy to be alive to witness it. This event helped ignite a new moral flame of humanity, which burns to this day. With seven words, that grizzly old man taught me to truly appreciate life in its entirety; he showed me that in the most meager circumstances, there are things to still be thankful for. And so I carry this axiom with me, and I believe I have become a better person because of it.

            After that day, I took pride in my Union Bay shirt. I walked around with it on as if nothing was wrong, because misery is merely a state of mind. I eventually grew out of the shirt, but as I matured, I realized that other things could be regarded as the shirt had been regarded. Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that life itself is a gift, and conscious perception proves to be an even greater gift to go along with it. I have been given active participation in the goings on in the universe, and I feel that I am obligated to get the most out of it. As far as is known, we only get one life in this dimension, so I strive to make life positive, not only for myself, but for others. Just as I have learned to appreciate the things around me, I have learned to be thankful for my intrinsic attributes. In doing that, I have been able to acknowledge my talents and use them to get a post-secondary education. As a result of learning to appreciate things, I have created more things to be grateful for. I also committed to complimenting people and helping them see the greatness in themselves. We’re all wearing Union Bay shirts, and I want everyone to see that.