Satire Project Checkpoint

Friday proved unfruitful in terms of getting started on the project due to the college office having a meeting during our class. However, my group and I already got started on our plot and are slowly but surely adding and trimming content from our script's first draft. The only problems being the difficulties in not sounding too harsh and including as many jokes that poke fun at our topic. Hopefully we can overcome this obstacle with the power of teamwork and receive a 100 as our final grade.

Thoughts on Word Police

Word police, by Michiko Kakutani, takes a strong stance against those trying to push politically correct speech onto many people, so that they don't disrespecting anyone and avoiding controversial topics. Although I agree with Michiko in terms of politically correct speech not being totally necessary in many ways. I do believe there are many exceptions to when you should speak politically correct and not. Although my stance is not too certain, I do believe that this is a very controversial topic that I can confidently say that I would rather not try to resolve.

Words that Work by Frank Luntz

Make up for March 5th

In words That Work, by Frank Luntz, there is a central theme in discussing the fluff that political leaders use in their speeches and deliverance of news that assist in confusing their audience to rid of the impact that would usually hit them. For example, a country can not just admit to the mass murder of innocent civilians due to being caught in the conflict of war. Instead they would say, there were many losses of on both sides of the war. I believe this to be necessary in some cases. I think the idea of not disclosing some information in order to keep the public calm.

Politics and the English Language by George Orwell

Make up for January 15th blog:

In class, we discussed a piece written by George Orwell. The purpose of the piece was to express Orwell's disscontempt with how the English language is slowly becoming oversaturated with verbal fluff and clutter. This classic argument criticizes the wuss-like dialect that normal people, like us, use on an everyday basis. Orwell's well-spoken criticism include harsh critique on the common tactic of everyday people to use way too many unnecessary adjectives. Orwell's strongly worded piece discusses many more flaws in modern English language, including the abrupt cutoff of many articles.

Over my winter break, I came across an article by By Doan Thi Ngoc, called 'Understanding Relationship Between Language and Gender'. Ngoc discusses the differences between the way women and men speak, the tone of which women and men within sub-cultures of their own sex speak, and which sex characteristically has a more dominant approach when speaking. Ngoc uses these differences in language as to why gender stereotypes exist in our society. I agree with her, but in my opinion, I think many of the cases described to prove her points may have been generalizations. Overall, I found it to be an interesting piece which helped me see a connection between gender and language.

Dec 4th Reflection

This week had a lot in store for my partner, Anthony, and me. For example, on Thursday Miss Moccia had us write thesis statements for various topics. The topics ranged from spongebob's influence on children to Kanye West's future presidency. Personally, I believe Anthony and I killed it in terms of how well our thesis statements were. We hope to be awarded with 10 gold stars.

Reflection

This week Miss Moccia taught us about writing fallacies. To assist in drilling these concepts into our minds, Miss Moccia took advantage of the classic pamphlet trick. Students paired up to be as creative as possible in order to persuade Miss Moccia into giving us credits. Credits that fulfill the ever necessary job of satisfying their cravings of a perfect score on our report cards. My partner, Anthony, and I are sure that Miss Moccia will recognize the effort we put into our pamphlet and reward us with our gold stars. :)