WP3 PB1

Keeping the Peace is a piece on the flaws of the college dormitory system that is used to pair up students. Rosemary Counter uses a very academic piece of writing, and does not utilize humor. It first starts off with an example of a roommate pairing gone wrong. The roommates that are paired together have the same things written down on their questionnaires, but when they meet each other, they are complete opposites. One roommate was incredibly shy, and would tag along with the other roommate to whatever they went to. Counter then explains what the problem with the roommate dormitory system is, along with ideas of why these problems occur. Mainly because of dishonesty on the questionnaire, and parents also had a big deal to do with it. Counter then further goes on and gives a couple ways that other universities had adopted in order to make the roommate pairing process more effective.

            To make “Keeping the Peace” a more children suitable book, I would make it a picture book. It could have a mother teaching her children about rooming or something. The word choices in it would be much easier, it would also come with a

WP2 PB2

Kyle D. Stedman has a specific move set in his article, “Annoying Ways People Uses Sources”. He enjoys using parallelism to get his multiple points across, for example his numbering of explanations when he compares

“1. They don’t know that the generally accepted practice of high-way driving in the US is to move to the right if an upcoming car wants to pass. Or,

2. They know the guidelines but don’t care” (Stedman 242)

and also when he goes over The Annoyances. Stedman always starts off with his made up title of the annoyance, and then gives a little example of what that literary annoyance is like in real life. After effectively giving his audience something that they can imagine or relate to, Stedman then introduces a passage that features that annoyance, and clearly examines why the passage features the given annoyance. After presenting these facts, Stedman always uses “The Fix:” to teach his audience how to turn the annoyance into a work of art. Stedman uses a lot of parallelism and for every single one of his annoyances, he follows the same order, 1. Name of annoyance, 2. Relatable experience or an image, 3. An example in writing of the annoyance, and 4. How to fix the annoyance. Stedman also uses a lot of bolded words and italics in his writing in order to keep the attention of his audience, which works quite well. His italics highlight the key points of the annoyance and his bolded words show what he has changed in his fix of the bad passage. These italics and bolded sentences express themselves more firmly onto the reader, which allows them to better understand the changes that Stedman is trying to teach. Stedman also writes as if he’s write next to you and talking to you, much like a teacher talks to a classroom, which is also extremely effective. The way he writes allows the reader to get a great grasp of the knowledge and stay entertained through the whole thing. With a combination of jokes, corniness, and knowledge, Stedman effectively gets through to the reader and enlightens them on how to use sources more completely. He also uses colloquial language to help enthrall the reader, allowing better absorption of his text.

While Stedman is fun to read throughout the whole reading, Rosenberg starts off beautifully in the beginning, but her writing starts deteriorating after the section, If At First You Fall Asleep. Rosenberg starts off as if she’s writing a story, illustrating the first years of her college life, she writes through personal experience, and relates to the reader through her similes, metaphors, and personification. She expresses her love for reading and many hours reading in the “overstuffed red chair in the library that enveloped [her] like the lap of a department store Santa” (Rosenberg 210). But once she reached the English texts, she “curled up, opened a book on the Chinese Revolution, started reading, and fell asleep” (210). She then shows her lack of concentration on the reading by depicting herself holding on for a couple paragraphs, and then day dream. With her similes, metaphors, personification, and especially her vivid details, she relates to the audience, describing the dread of reading academic texts and then appearing as a savior by offering tips on how to make the reading of academic texts more enjoyable.

                Everything falls apart after that section, once she starts the next section, the reading is near unbearable, she rambles on about how reading a scholarly work is a conversation, and multiple examples on how it becomes a conversation. The next section is where it actually becomes helpful, Rosenberg also uses bolds in her writing, and she bolds everything that the reader should look at or think through. After bolding the word that Rosenberg wants her audience to focus on, she then goes on to show why that works. She gives little tips and tricks that she learned after her seven years of college.

                Rosenberg and Stedman both wrote terrific pieces, but Stedman’s piece was by far the best. His understanding of the current student is great, and he’s very good at keeping his audience’s attention with his colloquial language, parallelism, short entertaining stories that relate to the reader, and corniness. His piece of work was much more entertaining than Rosenberg’s was, which had a lot to do with the spacing. Each annoyance of his was short and to the point, telling you a story, then a passage of it being wrong, and finally how to fix the problem. His brilliance in keeping his audience fascinated was through the simplicity of his text and his straight to the point writing style. Rosenberg would have been a much more entertaining read if she had used more dashes, and more spaces in her text. If she had had more paragraphs and borrowed some of the ideas that Stedman used, her piece would have been Justas interesting as Stedman’s.

Find a scholarly academic publication, then compare/contrast its rhetorical features and conventions with those present in the “SCIgen” genre generator program.  (Note: this is a revisitation of PB1B.)

Optimizing Firm Performance Alignment of Operational Success Drivers on the Basis of Empirical Data is much different than the SCIgen generated articles. First off, it is completely real, and it’s also not very fun to play around with. The SCIgen website also generates articles about computer science, and Optimizing Firm Performance Alignment of Operational Success Drivers on the Basis of Empirical Data is about economics, and the way and reasoning behind the way a firm works . They’re also totally different because the SCIgen articles are complete bullshit, while Optimizing Firm Performance Alignment of Operational Success Drivers on the Basis of Empirical Data is written based on information gathered about the how firms work and what works and what doesn’t work in a firm. SCIgen’s articles are about a fake topic that is randomly generated, even though it can seem to make sense, because the wording is so complex. SCIgen generates research papers about computer science. They have the title at the top, followed with the author’s name right under it. The first section is the abstract, which gives an idea of what the author is going to be writing about. It is then followed by a bolded Table of Contents with the first in the table of contents to be 1 Introduction, in the introduction, a general idea of his argument or point is trying to be given and the abstract is expanded upon. The introduction ends with a thesis and is followed by 2 Methodology. In the methodology section the way and theory of how the topic works is shown, with graphs and diagrams showing how it worked. 3 Implementation is about how everything else works and how the topic functions in real life. The 4^th section is about results and analysis with some information about how to put together the experiment and then results of how it worked out. The paper ends with related work with other people who have made advancements in the topic and a conclusion, along with references as a works cited page.

                Like the SCIgen essays, Optimizing Firm Performance also has 6 sections in its table of contents. Optimizing Firm Performance also starts with an introduction and the purpose behind the paper. They also have a thesis, and the paper focuses on why and how the author came to write the paper and a brief look into what he will delve into. It then has a Working Capital Management sections with information about working capital and why along with what it’s like working capital over long periods of time. The main part of the paper is covered in the third and fourth sections of the book. The author goes over how driving firm performances based on an integrated operations approach consisting of manufacturing, supply chain management, working capital management and supply chain risk steering. Optimizing Firm Performance also contains methodology of how its techniques and stuff works. After explaining the theory in chapter 3, the author goes on to show how to boost the productivity of firms. The reader is supposed to identify the drivers and motivations in the firm, and then use that to fuel its workers. The fourth chapter also covers  supply chain risk steering, and how to use it in the firm. The book also ends with a conclusion and also a bibliography.

PB1B

After browsing through the SCIgen, comic strip, and meme website, I found that they were all somewhat similar website. Of course they all had differences, but they were all somewhat random. For SCIgen, I would plug in names to the website, and they would return with a paper about computer science. On pandyland.net, clicking on the “generate new comic” button would reveal a new comic that seemed completely random. The only one that kind of stuck out was memegenerator.net, because unlike the other two, this one wasn’t random. It featured an online community that would post and make new memes, taking already invented conventions and making a funny caption with the picture associated with it.

SCIgen was a very strange website, whenever I generated a new paper, the website spit out a title that made no sense to me, such as “Decoupling Thin Clients from Kernels in Voice-Over-IP.” After playing with the website a little more, I found that every paper they gave back to me had computer science in it. It would always have a fancy title that pertained to computer science, with the name I inputted, Michael Jordan, as the author. Each would then have the label Abstract, which seemed to give a brief description of what the author aimed to do in the paper. Most of the papers generated had the same sections, an introduction, the architecture or framework, implementation, an evaluation with sub-chapters and chapters about how the concept was supposed to work and how it performed, related work, a conclusion, and reference the author used. I thought the website was incredibly interesting after I read the About section on the website. The SCIgen website would randomly generate computer science research papers, and if I had known any better, I would have known that none of it made any sense.

Pandyland was a little interesting, and much more amusing than SCIgen, it was much simpler, involving three panel comics that were randomly generated. They often made zero sense, but were still very entertaining. These comics feature two characters named Finlay and Simon saying and doing various things. When clicking on the generate button, 3 random comic slots are fit together, and they match up to form the comic. It was incredibly simple, with pre-drawn art made for each comic slot, and being matched up similar to how a slot machine is.

Meme generator was somewhat different, it involved an online community making memes and up voting and down voting each other. They used already invented conventions for pictures in order to make a caption that would only be funny to people who understood the convention. All of the captions are short in big bold uppercase white letters on the top and the bottom of a picture. They featured many different meme characters with some of the more popular being Bad Luck Brian, Good Guy Greg, Foul Bachelor Frog, and Philosoraptor.

Thinking about what’s happening in these websites helps someone better understand genre because they are able to compare and contrast the different websites and see the differences. This allows the person to know what to look for and how to know the difference between everything. They can see compare the websites and understand why all of the websites are in different genre categories. I usually would only distinguish the different genres of books, movies, and stuff, but now, it’s much easier for me to observe and distinguish genres. Before, I would put them in the generator genre, but now I look at a lot more of the little stuff and I understand genre and can categorize more effectively.

PB1A: Dissecting a Genre’s Rhetorical Features and Conventions – Fairy Tales

            Fairy tales is one of the oldest textual genres, marked out as a genre by writers in the Renaissance period. Fairy tales are meant to be entertaining and thrilling for children, while also teaching children lessons, and morals. For example, in The Tortoise and the Hare, the tortoise and the hare race each other. Since the hare thinks he’s hot stuff, he blows off the tortoise, and thinks the race is going to be an easy victory. The hare runs really fast in the beginning, but before he reaches the finish, he decides to take a nap as he thinks the tortoise would never be able to catch up with him. The moral of The Tortoise and the Hare, is “slow and steady wins the race”. This story teaches children not to underestimate anyone else and to always try your best, and that if you keep trying at something, eventually you’ll be able to reach your goal.

            Fairy tales, or at least Grimm’s Fairy Tales and the Disney remakes of the stories, were never meant for children. When the Grimm brothers first made the book, the book had scholarly feel and tone, with no illustrations in it, and many footnotes. The stories in the book also had many dark themes, like graphic violence, premarital sex, child abuse, and incest. Only after the brothers Grimm received more of a younger audience did they tone down the sex, but continued to have very gruesome scenes in their fairy tales, such as Cinderella’s stepsisters cutting of their toes in order to fit the glass slipper. Now, Disney has remade those classics into a more friendly viewing experience for this era, making them the soft movies loved by parents and children.

            Many of the conventions usually celebrated in fairy tales involve fantasy characters, such as elves, giants, fairies, and witches and also tend to have magic in the stories. They typically begin with “once upon a time” which suggests a time when magic was still in the world. This idea is reinforced by the German starting line, “In the old times when wishing was still effective” Fairy tales also usually have happy endings, a fairy tale ending, where everything goes well, and there is nobody suffering, a true happily ever after.

            A fairy tale is a fairy tale because of its themes and conventions. They are usually stories that have been handed down for generations and generations. They also tend to have many morals in the story, such as The Boy who Cried Wolf and The Tortoise and the Hare, teaching children lessons. They also nearly always start with once upon a time, when the world was still a magical place, and end with “and they lived on happily ever after”.  Fairy tales have changed a lot over time, especially in the past century, but they still contain the same basic themes. Being handed down orally and literally, fairy tales entertain and also teach lessons.

Hi! My name is Brian Ku, and I'm a first year Economics and Accounting Major at UC Santa Barbara. I'm from Hacienda Heights, California which is in LA County. My whole family is in the restaurant business, and I have a little brother in 8th grade. Even though I'm an Econ/Accounting kid, I'm still not sure what I want to do in the future, there's a lot of stuff that interests me, and I don't want to make the wrong choice and end up with a job that I hate. However, I do know that I want to travel, I think seeing the different viewpoints and thinking styles of people in different countries and cities would be super cool. I really miss home right now, especially after winter break, seeing my family and friends was great and I can't wait to go home and see them again spring break. It's not that I don't want to meet new people or anything here, it's just that I had a really close group of friends back home and I haven't found anything like that here yet. Some of my hobbies are playing basketball, and I also like hanging out with my friends whenever I have free time. My favorite basketball team is the Chicago Bulls, and I'm hoping they go far this year, they're doing really good this year. I also like old American and Japanese cars. This quarter I'm trying to focus on gym and school and grind it out. School, gym, homework, sleep, school, gym, homework, sleep. Last quarter I screwed around too much and didn't get the best grades, so I'm trying to do much better this quarter. With that, I hope everyone has a great quarter and achieves their goals!