3 examples of clear, concise writing

Looking back over past readings, I found parts of "Black Elk Speaks", "The American Dream" and "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For" to be good examples of clear and concise writing.  Each writer makes their point in an organized, clean way with descriptive details.


Black Elk mourns the death of Crazy Horse and tells us "Crazy Horse was dead.  He was brave and good and wise.  He never wanted anything but to save his people, and he fought the Wasichus only when they came to kill us in our own country.  He was only thirty years old.  They could not kill him in battle.  They had to lie to him and kill him that way." (113)

In Jim Cullen's "The American Dream", he writes about the dream of equality, and the changes that took place in mid to late 1800's.  He writes, "The acceleration of industrial capitalism in the late nineteenth century, combined with the growing application of the Darwinian theory of 'the survival of the fittest" to human affairs, popularized a notion of freedom as the right of the individual entrepreneur, like John D. Rockefeller, to make as much money as he could" (107)

Thoreau's "Walden" offers a lot of life advice.  In "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For", he argues that, "We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep."

Post-Apocalypse and Post-September 11th

In his book "The World Without Us", author Alan Weisman considers how the natural world would be without the influence of humans.  Our huge infrastructure would collapse and eventually vanish.  Everyday items would be cemented into fossils.  Some of the most long-lasting things would be bronze statues, plastics, man-made molecules, and radio waves.  After a long time of physical and chemical weathering, our material world would break down and vanish.

Post-apocalyptic books, movies, and shows are really interesting to me because they look at all the possible outcomes of a major, destructive event.  They also explore human psychology, how people would deal with an event like this. 

Though the world did not end after the al-Qaeda attacks on September 11th, it sure halted.  At the time, it seemed like things could get worse and worse.  Thankfully, the attacks halted, national security has been a priority, and victims' families may have a little peace in knowing that Osama Bin Laden had died.  Yet al-Qaeda terrorism will continue to affect how we live, including our suspicions of Muslim people in particular.  With two wars continuing, American politics is getting more polarized.  While at the time people came together in patriotism and empathy for the victims, we are still divided in politics and openness of other cultures.  Some of these attitudes and suspicions are like plastic, and will remain for quite awhile unless another major event takes place that brings us together.

Presentation is done!

It's always a good feeling to finish a project or speech because all your work finally pays off in the end.  I'm really happy with how my group did because it was a challenge getting everything done in the midst of a busy weekend.  Here are some things I think we did well on and some things we could work on for future oral presentations.

Things worked well when we...
- met early on and split up parts for each person
- decided on meeting times and adjusted when we had to
- communicated through email and used Google Docs so we could work independently and as a group
- practiced and times our presentation
- used humor to make our content more interesting and approachable

We could have...
- practiced more
- gotten started even earlier
- talked more about how and when to use humor
- done more research as a group, or shared our individual findings more
- asked for feedback throughout the process


Good luck everyone, you'll do great!