Honestly, why doesn’t everyone just try their best to take care of this environment that we are stuck with until we die? I have been called a hippie and a tree hugger on several occasions just for asking a person to recycle. Our planet is so fragile that we need to be making it better not worse.

          I’ve been brought up with an undeniablerespect for what I have. Earth is no exception. I believe that if everyone would do their simple duty of taking care of what little part they claim to the earth would be in better shape. I know that I am not entirely an environmentalist, but I still put in the effort to give back to the world we are a part of. I recycle religiously and try not to waste energy. There is something about teenagers that automatically refuses the idea of them recycling. Some even take pleasure in watching me squirm when they purposefully throw paper away that I politely asked them to recycle. Paper isn’t the only byproduct that needs to be disposed more creatively. My sister is buying utensils for her wedding made out of plants that look like plastic that don’t take four hundred years to start to disintegrate. Instead of using up another plastic bag every time we go shopping, my familyuses reusable bags. Have you noticed how many school lunches use Styrofoam plates? I don’t even want to get started on how bad those are for the environment. I believe that every little thing counts.

         I feel like global warming is on my peers and myself to fix, and I can’t do it all on my own. I believe that everyone should get to see a polar bear in their lifetime and because their pole is melting, that might not happen for your grandchildren or maybe even your children. As much as critics say global warming is not happening, it is. I have an uncle that lives in Alaska that has been witnessing it first hand by the glacier in his back yard melting more and more every year. We can’t undo the years past but we can try to change what is to come. We are the future of the world and we must keep it around for many more years to come. “We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.” -Chief Sealth This I believe.

Live Life Like It’s Your Last Day by Samantha

        Purpose                                                                                                   outside: to encourage people to spend everyday like it was their last day on earth                                                                                                                                              inside:the title, the anecdote about her mom, “I believe people should live everyday of their life like it is their last. ”

        Persona outside: teenager:regretful;mournful                                                                                                                                               inside:“I really did not want to go to school”; If I had lived everyday like it was mine or her last, I would have spent every last second I had with her”; “the hardest person to lose in life is your mother.”                                                                                                                

        Audience                                                                                           outside: people searching for meaning in their life that need purpose and are just going through the motions inside: “if i died tomorrow, would i have regretted going to school…”, “There are plenty of reasons to live your life like it’s your last day, but she was mine.”

       Argument                                                                                                                               outside: do everything that you want to do now because you might not get a chance later on                    inside: ”Your mom she…died durring the night”, “you don’t know what you’ll encounter next so be ready for the unexpected.”

Growth That Starts From Thinking by Eleanor Roosevelt

     Purpose                                                                                                                                  outside: to encourgage others to think for themselve and question everything                                          inside:”it didn’t do you any harm to learn those things, so why not let your children learn them? When they grow up they’ll think things out for themselves.”

     Persona                                                                                                                  outside:sage;inquisative
inside: “I came to the conclusion that you had to use this life to develop the very best that you could develop.”; “But as I grew older I questioned a great many of the things that I knew very well my grandmother who had brought me up had taken for granted.”

     Audience                                                                                                        outside: americans, people wanting to think for themselves when everyone else believes there is one right way and that they are correct, non-reigouspeople                                                                                      inside: she is an american icon, “I don’t know whether I believe in a future life.” (relatable to others)

     Argument                                                                                                      outside: be the one thinking for yourself, what is going to happen will happen so let it.                                     inside: “You have to accept whatever comes and the only important thing is that you meet it with courage and with the best that you have to give.”

Slippery Slope, Consistent, and Hasty Generalization.

1. Anne doesn’t recycle, so all of the trees will be cut down.

2. Global warming is melting the North Pole, so polar bears will be extinct in less than ten years.

3. Most people in Hawaii can surf the Pipeline.

1. If it were true that women were so limited in their thinking, than science could back up the thought that their lives are meaningless. Though, women aren’t that incompitent so that theory in incorrect.
2. No matter how smart or talented women appear, they can’t fight the facts that prove they aren’t as smart because they have smaller craniums.  
3. Women have shown that they are very intelligent. Men were being much too harsh when criticizing women. The statistics and numbers from Broca’s experiments made women look a lot stupider than they actually are. Theologians didn’t think they even have souls. Some scientists even thought that women don’t have any human intelligence at all. 
4. Some could argue that the reason why women have smaller brains is that they have smaller bodies, but don’t forget that the average woman isn’t as intelligent as a man because it is true. Therefore, we are allowed to think that the reason why their brains are this small is because they are physically and intellectually inferior to men.
5. Men need more brain power than women because they have to care for and protect their women; where as women can just be passive and raise babies (therefore they don’t need as much).
6. Many women are more like gorillas than adult males with their small, primitive brains. It’s obvious that they are inferior, but to what extent? All learned people know that women are the lesser form of human evolution. They are more like savages then men. There are a few women that are more intelligent than men, but they are rare. We should neglect them entirely!
7. To even think that we give women the same education as men is absurd and a dangerous thought…the day when women leave their homes to do men’s jobs will be the day that society will be overturned and chaos will reign supreme!
8. Black men have brains a little bigger than women, so they are a little smarter.
9. In an era that has superior human beings,  men will be both moral and sentimental. Maybe women will also have a chance to reign over men, when the whole puzzle of gender roles has been decided. Women have always been the more sentimental, moral, and had more honor of the two sexes.
10. Men don’t realize that women are as intelligent as they give them credit to be. Their intelligence is hidden at first, but it will be discovered with time. Women are still looking for their rightful place in society where they belong.

I noticed that all of the quotes were giving a different view but overall expressed the fact that women aren’t inferior to men or they were on a subject that is easily debated. The beginning and end quotes agree with the fact that women are just as intelligent as men, while the quotes in the body of the essay express misogynistic views of how stupid women are so Gould could debate them.

1.  Gould thinks the that scientists think that they are always right and that certain groups are inferior to others. The scientists that Gould talked about were stubborn when it came to their beliefs. He also thought that they could get their study to back up their hypothesis no matter what.

3.  In the fourth paragraph, Gould questions the methods of studying the brain mass and that the larger the brain the smarter. He says that the data wasn’t correctly acquired because he used different aged victims and an uneven ratios of women to men. He weaves them together by making the counter argument not credible and long and drawn out so that by the time you get to the meat of it his argument sounds right.

6. In paragraphs nine though twelve, he talks about how modern technology can prove that what was thought to be true in the past about women not being nearly as smart as men is in fact not true. There is evidence that can prove that women are just as smart. That central claim adds a lot more credibility to his essay.

7.  Gould shows how Broca and his colleagues didn’t just pinpoint women, but also Africans and poor people because they are also looked down upon. They were all thought of as being more like monkeys than men. They chose to make their main point about women because it was easiest to get a hold of their corps. By making the point so elaborately, Gould show that by showing all of the groups that are being wrongfully accuse of being stupider to appeal to a larger audience than just women.

9.  In the last two paragraphs, Gould states both of his arguments. Then he gives his own strategy by stating that the arguments made were wrong and completely irrelevant. He concludes his essay with a passage from George Eliot’s Middlemarch.

Works Cited

 Truby, Corbett. “The Argument agai

nst TV.” The Language of Composition. By Renee H. Shea, Lawrence Scanlon and Robin D. Aufses. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008. 777-79.

Gerbner, George, and Todd Gitlin. “Is Media Violence Free Speech?” The Language of Composition. By Renee H. Shea, Lawrence Scanlon and Robin D. Aufses. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008. 783-87.Johnson, Steven. “Watching TV Makes You Smarter.” The Language of Compostition. By Renee H. Shea, Lawrence Scanlon and Robin D. Aufses. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin, 2008. 766-76.

           I believe that Postman was trying to get us to stop our lives for a moment and look at what extent the television has had a negative effect on our society. We have to do this through looking at two excerpts from novels from an era without TVs that explain what the feel the future will turn out to be like. Both books were written before TVs were everywhere, but they were from very different times too and so their outlooks were different. Postman is trying to get us to think about how the TV has corupped us into thinking that there is no reason to read a book when we can just watch the movie version instead. Orwell’s thoughts that everyone would want to read a book and we wouldn’t be allowed to. That clearly didn’t happen in 1984. But has Huxley’s ideas of our society being ruined by the laziness of people that don’t think it important to read a book turned into our present?

1. Robert Putnam establishes credibility by having written that he is a professor at an ivory league school (Harvard). He also establishes credibility by stating his sights as reliableand knowledgeable sights of information.
2. All of the names listed are used in the article accept Comstock. Almost immediately in the first paragraph, the names John Robinson and Geoffrey Godbey are named as researchers for Time. Needham was mentioned in the DDB Needham Lifestyle surveys in paragraph three. James Howard Kunstler was also quickly mentioned in paragraph four as a social critic and has an excerpt from something he wrote in it.
3. By listing three sources Putnam is going above and beyond to make sure the reader can fully see all of the steps to his research. The extra sights and information help strengthen his argument and particularly the part by the little thirteen. He wanted the information to be part of his paper, but not part of the actual essay.
4. The purposeof the fourth footnote was to cite the sources of the information on how the Internet access at home dramatically changed our entertainment. It might seem obvious to some people, but it is there to inform the reader and if they didn’t know what it was for it would be helpful.
5. Putman uses his footnotes on number fifteen to support his claim because that study made the connection with the percentage of people that wanted to spend a night at home and the people who chose TV as their “primary form of entertainment”.
6. By citing Kunstle’s paragraph, he makes his argument stronger because it adds to the credibility of the article and allows the credit to go to the rightful owner so the reader knows that this isn’t necessarily his opinion on the subject.
7. Putnam’s notes and sources suggest that he had done extensive research before writing the essay. The sources all appear to be credible and come from reliable sources. He had to have read at least a couple of books on the subject and gone through several pages of paperwork to get the information he needed to write a paper of that skill level.

1.  Though this is labeled as a debate, both George Gerbner and Todd Gitlin agree that media violence should stop. “Television violence is mainly redundant, stupid, and ugly.” (Gitlin, paragraph 7) They also agree that “the problem goes beyond violence, ratings, or any single factor, to the heart of the system. Television is driven not by the creative people who have something to tell, but by global conglomerates that have something to sell.” (Gerbner, paragraph 24).

2. Gitlin uses Japan as an example of the effects of media violence to show how the mass population was unaffected by their harsh media violence. He backs up his argument by saying that they Japan has far more vile media violence but less real world violence. Gerbner responds with saying that that was not the only influencing factor that had an impact on the results.

3. Both Gerbner and Gitlin have strong views on the V-chip. Gerbner doesn’t like the V-chip at all. He said, “The V-chip is not the solution. That technology merely protects the industry from the parents, not the other way around.” (para. 14) Gitlin doesn’t share those same views with Gerbner. He instead feels that, “any device that enables parents to redress the imbalance of power they suffer under the invasion of television is to the good.” (para. 16) Though he knows that the it will be hard to fight Hollywood in his attempts to stop the media violence and doesn’t think that the V-chip can really do that much for us.

4. According to Gerbner the excessive TV violence is just another way to cause fear and social control. He says that TV watchers think there is an increasing number of violence the more TV they watch. Gitlin says that the amount of media violence has nothing to do with the amount of actual violence and that the reason why they shouldn’t put it on air is because it’s stupid.