Buffy Reflection

I liked the Buffy TV show we watched in class today. It was easy to follow even though I have never seen an episode of Buffy before. It was kind of cheesy and the fighting scenes and the special effects were pretty bad. The plot was really good though. The plot really developed the characters. I liked how the costumes showed the personalities of each character. I also liked how Buffy went from an ass-kicking vampire slayer to 18^th century royalty. These two characters were polar opposites. I also liked it when the soldier kicked the crap out  of the pirate. The irony in that was funny. The show of course had a happy ending when Buffy saves the day and she gets the guy. It did leave off with a cliff hanger though. The teacher has a dark past from what I gathered. All in all it was a good show and It was cool to see a show from the 90's because TV has changed a lot since then.

Favorite Book

One of my favorite books I have read is Beowulf. I had to read it for honors English last year. I thought it was a really cool book. It was very interesting because it is such an old story. I liked the story line about how Beowulf is an epic hero and is pretty much unstoppable. One of the best parts about reading it for class was that we got into some pretty heated debates about it. There was only nine students in that class and we would spend whole class periods arguing about the book. The biggest argument was about whether or not Beowulf was a hero. Half of the class thought he was and the other half didn't. We all had to write a paper after reading the book and most of us wrote on that topic. After reading Beowulf we read the Canterbury Tales. I really liked these stories as well. It is a cool book because it is composed of a lot of short stories. These stories were often times not very appropriate. In fact some of the stories were pretty raunchy. This book was really funny because it used a lot of old time ways to say bad stuff. This book also started some interesting debates in our class.  Beowulf and Canterbury Tales would probably have to be my two favorite books.

Reflection on the Vikings Season

I am a huge Vikings fan, therefore I am use to disappointment. Last year was the dream season for the Vikings. Brett Favre came in to save the team and they had a roster full of pro-bowlers. Sadly they came up a field goal short of the Super Bowl.

This year was suppose to be revenge for the Vikings. The first few weeks looked pretty bad though. They have had a lot of injuries on both sides of the ball. Sydney rice, Favre's favorite target, is out for most of the season. He led the team in receptions and went to the probowl last year. They also lost their two starting corner backs to injuries. All of these things hurt the Vikings the first few weeks of the season. Their record is 2-3, which isn't very good but thankfully the rest of the NFC isn't much better. The best record in the NFC is 4-2, so the vikings aren't out of the running yet.

With the addition of Randy Moss, and a healthy Percy Harvin, the Vikings are coming back. Last week they beat the Dallas Cowboys, and with a win Monday night against the Packers they will be in second place in the division and just a game back from the Bears. The Vikings will also get Rice back and hopefully both of their cornerbacks soon. It looks like their season is turning around. Some ESPN analysts even have them winning the division. I will wait and see, hopefully this is the year!

Cellphones distracting our society

My argument is that cell phones can have a negative effect on our society because of the distraction they cause. For the ethos I will use for this paper will be pretty easy. There are tons and tons of statics that show cell phones distract people who are driving, as well as students in the class room. For pathos I will make an appeal to people’s emotions by showing the dangers of cell phone distraction. Dangers like car accidents as well as educational dangers. Cell phones are distracting kids in school and taking away from their education. For logos I will reason that I don't believe that cell phones are a bad thing I just think they do have some negative effects. I think statistics and first hand experiences will be a good way to reason with my audience.

3 Paper topics

One topic I thought about writing about is gun rights. For this topic I could use the second amendment, the right to bear arms, to support topics. I could also go with the fact that criminals don't go to Scheels and buy their guns they get them from the black market or a shady dealer, so gun control will only make citizens defenseless against those who get their guns in other places.

Another topic I could write about is cell phone usage. I would mainly focus on how distracting it can be while driving. There are many studies proving cell phones distract the driver causing injuries and deaths. I could also point out that there are states that have banned either all cell phone use or some specific use while behind the wheel.

I could also write a paper on ghosts and spirits. I would write about how it is completely bogus. It is a fad brought on by too much TV publicity. Just because the history channel has a show called "Ghost Hunters" doesn't mean they exist. People tend to believe anything they see on TV; they don't often realize they edit everything for ratings. Those shows are there to be entertainment and get ratings.

Class Reflection

Today in class we learned about commas, semicolons, and colons. The lesson and handouts were both helpful. It is good to have examples to look at because it can be hard to know whether to us a comma or a semicolon. We spend the rest of class doing an exercise to generate paper topics. It was fun and helpful. We had to come up with a bunch of stuff that either annoyed us or we felt passionate about. I think it was really helpful because everyone came up with ideas and there were a lot of topics that I would never have thought of. It was also interesting hearing other student’s opinions on topics. Over all class was good today.

What I've gained from comp english

I have gained a lot of knowledge from this English class. First off all I have become a better writer. I have also become more efficient at writing, this is probably because in high school we didn't write this many papers in this short of a time for one class. This has helped me become able to sit down and write a paper when it is assigned rather than putting it off.

Another thing that I will take away from this class is research skills. In high school we never learned anything about scholarly articles, we just took stuff we found off the internet and put it in our papers. It is a good thing to know how to find scholarly articles because using them makes your paper look more professional and it also makes it more convincing. I think knowing where to find scholarly articles will be a big help in the future.

Learning about MLA was also something very helpful. We learned about MLA in high school but I better understand it now. MLA is one of those things that you can't learn without doing it. Using MLA format for our papers was a good refresher. I think its good that we are learning about it because it will definitely help all of us in our future class and careers.

How my literacy narrative changed

My literacy narrative changed quite a bit before I arrived at the final draft. I tend to write fast and get a whole paper written before I look back on it. So I always have to read over my first draft to make sure everything that sounded good in my head sounds good out loud. I picked out a lot of mistakes in this process. We peer edited in class. This was a big help. It is always good to get a fresh pair of eyes to go over you paper. Having other students look at my paper was really nice because they found a lot of things that I had looked over. Most of what I changed from the peer edit was grammar and sentence flow. I changed a few parts of my paper so they would sound better. I also changed a lot of repetitive words to avoid using that same word multiple times. Next we did the teacher edit. This was also very helpful. Most of what my paper needed was some more grammatical changes. I also took out a few things within my paper that were unnecessary. I rephrased some sentences so they made more sense as well. After all of this I think my paper has turned out very well.