Research Log

When I first started thinking about what I wanted to do my research paper on I thought something to do with the environment and being "green" would be interesting and relevant. From there I bounced between topics like carbon footprints, nuclear waste, oil spills, and finally landed on recycling. Here are a few sources I found for the other topics:

Carbon Footprints
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/datablog/2009/dec/07/copenhagen-climate-change-summit-carbon-emissions-data-country-world

• A lot of the other articles I was looking at about carbon footprints either were just merely defining   them or giving you a calculator to find out what your individual footprint was. I also couldn't really think of an argument that would be sufficient enough for an entire paper (or one that I found really interesting).

Nuclear Waste
http://www.epa.gov/radiation/docs/radwaste/
http://www.world-nuclear.org/education/wast.htm

• This topic is probably my second choice just because there is a lot about it that you can research and at least a couple of different angles you could come at this issue with. Not only that but I feel like this is something that a lot of people hear about but don't really spend a lot of time thinking about.

Oil Spills
http://www.epa.gov/oilspill/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/20/bp-oil-spill-study_n_972219.html

• One of the main reasons I didn't really think this would be a good topic (at least for me) is because of the recent events with BP and the oil spill in the Gulf. I figured while is was probably more than enough research, but that a lot of the arguments are probably over done, so I more or less passed.

Recycling
When I finally decided I wanted to research something about recycling I began brainstorming the many different facets of it. I thought about the typical pros and cons list, availability/presence, and the effectiveness vs cost of recycling as a whole. I decided I'd like to research the last topic (effectiveness of recycling) because it seemed the most interesting to me, and there is a lot there that I feel like people don't necessarily know.

Here are a few sources that helped shape my decision/I found might help me support my stance:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0921344993900062
http://www.mass.gov/dep/recycle/reduce/crbdrop.pdf
http://www.ilsr.org/recycling/recyclingmeansbusiness.html

Styling Speaks Louder than Words

Many people, girls especially, tend to have a distinct style in how they dress.

There's Preppy:              

Goth:

Sporty:

Hipster:

                                 

And a vast array of other styles. There are a lot of people that I know that generally adhere to one style of dress no matter what the occasion. So even though it's Prom, you can still tell their style is preppy by the kind of dress they get and how they accessorize. I however, don't really see myself as a one style kind of girl. I buy my clothes from a lot of different places, and not just one. Some of my friends refuse to shop anywhere else besides Forever 21 or Urban Outfitters, while I find something I like and get it. I think this shows that I'm a go with the flow type of person. I wear shorts and a t-shirt to class the majority of the time, but when I go out to a nice dinner with my family or just out with my friends I wear nicer clothes. I'm a pretty flexible person and I think that shows through what I wear. Not that I'm saying that only dressing one way means a person is uptight and rigid, but sometimes people are less willing to branch out with their clothing, and if they're less willing to branch out with that what else might they be less willing to do? I think that you can tell a lot about a person by the way that they dress, but at the same time I don't think a person can base their judgement of another person just by what they are wearing. Not all people who dress preppy are uptight snobs, just like not all people who dress goth are mean and scary.

A Picture to Define a Generation

Picking this picture to define our generation may and will come across as cliché and way over done, however I think it really does speak about our age group. A lot of the time, whether we like to admit it or not, the first thing many of us do when we get on our computer after class (and even in class) is log on and check our Facebook page. It isn't just that we as a whole spend a generous amount of time on this site randomly going through pages and liking things, but we also learn a lot of things about the world around us just by scrolling down our newsfeed. I know I hear a lot about what is going on, at least most of the major news worthy events, via twitter or people's facebook statuses. While that may not be the most reliable source, I know I'm not the only one who finds things out that way. We as a generation are starting to rely less and less on watching the news and reading the paper when we get usually get the gist just by scrolling down a twitter feed. Which leads me to my next point about this picture, it isn't just meant to represent solely facebook, but the many ways people now a days use to network with others. People use blogs (such as these or tumblr) to communicate with each other about their days or to comment on happenings in society. Others use photo sharing sites like Picasa or Snapfish to update others on their lives via pictures. Take the Facebook page for this class for example, not only are we using Facebook to connect and communicate with other people, but we are using it as a forum to get help with something in class. Anyway you look at it, our generation has changed and molded to incorporate social networking sites into the many facets of our lives. 

Visual Rhetoric, Pt. 2

This past week we spent some more time in class discussing visual rhetoric. This is obviously very fitting considering the fact that our first paper is on visual rhetoric, more specifically the rhetorical devices companies use in advertisements to persuade their targeted audience to buy or support their products. We discussed articles that we had read in our books in groups and then presented our thoughts to the class. This type of discussion/presentation oftentimes helps me to understand a certain work a lot better because I tend to not think about a lot of things other people catch on to. It is the whole looking at things with a different perspective that sometimes can get me, and when I listen to what others think about what we are discussing it helps me learn a lot more about whatever we are talking about. Not only that but peer editing (like we did for our thesis statements) helps me too because I usually do not like going over my writing right after I've written it, so when we do things like that in class it makes it so much easier to get help with my papers and things like that.

Visual Rhetoric

This week we spent a lot of time reading and discussing visual rhetoric. Visual rhetoric can come in a plethora of ways: TV commercials, print advertisements, pictures, movie posters, etc. Any way they come, they still aim to persuade you in some way, whether you realize it or not. The easiest to analyze are print ads and TV commercials, because the companies are always aiming to persuade the audience that their product is better than someone else's. This means that their use of ethos, pathos, and logos can become quite obvious if you take the time to actually pay attention to how the ad or commercial is affecting you. Pictures are a lot harder to analyze, because while you may be able to pick out things that appeal to your emotions or things that make the photographer credible, it is a lot harder to explain exactly why they made the picture like they did. To me it is a lot like analyzing poetry or a short story because you are not given a lot to go off of when trying to analyze the purpose behind their actions. It could go many different ways when deciding why a person made a picture darker or lighter, why they made it black and white instead of color, or why they took it at a specific angle. The only person who could tell you the exact answer is the author of the picture.