THE LAST BLOG

Crazy to think the semester is already coming to an end. Seems like we just started and I just wrote my first blog. Nonetheless, Its been a fun journey, writing these blogs.

Blogging was probably my most enjoyable genre that we explored this semester. Blogging is about just writing whatever is on my mind that (somewhat?) relates to the prompt. I don't have to worry about being academically correct and worrying that my rant is ever so slightly going off topic from the prompt. Most writing assignments consist of me staring at my computer screen for 10 minutes, typing out a sentence, look at sentence, and then delete sentence and repeat. But not my blogs. (They are actually so easy to write that I could write them an hour or two before they were due :D) They are nice quick and easy responses where I feel I get to show myself both with what I decide to talk about and visually how I formatted my blog. Its interesting to go back and look over my blog and see how close I got to creating that identity that I originally tried to portray.

And yea. Blogs were my favorite genre. I don't know what else to say other than I'm just doing this blog cause I feel like I'm going to need all the extra points I can get after I see the grade I get on my ethnography.

Turns out one more RWS class wasn't as bad as i thought it was going to be...

Blog 10: Research Ideas

Its kinda bitter sweet that its already time to start the research paper Professor Flewelling has been talking about all semester. Sweet because that means the semester is past the halfway mark and the end is finally in view but bitter because well...I have to write a research paper. Just from reading and talking about the paper this sounds like it will be my most involved research paper. I think this I have only had to write one other research paper since my freshman year and even that one wasn't as in depth as this one seems to be.

I am not very sure what discourse community I want to observe and research about. I have a couple in mine but I will talk about the one I want to do, but I'm not sure if I will be able to get it to work. I'm thinking of exploring how landscape photographers of Instagram communicate with their followers. I want to know why they are posting. Is it to get feed back on their work? To get more followers? Or do they just like to share their pictures with others? Now that I'm thinking about it maybe I should change my focus to landscape photographers in general and they different genres they use to showcase their artwork. I have been involved in the photography world for a few years now and would love to see what kind of answers I could come up with in this research. For me photography has just been a hobby. I use a picture sharing website and have an Instagram but have never really been that serious about getting my pictures out there to show others. I think I would like to be more active in the photography realm and this research would give me a good glimpse of how I could go about doing so. The big question I hope to answer is why do other photographers feel the need to share their work in the first place.

Hopefully after my conference tomorrow, Professor Flewelling will help me guide my research in the good direction with photography to make this interesting for me.

One of my favorite pics I have taken :-)

Blog 9: Service Community

Marabelli brings up some very interesting points in his article, "Learning to Serve." In it, Peter Drucker asserts that "interactive service workers lack the necessary education to be 'knowledge workers'" (Marabelli 145). This is a very generalized statement that I do not agree with. Service work is not a job that everyone can handle. I have worked a few food industry jobs and I never want to go back to. I tried it and can say I have seen what that industry is like and know its not for me. My job now as well as those summer jobs all strongly focus on customer service. If you've never had to deal with customers in a direct face-to-face interaction before consider yourself lucky. The people that I have met in the service industry, for the most part, are all people that i would say could be "knowledge workers," but had something holding them back. For a lot of service workers I think the thing holding them back would be furthering their education so they can be "knowledge workers." This isn't necessarily a drawback for them, but being a service worker is more of just a job to have while to work to become something more. I have many friends who are servers and waiters who I know will someday be "knowledge workers." Does having that particular job make them any less of who they are or who they will become? No, I don't believe so. Maybe to others who didn't have to work as hard as my friends do in order to have a better job might think so. Sure there are some service workers who just aren't meant to become "knowledge workers" but to say that all service workers cant become such, is a bit of a stretch. 

Blog 7: My Identity Kit

I used to hate talking to new people. Because of that, my first two years of high school were pretty rough. I was suddenly at new school full of people I didn't know and I sure in hell wasn't trying to go out of my way to meet new people. I was very reserved and kinda just kept to the small group of friend I did have and myself. 

But one day I decided I wanted more. I pushed myself to go out of my comfort zone and found a new group of people to be around through some mutual friends. Everything was great and I finally started to open up and then I had to leave that group of friends when we all went off to different colleges.

And then it seemed I was back where I started. That timid kid that always kept to himself. But fortunately living in the dorms my freshman year forced me once again to step out of that comfort zone and talk to people. It was hard at first but eventually I finally felt comfortable again talking with people and being in new social situations. 

I even had built up my confidence so much that I got a job on campus. When I applied I had no idea customer service was going to be so highly stressed. Dealing with strangers in a professional manner at work was a whole new level of social interactions that I was not ready for. Luckily, when I suck it up and toss myself into those situations I actually aren't that awkward as I think I am.

Its crazy writing this and seeing how far I have come as a person. I feel super comfortable in social situations but still have times where I feel a little uncomfortable and try to work on it. I have had new people that I have met tell me that they think I am a really social and talkative person which is crazy to me because I know how hard it used to be for me just a few years ago. Just never know whats gonna come out when you fake it well enough

Blog #6 - Discourse Communities and Cost of Affiliation

If you would have asked me which college I wanted to go to back when I was a senior in High School I definetly wouldn't have said SDSU. Having been born and raised just 25 minutes from campus, I wanted to venture out and get away from my parents like every other high school senior. When college announcements came out and the only school I got into was SDSU, I was ehh not to excited....

Man was I wrong. Attending San Diego State has easily been the best thing that has happened to me. My parents let me dorm my freshman year, which is something I wanted to experience and needed to have. Since being here I have met some pretty awesome people, experienced things I never would have thought of, and have learned A TON about myself. SDSU has provided me with so many opportunities to ready myself for a career after graduation while also making me a way better person. 

And the whole being "too close to home" thing is was a true blessing in disguise. If I was sick of eating at the Habit or making my own food I could just get on the 15 and be home in no time to have some of my mom's cooking. At first I rarely went home and got my personal space that I originally wanted but since then I have accepted my two communities I so closely live in: SDSU and my academics, and my family back home in Poway.

After reading, "Why Poor Students Struggle" I am beyond blessed to have parents who have unconditionally supported me both financially and emotionally through my college experience. Without their support I would no where near the person I have become. I have friends who struggle financially and going to school and its hard to seem have to struggle through so much when I got it so easy. For me, I didn't have to "exchange your old world for a new world," as Madden put it, but more had to find a balance between my two worlds. 

Blog #5: Discourse Community

I needed a picture so here's something I took this summer :D

All those JSTOR and Op-Eds, I forgot we did blogs. Thank goodness too cause blogging is so much easier than trying to meme a JSTOR article.

Professor Flewelling called Swales' piece a "stiff" read, so I wasn't looking forward to try and get through it. I probably had to read every sentence over a few times and still not really understand it but thats okay cause we talked about discourse communities in class on Monday.

From my understanding based on class on Monday, a discourse community is more than just in the intended audience. It is more of a specific group of people who have developed their own way of communicating in order to achieve a common goal. I liked Professor's analogy she always uses about doctors. Doctors taking and then sharing their SOAP notes could be considered a discourse community. A discourse community could be a social group such as my group of friends, or it could be a professional group such as how I would communicate with my coworkers and managers at work.

Swale came up with six characteristics to help identify a group as a discourse community:

1. "A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals"
2. "A discourse community has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members." 
3. "A discourse community uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback." 
4.  "A discourse community utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims."
5. "In addition to owning genres, a discourse community has acquired some specific lexis." 
6. "A discourse community has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise." 

The group I am going to analyze is my coworkers and managers. On any given day at work I will communicate on the phone, over text, written daily logs, verbally in person, and verbally with a radio. We meet the first criteria, being we are all trying to the job done (i.e. make sure everything is ready/clean) As for the second criteria, I'm not entirely sure what "mechanisms of intercommunication" means but I taking it as multiple forms of communication which we also have at my work. I communicate with coworkers at work "primarily to provide information and feedback." The fourth characteristic Swale give is a mouthful wow. I think this one is similar to #3, saying a discourse community has to have different styles/forms of communicating. Swale calls "lexis" as "community-specific abbreviations and acronyms." At my job we abbreviate all the time to communicate in a quicker way. We also have a very formal technical way of communication with our radios. As for the last characteristic, we are always loosing and getting new people so we always have a balance of experts and novices who are familiar with how communicating at work is done. Based on these characteristic, I do believe my coworkers and I are apart of our own discourse community.  

Blog 4: Opinion Writings

I've never read an op-ed or JSTOR article but really hoping they are easy to read cause this is the last thing I wanna be doing on this beautiful Sunday afternoon. Here goes nothing....

Me every time I write these blogs

The first op-ed I read was Emma Rollers, "Why This Election Feels Never­Ending." The next op-ed I read was Paul Waldman's "Trump's history of corruption is mind-boggling. So why is Clinton the supposedly corrupt one?" Despite my little interest in politics, for my third op-ed I kept the election topic going and read "Donald Trump's bet: We are all chumps." All three writings was easy to follow yet they still manage to have a formal and profession feel to it. Op-eds do exactly as one would expect: voice the author's opinion on a particular subject. I found reading these to way easier than Devitt's writing. It almost seemed like the op-ed pieces we blogs in a way. I feel the author of op-ed connects more to its audience because it is filled with so many emotional appeals. The only downside to writing op-eds is that they are geared toward an audience that shares the same opinion as the author. Okay there might be a few people who read op-ed they don't agree with but I think the majority of people will read the title and decide if they agree and want to keep reading or look for another piece. 

Having just watched the first episode of Stranger Things yesterday, when I saw a JSTOR article about that I had to read it: Liz Tracey's "'Stranger Things' and the Psychic Nosebleed." The other two I read were Kimberly Fain's "Viral Black Death: Why we must watch citizen videos of police violence" and Livia Gershon's "Where American Public Schools Came From." While still preaching a main opinion like the op-eds, the JSTOR article varied quite differently in structure and format. These articles left out most of the pathos that dominated the other opinion writings and instead were packed full of facts from history, references to other writings, and a logically formatted argument. It could have just been the content matter but I enjoyed reading the JSTOR article more than the op-eds. I usually don't care for reading academic pieces but the JSTOR article have a good balance of having a informal feel but still coming off as scholarly and knowledgeable authors. 

Blog 3: Imagination

As a redditor of a few years now, I'd like to think I have seen just about every meme out there. Reddit is definetly a place where memes come alive and never die. I think its hilarious how we are actually even talking about memes in a college level writing class. lol. Reading Knobel and Lankshear was even more exciting because it was a legit academic paper all about memes. wow I never thought I read such a thing. They do go into a great analysis as to what makes a good meme. Some of their main points they make are that the meme is contagious and has longevity. Another point they make is that memes "encodes a recognizable element of cultural information, where cultural information is defined as some kind of meaningful idea, pattern, or chunk of ‘stuff’ that embodies and/or shapes some aspect of the ways of doing and being that are associated with belonging to a particular practice or group (3)." I never really thought about memes as a way of actually communicating a message but Knobel and Lankshear point out that memes are just as valid as an essay. So here's my attempt to analyze one of my personal favorite memes.

I hope everyone had a good enough childhood that you remember this episode of Spongebob. For those that need a reminder about this episode, Spongebob orders a new TV and then proceeds to throw away the TV and ends up playing in the box. Patrick comes over and the two of them go on a multitude of adventures. Squidward hears all of their journeys: overcoming an avalanche, escaping police, and a trip to Robot Pirate Island. Confused, Squadward goes out to see where all the noise is coming from. Spongebob then tells Squidward that its all "Immmmaaginnaaaaaaation" as a rainbow forms between his hands.

This screenshot of Spongebob is definetly contagious because his facial expression can be for anything really. As this meme has come to be, it is usually used with sarcastic or blunt captions. It also has a very recognizable cultural element that I'm sure anyone around my age can certainly name. It is my generation that relates to this meme and can relate and then reproduce such a an famous meme.

Blog #2: Genre

I hope I still don't seem like a lower division student but I'd have to agree with Professor Flewelling's younger classes. If someone asked me, "What's my favorite genre?" I would assume they are talking about music. I have never really been into movies all that much so movie genres aren't crossing my mine and I'm also not an avid reader so book genres are definitely also out the window. Unfortunately for me, this is a writing class and not a music theory class...

I have been exposed to a few different types of genres of writing throughout my academic career. The classic research paper, book reports, annotated bibliography, narratives and rhetorical analyzes. All of my writing experiences are because I had to do it for school. I have never just kept or journal or written a blog (until now), and honestly kinda wish I had. Its nice to know I don't have to follow strict MLA guidelines or have a required number of sources to write this blog right now. I can just write whatever is on my mind until I think its long enough or just run of out things to say. I enjoy having the freedom to write in whatever style I want and not always having to try formal and academic. 

So since the prompt asked for it, I'll try to talk about the ideas and claims that Amy Devitt talks about in here article, "Teaching Critical Genre Awareness" but in a way that it relatable and won't but anyone to sleep (like everything else I have every had to write). 

Amy Devitt brings up some interesting things. Her main reason for writing is to show others that there is a better way to teach students different genres than just giving them different templates to follow. She claims that this way of teaching genres limits students from fully understanding the power of genres. I found this very relatable when she talked about students always writing 5-paragraph papers for every type of paper. Until starting college that is kinda how I always saw writing assignments. Not because I thought that structure would work best but because that was the was I originally taught to write academically and have used that way for years. I have since come to the realization that I can used whatever kind of structure I feel is most appropriate for my intended audience. At my job I have to keep a daily long of all the things I do, where I have written another format of writing. My paper for class and my writings at work are very different. Yet, they both work. They are both very different genres but both have their own way for me to get my purpose across to the reader. Devitt calls for students to have more genre awareness because it gives them the tools they need to decide which kind of genre will best get their purpose across to their audience most effectively. When Devitt claims, "When writers take up a genre, they take up that genre's ideology" (339) I think she's saying that writers might unintentionally limit themselves. Me as a writing, I have particular views and understanding on what I see a genre to be. By taking up a genre, what I see as attributes to that genre another reader might not and I wont get my claim across to all readers. 

Now back to my blog "genre" of writing. I feel I can relate these different genres of writing to social media. I feel like each social media also gets it's own genre of writing despite being the same exact audience. For me I view Twitter as a place where I can write short (140 character max) either sarcastic, witty, or just embarrassing things that I have to say. Whereas, lets say Instagram I can be more lengthy and more personal and realistic in my writing.  Those are the two main social medias I use but even just between those two I feel like it would be wrong to post something I would normally put on twitter and then put it on Instagram. Yes, Instagram has pictures to accompany every post but I still feel like they bot require their own unique style of writing. 

So what's your favorite genre? Right now I think mine is some good old classic rock...

Blog 1: Introduction

Hey!! How's it goin?!




My name is Nick Thompson and I am 20 years old and going into my third year studying mechanical engineering. (Yes, I said engineering and as you read that word I'm picturing the same frightened/terrified/confused face that everyone makes when I tell them that.) I am not completely crazy for voluntarily picking such a notoriously challenging major. I knew that going into it. But throughout my academic career I have always excelled and thoroughly enjoyed my science and math classes which prompted me to see what engineering was all about. After spending a year mentoring an engineer in high school and talking to plenty of others, I knew engineering was the right path and something that I wanted to go into. And I guess I have always enjoyed challenging myself. So far I am doing doing really well but I'll see how this semester of upper level classes goes.

Besides my school ethics, I do not see myself fitting into the stereotypical engineer student type. I picture the standard engineer wearing plaid button up, doesn't get very far from his office, and only has robots to play with. Going into college, yes, I would have considered myself to be a quiet, reserved and nerdy person who could have fit that type. But that is not the same person I see when I look at myself in a mirror today. I now see myself as a very approachable, more social, and overall more confident person. Looking back on it now, I think I have to attribute that change to deciding to work my sophomore year. I saw a posting for an open position in the Student Union working with Associated Students, applied and after an interview, got the job. I had never really worked before so I was slightly hesitant to start working but quickly figured out that this job wasn't too bad. Soon after I started working there, the opportunity came about for me to have a lead position. I was hesitant at first, and unsure if I could really do what they were asking for but knew that if I forced myself into that position I could get the job done. (Also has to do with me enjoying a nice challenge.) That was one year ago from when I originally got the job and have since been promoted twice to the highest student position within my department. It probably is odd to you that I brag about that but who tf cares. Without this job I wouldn't have the irreplaceable group of friends who I also can call my coworkers. I have something to give me a break from school that isn't just rewatching The Office on Netflix. And my favorite part, I am actually making some money of my own :D This job has taught me that I am like being a leader, and have the skills that it takes to do that well.

Alright sorry for rambling. If you made it through that, first off aww thanks, but second off why?? lol Some more about myself. I was born and raised in Poway, California which is about 20 minutes north of campus. So basically I have always been in San Diego. I never really wanted to go to SDSU cause I thought it was too close to my parents but am soo thankful I can go home to my mom's cooking whenever I want. I have two siblings. My brother is 24 years old and my little sister is 11. Back home I also have a dog named Peaches.


In my free time I love to take pictures. I was first introduced to photography back in high school and have been avidly taking pictures for the past three years. My favorite subjects are landscapes, but occasionally will do portraits or some street photography. (Check me out and give me follow on insta if ya want: nat_ural_photography) I also enjoy surfing. I have been surfing for about three years now and in now way consider myself a good surfer but if you get a board yes I'll try to teach you what I know. Besides surfing and photography, I also really enjoy live music. I mostly listen to EDM but also like punk rock, rap/hip hop and almost everything else.

Up until Monday I was really not looking forward to another stupid writing class. I never enjoyed writing or English classes (remember I'm studying engineering). I was just as pissed as you were when I say I got an 8 on the WPA. This class, however, seems like it won't be too bad after all. Of all writing tasks, I enjoy creative writing the most which seems like what we will be doing this semester. I'm pretty excited to see how this class goes.

Thanks for giving this whole blog thing a read. Its sad to think this was actually kinda fun to write. (Hopefully the other assignments will be too.) See you in class. Say Hi! I'll probably be in the back with headphones.

-Nick

P.S. My these pics are both from my travels through Europe this summer!