Unit 3 Proposal

The issue that we have chosen for this project is publishing unnecessary and inappropriate details about one’s personal life through facebook. Overuse of facebook has many negative effects on incoming college freshman which include being a distraction to academics among other things. Regarding this topic, we think that incoming freshman to TCU should be advised to limit what they share publicly on their facebook. Additionally, they need to be made aware that information they believed to be private can be seen by anyone, including their future professors and employers.

Our target audience for this particular issue is incoming TCU freshman, with facebook accounts, that have just graduated from high school. Our audience will be made up of both males and females ranging in age from seventeen to eighteen. Focusing in on TCU freshman, most of the audience members will be from middle to upper class families.

Our first medium will be an article in the Skiff discussing the dangers of facebook to incoming freshman and advice from more experienced, older students. Second, we are going to create a flier which would be handed out during new student orientation. The flier will include a general example of what an inappropriate facebook page looks like for incoming freshman. For our final medium for this argument, we decided to have a short video that could be shown to incoming freshmen during orientation as a warning about overusing Facebook.

In Class: Reading

From last nights reading, I learned about the importance of visual arguments. The book talked about how visual arguments are a reflection on our character. Additionally, in regards to our presentation, the book talked about making a purposeful visual argument rather than an accidental one. We need to remember this when constructing our visual arguments so that we have a purposeful visual presentation that makes sense and impacts our specific audience. It discussed how to make the visual argument warm and appealing with little things such as font size, color, and style. Another important piece of information the book talked about was how to make visual arguments using statistics. The book gave examples using graphs and pie charts to point out important statistical pieces of information. The book also talked about how visual arguments can appeal to emotion, like pictures of Hurrican Katrina victims leading to relief groups. Lastly, the book discussed how to organize the information on in the visual argument in a way that is meaningful and not just haphazard, like utilizing text boxes for pieces of information that we want to highlight. All of these things will be important to incorporate in our visual presentations in order to make an effective visual argument.

In Class blog: Reading Assignment

From the reading last night I learned that visual arguments are important in making an argument to a public group and that identifying strengths and weaknesses of the argument are important to making an effective argument and that various genres require various strategies to make arguing something through these methods effective. Additionally, I learned that through targeting arguments to various audiences will help make a public argument more effective.

Unit 3

For this unit, we have been divided into groups. Mine consists of Ashley, David B., and Alan. In the last class, I was assigned the recorder. So I am in charge of writing the notes and important things from each class and keeping track of things. I am not sure what else my role really entails. We, as a group, discussed how the roles may blend and be intertwined down the road and that they may shift depending on what topic we decide to do. 

I think my role as a recorder will help keep us organized and know what we still need to do. I am still finding out all of the responsibilities specific to my role since we did not really know which responsibilities to assign to each specific job since its a new project. I think over time maybe each role will define itself and we will be able to allocate specific responsibilities as we come across them. I also talked about possibly being an editor for the written part of this assignment. I think it is a learning experience to see what roles we will all have and it was difficult to try and assign them before we started the project although it will hopefully help us get organized and help each group memember to participate fully and put in equal effort. 

In Class Blog: Group Situation

Group work is not something that I usually like. For the ideal situation, I would have a group that had members that were all willing to put in some effort to the assignment, whether we wanted to be there and working on it or not. Additionally, I would have all the members be willing to take some responsibility for their part and initiate responsibility over some part of the project. Also I would want all the group members to get along and not quarrel over an assignment they do not feel that strongly about. I'd want all the members to recgonize that it is a group project and not an individual project and that that changes the work ethic and how we go about completing the assignment It would also be ideal if the group could agree on the subject of the project and who was going to do what and that everyone would follow through and if they thought they could not than maybe say so before hand instead of waiting until right before the assignment is due.

In Class Blog: Primary Source Analysis

This assignment was somewhat challenging. For my particular topic it was not so difficult to find primary sources as it was to analyze them. I found it somewhat difficult to decide who the "author" even was in some cases and it was also difficult to analyze what they were trying to argue in addition to analyzing whether the argument was good or not. I found it hard to keep myself from summarizing my sources and I had to keep refocusing in on the nature of the argument itself as opposed to just analyzing what was being argued. I think I got better at doing these with each subsequent source but it was difficult.
Another difficulty I had was making my own central, controlling claim in the beginning of each analysis. I sometimes forgot to have a central claim to guide my analysis. I think I got better at doing this also with each successive source but I do not think that I have fully overcome it and it is something I feel I need to go back and fix in my sources.

Unit 2 Proposal

For my topic, I chose an event that happened in December of 2008 in my hometown of Bellaire, Texas. It is the controversial shooting of young Bellaire resident named Robbie Tolan, son of former baseball player Bobby Tolan. I chose this because there is a lot of controversy surrounding why this young man was shot in his own driveway by a Bellaire police officer. It created a huge buzz around the neighborhood and further more was seen as a terrible incidence of racial profiling in the community. This a general description of this event but there are more details and many different arguments surrounding the outcome of the case which was taken to court. There was and still remains a lot of controversy over the ruling made about the case in court which resulted in the police officer being charged not guilty for aggrevated assault by a public servant. Additionally, Tolan has filed a federal civil lawsuit against the city, claiming his civil rights were violated and no longer wants to live in the city of bellaire. 

This incident brought up a lot of underlying issues in my small home town community. It raised the importance of awareness of apparent racial profiling that many people were not aware of. The argument and controversy surrounding this issue is still being talked about in the community today. I chose it because it particularly surprises me as an issue that would come up in my home town and I think it was a surprise to many other residents. Thus, it is an issue that has been looked into a good deal since the incident and there continues to be research and discussion regarding racial profiling in my small hometown of Bellaire. As a result, there have been and continue to be many opinions, blogs, articles, and other sources written about this particular shooting. So, for my primary sources, I plan to use some of these first hand news articles from local papers in my hometown as well as other blogs, editorials, and position pieces regarding this shooting. I plan to get these sources from local places around my hometown that carry them as well as over the internet.