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The Grand Finale

Introduction Hello all, we are to the point of the semester where I will be saying goodbye. I started this blog since it was a necessary assignment for my English class, and you have been able to see the variety of assignments that we have completed over the past 14 weeks from my perspective. However, now that we are at the end, I will no longer be updating this blog as I will be moving into my summer break where I will have a job and will be focusing on experiencing life to the fullest. As I am no longer going to be updating this, I would like to reflect on my experiences with this course and how it changed me. Reflection This English class was very different to the other English classes I have taken in the past. A big focus in this class had been the different parts of writing from normal such as the exigence of the text, so why should the reader care about the topic. For that essay I spoke about BookTok and how it promotes overconsumption, so I included facts about the environmental...
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AI writing, is it good or bad?

Intro In my English class we have spent a great deal of time working with and analyzing AI writing. This is because my teacher acknowledges that AI is being implemented into our lives, so we may as well try and learn how it can be beneficial rather than ignore it. Before this class I never used AI writing services outside of the editor functions of Word or Google Docs but now I find AI showing up in my life in unexpected ways. With my computer that I got just last year, my automated search engine is Microsoft Start and when I input a search, it automatically comes up with an answer to my inquiry with Copilot off to the side. From my examinations the answers tend to be a conglomeration of the information from the first page of search results, with links included, but this is not a feature I am used to. There is also the rising issue of AI or machine created art and images which are passed off as human created, even if it would be physically impossible. Machine generated writing and art ...
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What's a Wiki?

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Intro  This week in my English class, individually each of us created a wiki page on our class canvas, then we were supposed to go through and edit and link ours to others. A wiki page is an informative page that allows for collaborative discussion, users can create, edit, and delete information on an interlinked page. In an article about wiki pages, the author Zach LeBar mentions that because of the collaborative editing that wikis allow for, they are very different to other types of websites, but it is extremely powerful to utilize. As a normal consumer of media, you most likely have never created your own wiki page before, neither had I until this assignment, but you can recognize that a common wiki is Wikipedia. While the collaborative editing for wikis is powerful in every sense of the word, it has led to Wikipedia having a poor reputation as an uncredible source due to the free editing nature of these pages. For my class, we were not required but strongly encouraged to create...
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Twitter Fiction

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Purpose: This week in my English class we were given the opportunity to gain experience about the different sides of social media. As a normal consumer, when I make a post on social media it is about my life in some way shape or form. However, this week we could either create advertisement posts for books or create fictional story posts. I decided to make Twitter fiction posts as I felt that it would be a fun activity that allows my creative juices to flow. I have always really enjoyed writing short stories based on vague prompts as they make the reader dig deeper into what is being said.  Process:  For this assignment I picked three prompts from the provided website and had to author stories that could be posted on X, formally known as Twitter. Which meant there was a strict character limit of 280, which includes commas and letters, making the task more difficult than what meet the eye. I picked the prompts “Describe an unphotographable moment” “Why did the woman wake up scre...
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My Newsletter

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Purpose: This week in my English class we had to slow down and go back in technology. We were tasked with creating a newsletter like it would have been created in the 80’s by using typewriters. While we didn’t have to use real typewriters, we used a software that acted like a typewriter. This meant no spell check, no backspace to delete, and no moving around on the document. If that doesn’t seem hard enough, we also had to include two columns of text, a banner, something in a box and a text-based call out. Process and Reflection:  My process for this task began in a notebook and a word document. I sketched out a general idea of how I wanted my newsletter to look in terms of content I would include before I moved over to my computer. Due to not having specific content requirements, I felt like a topic I could write a lot about would be popular attractions in the state. I went with two major attractions in Michigan, the Detroit Zoo and the Detroit Institute of Art. I spent a few hour...
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How to Define a Book

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Definition:   For this week’s blog post, it is revolving around books, specifically, how ideas and information are spread and how these have changed over time. First, I needed to find a definition of “book” from a long list, and I chose one by writer, designer, and book artist Warren Lehrer. He defined a book as “A book is a time-based medium made up of sequenced pages, bound together, composed to animate a reader with ideas, feelings, information, stories. An intimate and flexible medium, a book can take many forms, be large, small, physical, digital, produced as one-of-a-kind, in editions, and in hybrid platforms. It is usually portable, interactive and haptic. Most commonly, word-laden, a book’s contents can be composed of words, images, shapes, colors, symbols, pop-ups, cut-outs, sounds, smells, and any combination of these. ” Why I picked it and why I like this definition: This definition stood out to me in comparison to the rest as it covered so many aspects of the w...
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All About My Collection of Quotes

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  What a commonplace book is: These past two weeks I have been creating a collection of quotes in my commonplace book. A commonplace book is a tradition that dates back to the Middle Ages. The concept of these books is to place words worth remembering in a single home; these can be ideas, arguments or quotes typically by another individual. These books are an effective way to catalog pieces of information or inspiration that you may come across in one’s day to day life. There are multiple benefits to keeping a book close by dedicated to things you found interesting. The first is to remember what inspired you. In today’s day and age, there are so many things one sees and learns in a day that it becomes very difficult to remember it all. In an article about how the brain separates important and unimportant information, the authors Sabine Heim and Andreas Keil stated that “Scientists have measured the amount of data that enter the brain and found that an average person living today pr...
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