My Thoughts on Comments

This post is going to contain my feelings about comments provided from The New York Times, discussing the same Planned Parenthood debate that I described in the "My Controversy" portion of my blog. I have organized the comments that I am going to analyze into two categories: Credible and Lacking Credibility

Credible:

Flowerpower is definitely expressing his or her wish that Planned Parenthood be put to a stop. I can tell this based off of his or her powerful proclamation of "Defund Defund Defund!!!". This commenter seems to have strong belief system, because when he or she has strong feelings about a topic and wants something done... he or she really wants it done. Although Flowerpower has strong opinions, he or she still seems quite trustworthy to me based on his or her ability to see all of the other services that Planned Parenthood provides to its patients, despite his or her opposing view about Planned Parenthood. Also, Flowerpower appears to be a credible source because he or she wants to rid the world of Planned Parenthood, but realizes that this change can and will not happen overnight. This foresight makes me think that Flowerpower is a logical thinker, who puts thought into the things he or she feels strongly about, and I have more trust in him or her because of that.

Casey Burgess seems to have anxiety in the way in which our society neglects to acknowledge the presence of certain issues, until those topics are forcibly thrown back into the minuscule attention span of the human mind. Casey's reference to the Confederate flag is, for example, is a valid depiction of he or she feels about the typical lackadaisical American approach most moral issues. Casey seems to have a realistic belief system, as exemplified by his or her ability to realize that people only now care about the "legality" of abortion because fetuses have recently been humanized in their minds. I consider Casey Burgess to be quite credible, because of his or her ability to compare two modern day controversies and share his or her views in a thoughtful and sophisticated manner.

Lacking Credibility:

Dane is expressing his of her fear and utter hatred towards abortion. Based on his or her use of caps and plentiful exclamation points, it is evident that Dane is solely using this comment feed to aggressively voice his or her very strong conservative values and opinions against abortion. This commenter seems to totally lack credibility, due to his or her inability to sympathize whatsoever with people's beliefs who are pro-abortion. Dane's opinions are delivered in such an unnecessarily demanding fashion. And for that reason, I find it hard to take anything he or she says seriously. Also, having faith in Dane is quite hard because the article has nothing to do with whether or not abortion should be allowed or practiced. Instead, the article brings attention to the specific actions of Planned Parenthood and whether or not it as an organization should lose its funding, which is never addressed in Dane's argument whatsoever.

In this comment R.P. is expressing his or her wish that Planned Parenthood be looked at in a simplistic fashion, as most of the other big controversies in America. I think that this commenter believes that Planned Parenthood should still exist, because it benefits low-income individuals, and since "progressives" generally choose to side with "poor people", or at least that is the case from R.P.'s perspective. I wouldn't really trust R.P. and his or her thoughts based off of the way that he or she makes vast generalizations about individuals and important issues in our country. Also, I lost faith in R.P. because of the frantic and erratic writing style which he or she utilizes. However, not all of the ideas that R.P. presented are totally invalid. If he or she took some more time to organize and develop the thoughts that he or she placed in the comment, his or her argument probably would have been a lot more effective.

Reflection:
After reading Katherine's and Ann Emilie's "My Thoughts on Comments" posts, I solidified a lot of my prior opinions about online commenters.

Katherine, Ann Emilie, and myself all chose vastly different controversies to analyze, however there are still many similarities amongst our views on the credibility of the commenters on our issues. I have learned that what truly makes a commenter appear to have credibility is his or her ability to express his or her feelings and beliefs in a coherent fashion, while not being too aggressive about his or her thoughts and still allowing some room for discussion. Conversely, the individuals who typically don't appear credible are the ones who make comments that are at times demanding, totally off topic, or plagued with sweeping generalizations. I agree with every decision that Katherine and Ann Emilie made in classifying their commenters, and I think they both did really great jobs. One thing that especially interested me about Katherine's post was that the commenters on her controversy had to link their comments to their Facebook profiles, which no longer allows individuals to hide under an anonymous shield. Therefore, the people who commented on Katherine's controversy were willing to have their ideas, ignorant or not, be freely associated with their identities, which provides some trustworthiness right off the bat.

My Controversy

The following post will discuss an article written about a major topic of controversial topic in 2015: Planned Parenthood

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/planned-parenthood-health-services-beyond-abortion/

This article by CBS NEWS talks about the huge backlash coming from politicians to shut down Planned Parenthood, following the recent release of a series of videos, in which Planned Parenthood medical officers discuss the sale of aborted fetal tissue. Though the sale of fetal tissue to researchers is completely lawful, people are outraged by the idea. Certain individuals, such as Iowa Senator, Joni Ernst, are demanding that Planned Parenthood lose all of its government funding. Planned Parenthood received about $530 million in government funding this past fiscal year, but abortions supposedly make up a mere 3% of the total services that Planned Parenthood offers to its patients. Also, a lot of this money is used to refund Medicaid coverage for low-income patients, who might not have anywhere else to receive the plethora of services that Planned Parenthood offers, if the organization were to be shut down.

It is evident that there is no obvious right or wrong decision when it comes to this issue, and that is why it has escalated into a major American controversy. The reason I chose to discuss this topic is because I have heard about it many times in the past few weeks, particularly while watching the GOP debates, but never got the chance to truly learn about what was actually occurring. Now that I am more informed, I am eager to see what is going to come out of all of the debate surrounding Planned Parenthood, in the future.

Calendar Reflection

In this blog post I will talk about the amount of free time that I have on a day-to-day basis and how I will take advantage of that time, in order to be successful in school.

Coming into Freshman year I knew that I would have to cope with many major lifestyle changes, especially coming all of the way from New Jersey. Therefore, I have made a conscious effort to not overload my schedule with too many classes, clubs, or other responsibilities.

After looking at my filled in calendar I can see that I definitely have left myself enough time to allot at least six hours of homework time per week to 109H, in addition to all of my other classes. Now that I know I have enough time to set aside to my schoolwork, I just need to follow through with my plans and actually do my assignments at times that work for me, which is easier said than done.

My time management is definitely something that I need to work on, in order to be successful. I tend to lose focus quite easily and tell myself that it will get done "later", but later isn't good enough anymore. I plan on dedicating time slots directly following each of my classes to do my work, and doing my very best to stick to that schedule. This way I can get the work out of the way, when it is still fresh in my mind, and will no longer allow my procrastinating ways no longer overpower my free time.

BK. "Whatever you want to do, do it now. There are only so many tomorrows" 10/23/2013 via Flickr. Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic

Reflection: 

After reading the calendar reflections by Rose and Rachel, I now see that I should have very little to worry about in the upcoming semester. 

Like I said in my initial post, one of my goals was to not over-crowd my schedule going into this year. Conversely, I didn't want to have too much free time on my hands. After reading Rachel's post I have been re-assured that having a lot of time to get work done and have a social life is okay, especially since I still have to adjust to the college lifestyle. 

On the other hand, after reading Rose's blog post, and seeing how jam packed her weekly schedule is, I realized that I never have the right to say that I am too stressed out between schoolwork and other obligations. Rose's life seems so busy that it sort of makes me concerned that I am lazying it out this semester. But now I know that when I do choose to get a part-time job, most likely next semester, with the right attitude and strict planning, I should be able to properly manage all of my responsibilities. 

My Writing Process

In this post, I will reflect on my own writing process by answering questions pertaining to Dr. Lisa Ede's book Work In Progress: A Guide to Writing and Revising. 

1. Up until today I have never really thought about what kind of writer I am, however now that have put some thought into it I guess I can consider myself to be a planning procrastinator. Unless the topic that I am writing about is something that truly interests me, I will typically delay it as much as possible (though I am trying to change that in college). When I do in fact decide to start thinking about the given topic, I make a detailed layout of all of my ideas, and then jump right into writing.

2. I have realized that I don't really follow any specific approach. Like I said earlier, I definitely fall under the procrastinator and heavy planner classifications.

3. English has typically been one of my strong suits in school, so I guess my writing process has worked pretty well for me thus far in my education. One of the strengths to creating and organizing my my ideas before-hand is that I rarely ever have to worry about what the next topic in my writing will be, or be concerned that I am going off topic. An obvious weakness to my writing technique is the additional pressure that I have to put on myself to produce well-planned and well-written work in brief amounts of time, due to my incessant delaying.

4. Editing and revising are my worst and least favorite aspects to the writing process. I think that If I could get myself to stop procrastinating and leave more time to force myself to look over my work, the additional time allotment for revisions would definitely benefit me in the long run.

Vic. "do it - procrastination concept" 5/30/2011 via Flickr. Attribution 2.0 Generic

Reflection:

Now that I have read about the writing processes of both Clayton and Lauren, I realize that I am not totally alone in my approach to completing assignments, and the way in which I view myself as writer.

Both Clayton and Lauren consider themselves to be procrastinators... it's nice to know that I am  not the only one! However, none of us only fall under simply one classification as writers. Clayton and I both tend to overlook the revision portion of our writing strategies, while Lauren seems to really enjoy editing and re-editing her work. I think that myself and Clayton could learn a lot from Lauren in that regard.

I definitely appear to be the biggest planner of the three of us, but I typically tend to push off my planning more than any other part of my writing process. Maybe a possible solution that all three of us could use to remedy the flaws in our approaches to writing, would be to pre-write for our work and organize our ideas immediately after receiving an assignment. This way all of our thoughts will be on the page and our drafting processes would feel a lot less daunting.