Carmen's Peer Profile of Laura

Profile Assignment on Laura

           On April 20^th of 1995, a girl named Laura Silvestre was born into this world. She was not only born as the daughter of a successful father who has made a career in dentistry but she would soon realize that her legacy was to continue the family line of high-degree professions. As this Dominican origin family continued to raise Laura with high standards, she soon became an English/Spanish fluent bilingual speaker, which would prove efficient in her later years. The expectations rose as her older cousins started to attend prestigious schools such as Cornell and Harvard University.

            In her early days, Laura would enjoy watching a show called The Little Couple from the television channel TLC, which talked about a neonatologist and telemarketing businessman (the two main characters) that had just married and both suffer from dwarfism. Although Laura has always found joy in attending to little kids, this show further encouraged her to become a neonatal doctor in order to care for premature babies. As she entered high school with the mindset to study biology, she became an honors student who juggled schoolwork and her hobby to cheerlead.

             When she started her new journey in The Mary Louis Academy, she joined cheerleading. Since then, cheerleading became a spirited hobby, a way to escape from pressure, and her life. Not long after, she fell into the habit of staying after school everyday to practice her new routines and cheers, thus cheerleading grew to be a big part of her life. This hobby had also beneficially created a structured schedule for her and, without knowing it, her daily routine had turned into being in school for six hours, homework at the school library for the next two, and then cheerleading practice from 6 to 9 P.M. If she didn’t have to return home for dinner and sleep, her high school would actually have been her home.

            Eventually, she came to meet a fellow cheerleader during her after school practice named Chelsea, who had just joined the team, started to join Laura in her late practice hours and, soon enough, they bonded during those late nights. Her new friend had quickly turned into her best friend. As friendships bloomed, and her parents became more considerate towards her needs to be more of an individual, her hobby to cheerlead developed into her passion as the years passed in Mary Louis.

            Laura considers cheerleading practice the biggest stress reliever in her life but unfortunately, uncontrollable anxiety had slowly developed during her years at Mary Louis. The irrepressible shaking that occurs with the slightest bit of nervousness Laura feels repeatedly threatens her performance as a cheerleader and as a student; it has followed her throughout her high school career.

            The first time she had to perform, Laura cried worrying about a specific stunt she had to do. Her hands quivered rapidly and her coach, not having enough time to think of a solution, said, “Stop crying, you’ve done it plenty of times before and you can hit it.” That gave Laura a slight boost of confidence but the confidence vanished as quickly as it had came when she stepped onto the mat in front of hundreds of people. The speed of her heartbeat was that of an anvil dropped from a ten story building and as she attempted the stunt she was worried about that whole time, she fell. When they got to a waiting room, Laura burst into tears and immediately started apologizing and blaming herself.

There were numerous times when Laura would get anxiety about as horrible as the first time she performed. After a while, she finally realized that it was because of her urge to blame herself and put all that weight that she feels about something onto herself that created her anxiety. She has yet to realize that she may already have found a way to conquer her anxiety but as I interviewed her, she told me of a wonderful moment in her life when she was able to acknowledge her own anxiety and tell herself that she did nothing wrong. It took her about a year or so to acknowledge that it wasn’t her fault when a specific friend of hers did not tell her in person that she was a lesbian. The anxiety built up for those few years and finally, she realized it was going nowhere and she needed to just move on instead of asking herself what she did wrong. Laura’s anxiety seems to come from constant worry over important subjects in her life which is why she has anxiety very often in school but whether it is anxiety from school or her personal life, she has overcome it all and I believe she will succeed to do so even in the future.

Laura's Peer Profile of Jarin

Peer Profile Assignment: Jarin Tasnem

            Jarin Tasnem was born in Bangladesh. She came to the United States of America when she was just 11 months old, leaving behind her beloved grandmother, but she does visit for vacation. Jarin lives in New York City where she was raised speaking Bengali, and learned English at school. Based on how she speaks now, I can honestly say she speaks English better than Americans do. Jarin attended Hillcrest High School, which she says is a horrible high school. The girls’ bathroom had a foul smell of marijuana on a daily basis. As you can tell the ideal high school experience is to make school feel like a home. Unfortunately, for some, that experience isn’t given to their students. Jarin was one of those deprived students who had to make the best of what they had, and she defeated all odds. 

            Jarin had a positive attitude towards her education and was an ideal student. She worked hard toward her dream, at that time, of being a scientist. She wanted to challenge herself throughout high school. She took the hardest classes possible such as: AP Biology, AP Chemistry, and AP U.S. History. Jarin mentioned that her high school goal was only to get their students to pass the regents. She decided to take her education more seriously than what her school could provide her with. Jarin expressed in a rough voice, “ The teachers would only come to work [school] for the money. They do not care about their students education enough to help them succeed.” For a student to express this about a teacher can help see into the mentality of a young woman who takes their education seriously. As she got older, she decided to examine her goal of being a scientist. She realized that being a scientist was not a promising career path. As time went on she understood that being a scientist didn’t provide her with a path that could lead to a life of having a stable income that she could build a family on. 

                                

            Jarin had a rough path when her grandmother was diagnosed with neck cancer. She reevaluated her life values and realized people don’t live forever. Horrible things do happen. Her grandmother developed neck cancer from chewing betel nuts. Betel nuts where used in the old days by women to give them a reddish veneer on their lips. Jarin had also chewed one once when she was a young girl. “The betel nut had a sort of… bitter and disgusting taste.”. Jarin explains that this experience made her change her interest from being a scientist to being a Biology major. Jarin considered a scientist to have more of a study in what makes up an item, such as a new element in the periodic table of elements. She considered Biology as the study of  what effects medicine has on the human body. She wanted to change her course of study to see if she was up for the challenge of having a medical career, so she decided to take Advanced Placement Biology.           

          Jarin is a very dedicated young woman who I believe will pursue and accomplish her dreams. Besides her interest in the sciences, Jarin does have an interest in fiction books. She reads fiction throughout her free time. When asked if she had any favorite book, Jarin couldn’t decide on a favorite, but she does have books that she likes including her most recent one Hamlet by William Shakespeare. “Hamlet was an interesting book because it had a lot of trials before it gets to the final point.” Besides literary books, she likes to read the newspaper on her free time, including The Huffington Post and The New York Times.  At the City College of New York she will try to continue her interest in Pre-Medical studies. In four years she sees herself in medical school. Ten years from now she sees herself having a stable job as Doctor Tasnem and, hopefully, starting a family with a husband and kids.

            Jarin Tansem has a bright future ahead of herself. She is very hardworking and dedicated to everything she puts her mind to. She is very motivated to continue her passion for the medical studies. She has managed to keep her grades up while she tries to cope with the emotional toll of having an ill grandmother.  Jarin mentioned, “ My parents raised me to be honest, kind, and respectful to others.” I believe that she is making her parents very proud because that is exactly what comes across when you first meet her. Besides being intelligent and respectful she is a young woman that will do many marvelous things. Jarin I believe will have an amazing college experience based on how her high school experience was. She was a deprived student who has already started making a good impression in the beginning of her college life. Choosing to take a writing class during her summer really shows how dedicated and hard working Jarin was during high school and continues to be.

Peer Profile Assignment

     For this assignment, please compose a rounded portrait of one of your workshop peers as a writer, reader and young adult.  Working in pairs, you will be developing profiles of one another to share in class and post on our course blog.  Your profiles should provide the following, in whatever order you decide:

·         an account of the person’s cultural background, including language use

·         a survey of the person’s education, including attitudes toward learning/subjects

·         a narrative of a formative experience or series of experiences, including sensory details

·         a description of the person’s motivations and goals as he/she enters college

      You will weave together your profiles from four sources: a transcript of a personal interview (conducted in class and possibly extended over the phone), any photos, video clips or recordings that your peer makes available, an archive of your peer’s writings, and your own journalistic notes.  With photos and clips embedded into your essay, it will become a multi-modal text, functioning fully when we post it online. 

     Be sure to acquire your partner’s email address and phone number, as well as their times of availability for this project so that you can stay in contact as the profile evolves.  The idea is to collect much more material than you have room for, then select the most interesting pieces and arrange them in the most dramatic order.  You will begin with an interview, then pour over the transcript, along with the writing archive and your notes, looking for a theme or “angle” you can use to engage your audience and unify your portrait.  Such a theme must be true to life, even though it will necessarily simplify the person.

     Though your primary medium is text rather than film, you may imagine yourself as the editor of a biopic.  Your own writing will serve the role of a dubbed-over narrator, bridging the gaps between quotes/excerpts, summarizing information that you don’t quote, or fleshing out the peer’s first-hand accounts into vivid, 3^rd-person narratives.  Feel free to alternate frequently between modes and materials as a way of stimulating the reader’s interest.  Further tips on developing profiles may be found in Field Guide, pages 191-204.

      These profiles should run between 1000 and 1350 words (3-4 double-spaced pages).  A typed draft is due on Monday, Aug. 19^th.  Final versions are due on Wednesday, Aug. 21^st.

Here are some suggested interview questions to start with:

Are you bilingual/multilingual? If so, what language do you prefer to read and/or write in? Why?

What is your writing/composing process like?
What was your most memorable/most dreaded writing experience?
What is the one thing you would love to write about? Have you written about it? If not, why not?
Growing up, what was your reading experience like at home? At school?
What reading medium(s) do you prefer: books, magazines, newspapers, blogs?
Describe some of your all-time favorite readings.  Why are they so important/enjoyable to you?
Describe a key experience that motivated you to come to college/pursue your course of study.
Where do you hope to be in your work/life in four years?  In ten years? 

Sample Analysis Ad

Analyzing a Text

http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/write/fieldguide/genres1.asp

We need to be careful, analytical readers of magazines and newspapers, ads, political documents, even textbooks. Not only does text convey information, but it also influences how and what we think. This chapter offers guidelines for writing an essay that closely examines a text both for what it says and for how it does so. We'll begin with one student example.

DOUG LANTRY
"Stay Sweet As You Are": An Analysis of Change and Continuity in Advertising Aimed at Women

Doug Lantry wrote this analysis of three print ads for a first-year writing course at the University of Akron.

Magazine advertisements aimed at American women have a long history of pushing things like makeup, mouthwash, soap, and other products that reinforce men's roles in women's lives. The concept of personal hygiene has been used to convey the message that "catching" a man or becoming a wife is a woman's ultimate goal, and in advertisements from the 1920s, 1930s, and 1950s this theme can be traced through verbal and visual content.

For example, a 1922 ad for Resinol soap urges women to "make that dream come true" by using Resinol. The dream is marriage. The premise is that a bad complexion will prevent marriage even if a woman has attributes like wit and grace, which the ad identifies as positive. Blotchy skin, the ad says, will undermine all that. The word repellent is used for emphasis and appears in the same sentence as the words neglected and humiliated, equating the look of the skin with the state of the person within. Of course, Resinol can remedy the condition, and a paragraph of redemption follows the paragraph about being repellent. A treatment program is suggested, and the look and feel of "velvety" skin are only "the first happy effects," with eventual marriage (fulfillment) implied as the ultimate result of using Resinol soap.

Visual content supports the mostly verbal ad. In a darkened room, a lone woman peers dreamily into a fireplace, where she sees an apparition of herself as a bride in a white veil, being fulfilled as a person by marriage to a handsome man. She lounges in a soft chair, where the glow of the image in the fireplace lights her up and warms her as much as the comforting fire itself. A smaller image shows the woman washing with Resinol, contentedly working her way toward clear skin and marriage over a water-filled basin suggestive of a vessel of holy water. This image is reinforced by her closed eyes and serene look and by the ad's suggestion that "right living" is a source of a good complexion.

A somewhat less innocent ad appeared more than a decade later, in 1934. That ad, for Lux soap, like the one for Resinol, prescribes a daily hygiene regimen, but it differs significantly from the Resinol message in that it never mentions marriage and uses a clear-skinned movie star as proof of Lux's effectiveness. Instead of touting marriage, Lux teaches that "a girl who wants to break hearts simply must have a tea-rose complexion." Romance, not marriage, is the woman's goal, and competition among women is emphasized because "girls who want to make new conquests ... [are] sure to win out!" by using Lux. Lux's pitch is more sophisticated than Resinol's, appealing to a more emancipated woman than that of the early 1920s and offering a kind of evidence based on science and statistics. The text cites "9 out of 10 glamorous Hollywood stars" and scientists who explain that Lux slows aging, but it declines to cite names, except that of Irene Dunne, the ad's star. The unnamed stars and scientists give the ad an air of untruthfulness, and this sense is deepened by the paradox of the ad's title: "Girls who know this secret always win out." If Lux is a secret, why does it appear in a mass-media publication?

Like Resinol, Lux urges women to seek love and fulfillment by enhancing their outward beauty and suggests that clear skin means having "the charm men can't resist."

The Lux ad's visual content, like Resinol's, supports its verbal message. Several demure views of Irene Dunne emphasize her "pearly-smooth skin," the top one framed by a large heart shape. In all the photos, Dunne wears a feathery, feminine collar, giving her a birdlike appearance: she is a bird of paradise or an ornament. At the bottom of the ad, we see a happy Dunne being cuddled and admired by a man.

The visual and verbal message is that women should strive, through steps actually numbered in the ad, to attain soft, clear skin and hence charm and hence romance. Not surprisingly, the ad uses the language of battle to describe the effects of clear skin: girls who use Lux will "make new conquests!" and "win out!" Similar themes are developed for a younger audience in a 1954 ad for Listerine mouthwash. This time the target is no longer grown women but teenage girls: "If you want to win the boys ... Stay Sweet As You Are!" Because attracting men would be inappropriate for teenagers, boys are the catch of the day in the Listerine ad. The idea of staying sweet means on the surface that girls should have nice breath, but the youthful context of the ad means that for women to be attractive they must stay young and "stay adorable," preferably with the girlish innocence of a teenager. The consequences of not staying sweet are clear: if you don't use Listerine every morning, every night, and before every date, "you're headed for boredom and loneliness." If you do use Listerine, there are "good times, good friends, and gaiety ahead."

Like Lux, Listerine relies on science as well as sex. With talk of "the bacterial fermentation of proteins," research, and clinical tests, the mouthwash props up its romantic and sexual claims by proclaiming scientific facts. Listerine is "4 times better than any tooth paste," the ad proclaims. "With proof like this, it's easy to see why Listerine belongs in your home."

Visuals contribute to the message, as in the other ads. The central image is a photo of a perky, seemingly innocent teenage girl playing records on a portable phonograph. A vision of midcentury American femininity, she wears a fitted sweater, a scarf tied at the neck (like a wrapped present?), and a full, long skirt. She sits on the floor, her legs hidden by the skirt; she could be a cake decoration. Leaning forward slightly, she looks toward the reader, suggesting by her broad smile and submissive posture that perhaps kissing will follow when she wins the boys with her sweet breath. The record player affirms the ad's teenage target.

The intended consumers in the Resinol, Lux, and Listerine ads are women, and the message of all three ads is that the product will lead to—and is required for—romantic or matrimonial success. Each ad implies that physical traits are paramount in achieving this success, and the ads' appearance in widely circulated magazines suggests that catching a man (whether or not she marries him) is the ultimate goal of every American woman. While there is a kind of progress over time, the ads' underlying assumptions remain constant. There is evidence of women's increasing sophistication, illustrated in the later ads' use of science and "objective" proof of the products' effectiveness. Women's development as individuals can also be seen in that marriage is not presupposed in the later ads, and in the case of Lux a single woman has a successful career and apparently has her pick of many partners.

Still, one theme remains constant and may be seen as a continuing debilitating factor in women's struggle for true equality in the world of sex roles: pleasing men is the prerequisite for happiness. Despite apparent advances on other levels, that assumption runs through all three ads and is the main selling point. The consumer of Resinol, Lux, and Listerine is encouraged to objectify herself, to become more physically attractive not for her own sake but for someone else's. The women in all three ads are beautifying themselves because they assume they must "make new conquests," "win the boys," and "make that dream come true."

Lantry summarizes each ad clearly and focuses his analysis on a theme running through all three ads: the concept that to find happiness, a woman must be physically attractive to men. He describes patterns of images and language in all three ads as evidence.

Counterargument to Leonard

Dear Students:

David Sirota, writing for Salon.com as well, argues counter to Leonard when he asserts that "Black Friday's true meaning...is less about succumbing to the agitprop of a commercialized holiday than about deeper cognitive dissonance and self-delusion.  We know greed isn't good, but we nonetheless actively embrace its narcissistic temptations.  We tell ouselves the shopping and profligate spending is about yuletide altruism, when what's really driving sales is avarice.  So devoted are we to such avarice, in fact, that we now fuse it to our national holiday of thankfulness and shroud it in a veneer of Christmas spirit, all to preserve materialism as something to celebrate rather than to shun--or even to question."

See the full article here:

http://www.salon.com/2012/11/28/dont_blame_commercialism_for_your_shopping_madness/

Ad Analysis Assignment

Formal Essay 1: Advertisement Analysis

Summer Writing Workshop 2013

Ward / Moon

     For this assignment, analyze an advertisement for Apple computer products, and then compose and argument that critiques the ad’s effectiveness and\or power of persuasion.  The ad you should analyze can be found at the following url:

http://www.apple.com/designed-by-apple/

Your final essay should take the form of an argument, and should be organized around one thesis statement (main point).  You may formulate your thesis as a specific answer to one of the following questions:

·         Why is the ad so effective/persuasive?

·         Why is the ad ineffective/off-putting?

·         How exactly does the ad try to convince viewers to buy Apple products?

In your critique, consider the interactive use of still images, moving images, sound, graphics, and language to communicate a message.  And of course language or lyrics should also be subjected to analysis.  As a way of highlighting this ad’s strategies, you also have the option of comparing it to another ad by Apple or by one of Apple’s competitors.

     In addition to studying the ad itself (your primary source), you are required to integrate two secondary sources into your critique.  One of them, if you find it useful, may be found here:

http://askdrads.com/2013/07/01/whats-up-with-the-new-apple-ads/

A works cited page in MLA format must follow your essay.  This assignment must be 900-1200 words long (roughly 3-4 double-spaced pages), not including the works cited page.

     A typed, full-length draft of this assignment is due Monday, August 12^th.  The final version is due at the beginning of class on Thursday, August 15^th.