English 114 Portfolio!

Portfolio Reflection:

“Looking Back at Those ‘Shitty First Drafts'”

In this Reflection Paper, I tell about the progress I’ve made throughout the semester and evaluate my skills.

Literacy Narrative Assignment:

In my Literacy and Digital Literacy Narrative , I tell about the times I first learned how to read and write. I provide a story about how learning these skills helped my find my passion for writing. In addition, I talk about digital literacy and the effects it has had on myself, society, and the ways in which we communicate.

During my revisions, I tried not to change much about the content of my paper but instead I focused on changing the awkwardly worded sentences so that they would make the paper flow a little bit better.

Blog Post #2:

In “Stereotypical Profiles and Influences”, I discuss an article I read by Tim Nash about how there is a stereotypical profile that fits a serial killer. He is one of the many people attempting to understand what goes on in the mind of a killer. In my response, I disagree with Nash trying to stereotype a killer and give some examples of how and why he is wrong.

Upon revision, I found myself completely restructuring my paper. In my first draft I talk about one aspect of the article which was how serial killers have bad childhoods. While reading the article over again, I was able to understand it better and restructure my papers response completely.

Blog Post #4:

In “Fact vs. Fiction”, I talk about two completely different articles I read. One is about how mathematicians seem to have found a formula that explains the mind of a serial killer while the other is about how they get motivation from their feelings towards society. I respond to these theories with my own opinion regarding the differences between the brain and the mind.

In my revision, I make my post more exciting for the readers to read because this really is an interesting and exciting topic. I did this by adding more information and examples so that I am able to give my educated opinion.

Speech Writing Assignment:

In my Proposition 32 Speech I argue in favor of Proposition 32. This proposition prohibits both unions and corporations from using employee payroll-deducted funds for political purposes and permits voluntary employee contributions instead. My revision only consists of a couple grammatical changes and better citing as I had a pretty solid speech.

Research Paper assignment:

In my Research Paper I look into celebrity and normal suicide in order to compare and contrast the two. I take a look at the symptoms and differences for both and make conclusions for both. Overall, this was a very interesting paper to write and an intriguing one to read. I revised this paper multiple times in order to make sure that I did not share my opinion until the reflection.

 

Research Paper: Attempt #2

 

Draft #2:

Research Paper

Research Paper Rough Draft #1 (What I Have So Far)

Before bed every night, most adults routinely turn on the news desiring to hear the days top stories nationally and locally. Expected from viewers a national newscast are the daily differences in stocks, the war, and the lowdown on what’s new in politics. Occasionally they throw in some sadly intriguing murder stories and events that are appealing to the audience even though they are really not effected by them at all. On local news shows, viewers hear tales of bravery and thriving businesses in the area. Sometimes thrown in are the scary stories or violence or murder but for the most part, news really depends on where you live. Different events happen in different places. Although, no matter where you live, in a rich or poor community, suicide is always a common action. In fact, it is far too common and far too ignored. 

My curiosity in this topic led to me to attempt to understand what some call the not understandable.  What makes people want to kill themselves? How do their feelings go unnoticed? Looking into finding an answer for these questions, I encountered something quite interesting. Celebrity suicides are publicized in the newspapers, magazines, and on TV almost to the point where the entire world is informed about the tragedy. Looking into these famous suicides, I noticed that their reasons for committing suicide were completely different from those of normal people. What is the difference between the two and why are the causes so distinct? This is a question that has not yet been answered and that is why I plan to explore the two and draw the comparison. 

THESIS GOES HERE.

First, let’s take a look at the reasons for suicide and the theories surrounding them. Every 40 seconds someone commits suicide and it is never their only option (cite… TATS website). According to the National Institute of Mental Health, “In 2009, suicide was the third leading cause of death for young people ages 15–24”( cite, nimh website). This tells us that teens and young adults are the most common to commit suicide, but why? Depression is very familiar among the younger generation as well as feelings of not belonging or trying to find who they are. Teenagers are going through a stage in their lives where they are wanting to become more independent from their parents and often searching for who they are and who they want to become. Another reason why depression grabs on to most teenagers is because in this day and age they are forced to worry about money and material things instead of focusing on themselves. ABC News reports, “children learn which aspects of life to make a priority. Relationships take a back seat, and work, success, material gains take precedence”(ABC NEWS CITE) These factors put so much pressure on the teens that when they cannot do something up to standards, they begin to feel worthless and obsolete which could lead to suicide. Usually it is thoughts of not being able to be enough that leads to their downfall.

In contrast, with celebrities, being who they are is what leads them to their ultimate downfall. Their lives are always under close surveillance and because they are famous, it is near impossible to get alone time. The press are always there and anything they do can be misinterpreted by reporters. An article published in USA Today says, “Readers hungry for information turn to the tabloids for whatever nuggets they can glean about their favorite stars — their loves, babies, pregnancies, diets, marriages and breakups”(USA TODAY ARTICLE CITE). Being under such close watch all the time forces them to become a fan pleaser instead of their own person. This loss of who they are is often the cause for them to have thoughts of suicide. In addition they have been proclaimed by society as the best at what they do. Sometimes it’s almost as though they cannot get any better and this causes them to take drugs to ease the pain of not being good enough which can also cause depression. They have to be on their A game and best behavior all the time because they are always being watched. Yahoo News says, “They are basically performers and have to constantly live up to their public image. This is not easy, considering that we, as human beings, grow older, suffer from diseases and face different problems in life. However, the stars have to always be that ideal person before the crowds; they cannot show any of the frailties that seem to affect petty human beings. This is a tremendous and virtually impossible task to live up to”(YAHOO NEWS CITE). In other words having it all is not easy in any means and does not cause happiness much of the time. Trying to keep up the relentless tasks of being role model sand keeping up their “public images” can lead them suicide and unfortunately that has been the case many times. 

Another reason why suicide seems to be different among celebrities is because the signs and symptoms vary quite a bit. From a regular person,

Finalized Topic and Information

My question that I will be researching for my final paper is going to be: How are the causes of celebrity suicide different from that of everyday suicide among people? Are there any patterns?

I would like to take an inside look at why people commit suicide and then compare them to suicides among celebrities and why they tend to be more common.

First I would like to briefly discuss an article I read on celebrity suicide. Celebrities all of their life are constantly in the spotlight almost as if they can never escape. This article brings up the point that they are judged on just about everything they do because they are constantly being followed and exposed to the public in ways that others aren’t. This causes them to become dependent on the opinions of people they don’t even know and have probably never meant. It makes them lose any sense of themselves and they are  so far away from ever finding who they were before the fan again that it drives them to insanity.

There are really a number of reasons why they can possible think to rid of their existence but looking at the logic behind it, it is so much more different than an average humans. A lot of everyday’s innocent suicides are due to feeling they will never amount towards anything or they just can’t seem to provide for themselves anymore. Celebrity suicide takes on a whole new meaning to the topic because it is so different. For example, the article brings up Marilyn Monroe and her suicide. Apparently she never was able to do anything without being in the spotlight anymore and the only way to have any sense of privacy was to kill herself. It’s so interesting to me how some people beg for the spotlight when in the end it ends up being the downfall of them.

All in all, for my paper I would like to look at what causes celebrities to want to die. We look up to them and figure that they have it all and wonder what could there possibly be to drive them to such a point. Not to mention, they all tend to leave behind some sort of an interesting legacy and a very intense suicide note. To sum it up, my curiosity and my own thoughts will be very prominent throughout the paper.

Possible Research Paper Topics

• How to plan a trip to Iceland and what to do while you’re there.
• History of the hippie culture/movement.
• What causes celebrities to commit suicide?

Blog Post #3: The Revision

For this post I would like to focus on one of the most interesting and successful serial killers: Ted Bundy. Many may know him as the man who knowingly murdered 28-30 women without anyone finding out. No question, he did some horrible things to some very innocent people but he is also the very reason why I refuse to believe that a serial killers’ backgrounds have anything to do with the things they do. I read an article this week that I found on the “Pure Intimacy” cite all about Ted Bundy’s final hours. During his final day before execution, he called in James Dobson to come interview him. That interview can be found at http://www.focusonthefamily.com/popups/media_player.aspx?MediaId={710D67E8-7AFB-411F-8A37-503EA8B69B5B}&FAMILYTYPE=null in video form.

The reason why Bundy called for this interview to take place was because he wanted everyone to know that the way he was brought up had absolutely nothing to do with the way he turned out and especially nothing to do with the lives he took. He claims, “I had two parents who loved each other very much and raised me in the happiest of ways.” Clearly this means that his childhood couldn’t have caused him to want to kill people, so what did? The answer to this question is the whole reason Bundy wanted to do this interview. Pornography; the silent killer. Bundy says that when he was 12-years-old, he can remember finding pornographic magazines in the trash can of his neighbors house and reading them. He particularly found what he calls “violent hardcore pornography” interesting and intriguing and would often fantasize about what he saw in these magazines. After a while, he felt the need to make his fantasies a reality and while in law school would fake an injury of some sort. After, he would scheme to drop his books and have a girl pick them up for him and walk him to his car. Then he would lock them in so they could not get out, fulfill these fantasies he read about in magazines and kill them out of fear. He blames this all on pornography and society making it okay for those magazines to be seen by pretty much anybody.

If you really think about it, Bundy is right. I mean pretty much anybody of any age or background can find their way into a convenience store and see pornographic magazines. Society is somewhat responsible for this in a way because they force these horrible things on some people. Of course, he is responsible for his actions and he should defiantly be executed for the many lives he took away, but he more acts as a warning to society if anything. Ted Bundy is the reason why most theories are wrong if we look at the big picture. He has no chemical imbalance, no horrible past, and no history in his family. Mostly, he feels remorse for what he did as we can see in the video . He knows he is going to die for what he has done and he doesn’t plead to live. All he does is give society a message to start paying attention to what they are allowing and doing so that more people don’t commit the crimes that he has. This article shows that serial killers are not any different from us and the theories that try to prove that wrong are simply ignorant to anything that has to do with themselves as a member of society.

 

Blog Post #5: Reflections of my Blog Writing Experience

Blogging is one hundred percent its own style of writing. It’s taking a topic that you feel strongly about and making your opinion and understanding known. It’s putting your voice out there on the World Wide Web for everyone to read. Looking at the bigger picture, blogging is experiencing and reflecting on things that are somewhat ignored in society.

Personally, blogging is my thing. I really enjoy being able to show my attitude and personality through my voice in my writing. In addition, blogging gives a writer the freedom to be creative with their work without feeling any of the “social protocol/standard” pressures of regular academic writing. I love taking risks and experimenting with my writing and blogging really gave me the opportunity to take those risks that I would have been scared to take otherwise. I remember in high school I always felt like I was writing the paper assigned to me for the teacher to read so it had to be extremely formal and meticulous. Blogging makes me feel as though I am actually writing to someone I care about. I want people to hear my voice in a more colloquial way.

Through this experience of blogging I learned how to organize my thoughts into one prompt. Of course before this class I used to blog for fun, but my thoughts were very all over the place and hard to follow. For example, I would write one post about happiness and another about music but really didn’t tie them together in anyway. As I have been blogging for this class I have realized that it is rather easy to organize all your thoughts into a single post and most importantly make them matter to the people reading them. When we began blogging in this class I didn’t think a scatter brained style of writing was a bad thing, but now that I have learned how to focus on a single topic, I feel far more confident about my writing as a whole.

The aspect of blogging I liked the most was the blog groups and commenting. Honestly, at first it seemed like everyone was telling me “Oh, your blog post was so amazing! Great Work!” and I just wanted some real, structured criticism to go off of. Then as we kept posting the comments began to get more thorough and they really helped me because they were questioning my thought process in order to better my writing. Just as our class said, the only real problem I had with blogging was that the posts were due on Mondays and I would often lose my thought process on the weekends, but other than that I really enjoyed how creative of a learning experience it was.

By having the blogging groups, I was able to read other blogs and compare them to mine. Because Mahayla had the same topic as I did, we were able to feed off of each other and learn new things together and that was extremely helpful. All of the blogs I read were incredibly interesting and really made me love to read more because they weren’t hard to get through without falling asleep.

At the beginning of the semester, I was very terrified about English. I love writing and I know I may not be the best writer but I really want to improve. Coming into the class I really did not know what exactly to expect, but I ended up liking how free and real college writing is. No more of this 5-paragraph-essay non-sense and none on the stupid rules and standards high school teachers told us about. Basically, our writing is no longer bullshit because now, even with some structure, it gives us the chance to share our voice with the world. I really thought I was going to hate college writing because it was going to be about the most boring of topics, but now that I have seen that it is so free, I love it!

Blog Post #2: The Story So Far Revision

All people have their own individual mind. Some are smart, some are creative, and some are disturbing.I recently came across an article on http://www.thefinertimes.com/Serial-Killers/the-mind-of-a-serial-killer.html by Tim Nash that talks about what goes on deep in the mind of a serial killer. His main point is that serial killers prey mostly random people who they see and decide that they would like to “get to know.” The people they choose to kill are usually completely innocent and have no idea that this person is going to kill them. Because of this, they say that there is a certain profile for a serial killer that makes them the way they are. Most have had troubled childhoods and were often abused or ignored by the ones they loved. There is always a reason that they are doing what they are doing and Nash believes that it has to do with their childhood and what they were exposed to at a young age.

Although Nash makes a good point about the common theory that they kill because of the anger they have from their childhood, he fails to point to a single example. Ted Bundy had an extremely normal childhood which has been proven by statements from his brothers and sisters. In fact, even Bundy himself, makes the claim that it was pornography that made him have the rage to kill these people after he fulfilled his fantasies with them. A lot of people with terrible childhoods turn out to be very respectable. For example, Lisa Leslie, famous WNBA star grew up in one of the worst parts of California and had extremely abusive and dangerous parents. Of course this is only one example, but usually the children that grow up in bad environments want to make their lives better.

In addition, it is not just Bundy that led a normal life before killing. John Wayne Gacy who confessed to killing 24 young men was happily married and a successful shoe salesman vice-president of his local Jaycees organization. Jeffrey Dahmer was an active and outspoken proponent of gay rights in the Milwaukee area before he took the lives of 15 people. Ted Bundy graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in psychology, and volunteered at Seattle’s suicide prevention hot line before he killed 40 women. In addition, Andrew Cunanan, who murdered 5 people, had very superior intelligence, testing with an I.Q. of 147, while in high school. If anything, they kill for power and to feel as though they have made some sort of mark on society.

To conclude, of course a childhood affects the child in many ways. My mother says “sandwich” a weird way which influenced me to say it that way. But, this doesn’t mean that influences are the exact way we are. Even if a serial killer did have a troubled childhood, that does not mean that this is the very reason they kill. That is just going to the most extreme situation which cannot be the case. Killers kill because of their own personal wants, desires, and sometimes even fears.

Blog Post #4: Mind vs. Feelings

                I would like to introduce two new theories experts have now come up with to figure out why serial killers kill. Natalie Wolchover of NBC news reports that scientists are now explaining that math explains why so many lives are taken by these people.  She says, “In the brain, the firing of a single neuron can potentially trigger the firing of thousands of others, each of which can in turn trigger thousands more. In this way, neuronal activity cascades through the brain. Most of the time, the cascade is small and quickly dies down, but occasionally — after time intervals determined by the power law — the neuronal activity surpasses a threshold.” With this she tells us that this irregular brain functioning can cause extra rage in killers which thus causes them to kill. She believes that these people kill because their brain causes them to.                        

               In contrast, David Blakie writes that serial killers get their motivation from feelings of fear and rejection.  He claims that killers tend to treat others like “objects” and this is an early sign that they are feeling out casted from the people around them. In addition, they may just absolutely hate society and not understand why people do the things they do. After all, not everybody agrees with every aspect of the way the world is today. Some people just tend to go a bit further in expressing their distaste in society. Killers want to be able to feel something and when they feel they must “continuously kill simply because they are addicted to the feelings they get when they do.”

                All in all, both authors have almost night and day conclusions as to why people feel the need to kill mass amounts of people, but both fail to look at other killers. In fact, I don’t think I have ever seen or read an article about murderers. They kill too and maybe not as many people but that is still taking the life of someone. We look into what could be wrong with the minds or emotions of serial killers, but don’t murderers do the exact same thing? This is why I absolutely refuse to buy into the theory that a mathematical formula could explain a person’s mind. Everyone has a different mind and there is no way to make up one single conclusion for every person that has ever killed someone. I definitely agree more with Blakie in that their emotions drive them to kill. For example, Charles Manson, one of the most famous killers talks about how he simply hated society and everything about it. He found himself some people to help him do his dirty work and killed 8 Hollywood producers because he thought the movie industry was corrupting the nation. Also, he claims that he had fear towards technology taking over the world and this is what influenced him to do what he did. In conclusion, although serial killers may show some common themes, they are all different and that is the primary reason why we can’t pinpoint one factor to every killer.

 

Blog Post #3: Society Killed the Killer

For this post I would like to focus on one of the most interesting and successful serial killers: Ted Bundy. Many may know him as the man who killed 28-30 women without anyone finding out. No question, he did some horrible things to some very innocent people but he is also the very reason why I refuse to believe that a serial killer’s background has anything to do with the things they do. I read an article this week that I found on the “Pure Intimacy” cite all about Ted Bundy’s final hours. During his final day before execution, he called in James Dobson to come interview him. That interview can be found at http://www.focusonthefamily.com/popups/media_player.aspx?MediaId={710D67E8-7AFB-411F-8A37-503EA8B69B5B}&FAMILYTYPE=null. In the interview, Bundy makes it extremely clear that his family was normal. He said he had two parents who loved each other and raised him in a more than healthy environment.

 Bundy’s thought process had absolutely nothing to do with how he was raised. He says that when he was 12-years-old, he would find pornography magazines in the trash can of his neighbor’s house and started reading them. He particularly found what he calls “violent hardcore pornography” interesting and intriguing and would often fantasize about what he saw in these magazines. After a while, he felt the need to make his fantasies a reality and while in law school would fake an injury of some sort. After, he would scheme to drop his books and have a girl pick them up for him and walk him to his car. Then he would lock them in so they could not get out, fulfill his “need” and kill them out of fear. He blames this all on pornography and society making it okay for those magazines to be seen by pretty much anybody.

When I began writing this blog, I thought serial killers were horrible people and I believed that they should never be forgiven for what they have done. Now that I have watched Bundy’s interview I can tell that he feels remorse. Part of me feels bad for him which I did not think was possible to feel for someone who has killed so many people. There was no difference between an average humans mind and his. Society simply got the best of him.  He wanted his fantasies to become a reality just like anyone else does. His fantasies just happened to leave tons of innocent people dead. All in all, I am not in any way saying that what Bundy did was okay on any level. I am just pointing out that society is somewhat responsible for his downfall by allowing potentially dangerous things such as pornography magazines out in public.