Outline

According to yourdictionary.com, a song is defined as “a relatively short metrical composition for singing as a ballad or simple lyrics.” My definition of a song is lyrics set to music that have some sort of story or meaning behind it, be it from the singer, song writer, or some random person. A song is a text because through its style and tone, the meaning behind it, and the reason it’s written any one person can get an idea from it and interpret it anyway they want. In Carrie Underwood’s, “Jesus, Take The Wheel, the slow tempo and meaning of the song leads listeners to have many different ideas.
· Songs come in many different styles and tones, which can influence they way a person listens to it.
o Uptempo
§ People dance or maybe exercise
o Slow/ Romantic
§ Gets couples in the mood or makes people sad
o Soothing/Relaxing (just a particular sound)
§ helps people sleep or exercise on a different level, like yoga
· Songs have some story or meaning behind them. They’re composed for a reason.
o Romance
§ Bad relationship, crush, fell in love
o Depression
§ hate someone, hate life, suicidal, personal problems
o Trauma/ Life event
§ One of the writers of Jesus, Take the Wheel says,
“‘They came over and we just started throwing out ideas,’ she described. ‘Gordie said he had a title that he had been living with a little bit and it was 'When Jesus Takes the Wheel.' He told us about a friend of his who was in a car wreck and had been thinking that when the wreck happened. We started talking about it and the song just came out.’“(Newsome)
· Content/ Historical Context
o Lyrics
§ “Jesus, Take The Wheel” is about a single mom and her baby traveling to her parents house for the winter holidays. While driving recklessly, she was thinking about everything that had happened over the year. She starts to swerve and stops along the shoulder. She then calls on Jesus to help her with her problems.” (Gracenote)
o Religion
§ The use of Jesus is essential for this song because He is known to be called on when someone has a problem. He is the One that will always be there no matter what.
After examining how songs can be seen as text, the definition I have come up with is anything visible that has the ability to make any one person think about its content or get an idea from it. A composition is the factors that come together and link everything into a text, or link multiple texts into a bigger text.

Technology

In Hall’s paper, he talks about an online computer game, in which you create a person and basically go around and live an alternate life. Hall says you can do anything from clubbing to participating in sexual activities. You can even buy fake money for the game with your real money. Hall actually interviews a guy that says he “budgets about $40 a month to be cashed in for Linden dollars”, the games currency. Honestly, anybody that’s spending real money to buy fake money for a game has no life,..well except for the one in the game.

In the excerpt from Hass, she is saying that “writing is technology”. Basically she saying that without technology, the human race would not be able to write anything. Every way that we write something requires the use of technology or was made from technology.

According to Rashke, the world has become so dependent on technology that if higher education doesn’t use it, it’s going to “retard the entire course of Western history.” Rashke thinks that the world needs to forget about writings things down with pencils and pens and reading from books, and instead use technological things like computers and cell phones for everything. He doesn’t think the world is smart enough to use anything besides technology.

I totally agree with what Hass has stated. From crayons and markers to pens and pencils, they were all created through technology. And on today’s world, writing now revolves around the keyboard and the keypads on phones. All of the writing we do has something to do with technology. As for what Rashke says, I do agree that our world today is very dependent on technology, but I also think that if we were to be without computers, education would be okay with using pencils and crayons. Yes, higher education mostly uses computers for everything, but we didn’t start out in kindergarten learning how to write our names on a computer. If kids continue starting out with coloring and learning how to write as we did when we were in elementary school, they will be fine doing it all through their educational life.

With the use of computers in this class, I don’t think it has changed how I think or what I think. I’m sure I would have the same things if I was sitting in front of a piece of paper to write. It probably has influenced how I write because I now don’t focus on what I’m writing so much, but instead on meeting the requirement of the paper. The computer allows me to see how many pages I have or how many words I have typed, so once I reach the requirement, I try to wrap up what I’m saying and end the paper, or whatever it may be…like this journal for instance. In this class, the only enhancement of learning I gained from using the computer is creating a website, doing blogs, and yea…I think that is about all there is.

Alone...or Not?

Having to move to a new town and start at a new school is hard enough by itself, but being the only black student in all of your classes makes it that much harder. My name is Shirley White and I just started my first day at V. M. High School. I am a very intelligent girl and tend to be a little unsocial. For the first couple of months, I did everything at school by myself. I walked to each of my classes by myself, ate lunch by myself, rode in a seat on the bus by myself, and anything else possible.

One day while sitting in English class, a new student came in looking just like I did on my first day, except for the fact that she was white. As she quickly scanned the room, our eyes locked for a brief second and I knew right then we would be good friends. The teacher said her name was Alice Richards. I could tell she was shy just like me by the way she quickly walked to the closest available desk, which happened to be right beside me.

After class, I noticed she was a little lost trying to find her next class. I asked to see her schedule and discovered we had exactly the same classes at the same time. She decided that she would just walk with me after every class. This started the first day of me not doing anything alone. I was still the only black girl in all my classes, but I was that black girl with a friend.

The two images I have chosen to go with my short story enhance the story by showing that the color of skin doesn't stop people from being the best of friends. This relates to me because all of my best friends I've ever had since 3rd grade have all been white, and I never, and still don't have a problem with that. =D

My E-Portfolio

My e-portfolios' homepage does an awesome job of representing myself! It's pink and has tons of general information about me and pics of me. I'm not so sure it does a good job of displaying my papers. I do have links for my papers, but honestly, if I were to stumble across this page I wouldn't think it was for english paper assignments. But as for the actual webpages of my paper, I think I greatly expressed my work. Although writing papers isn't my biggest thing, making this website has definitely been fun for me. I LOVE MY WEBSITE!! =D


My portfolio online is sooo much more interesting than a folder with 3 papers in it. I personally would much rather look at a paper filled with color and pictures than white sheets of paper with black text. Another benefit to the e-portfolio is you dont have to turn the page to continue reading the paper, you can just scroll down.

Basic Design Principles

The four basic design principles are alignment, proximity, repitition, and contrast. Using these four principles will result in a very organized, easy to follow webpage. When aligning your page, you should make sure you use the same alignment throughout the whole page, dont mix alignments. You should also align your pages horizontally. Proximity is the closeness of certain things on a page and the relationship between them. The closer things are, the stronger the relationship should be between them. Repetition means that all of the webpages that compose your website have something in common that links them together. Using the same font, color scheme, layout, etc. can all help bring out repetition. The final principle, contrast, serves to lead viewers to the main points of interest of the webpage. Contrast can be making text bolder and bigger, a totally different font from everything else, etc. Combining these four principles should produce an AMAZING webpage!

As far as colors go on websites, you can be limited or unlimited. Either one works but if you're making a professional website, limited colors would most likely be the better choice. Limited color usage is picking a couple of colors and sticking with that color scheme for the whole site. Unlimited color usage is using many colors, but it still needs to be organized otherwise it will look messy. Any color can be used, all colors have been used at some point in time so reusing someone elses color scheme is not a problem!

Looking at my website, I believe I have definitely stuck with the same alignment the whole way through. On both my homepage and narrative page, everything is centered. Although the excerpt from Basic Design Principles says centering everything when you first begin making websites isn't very good, I think my page looks good. The proximity of the text and pictures on my homepage is good. I basically have pictures of myself surrounding the information about myself. The proximity of my narrative page is the same way. The pictures that are related to a particular part of the text are next to each other. The repetition I have on my pages are they are all set up with 3 columns. My homepage does look a little different from my narrative page, but my narrative page and page of my second paper have the same format and same font. The only place I really have the principle of contrast is on my homepage. I made my name bolder than the rest of the information about myself. The titles of my papers are also set aside and easy to notice.

Tone&Audience in Essays&MovieTrailers

Trask v. Knier



In Trask's essay, she expressed a tone of seriousness, aggressiveness, and frustration. The audience she is trying to reach with this essay is an older, informed audience, perhaps specialists in history or government officials. She mentions organizations and committee's that have been formed like "Office of Hawaiian Affairs (OHA)", "Ka Lahui Hawai'i", and the "Constitutional Convention". This essay can also be assumed to be targeted toward just regular middle-aged citizens of America because at the end of the essay she states, "We don't need anymore tourists. If you want to help, pass this message on to your friends."



Kniers' essay is the complete opposite. He has a very relaxed and witty tone. He's very chatty and informal. His audience is clearly to that of young people his age, perhaps classmates. This can be seen by him saying, "regular plebes like you and me can declare backruptcy, too" inside another sentence. He tends to add little side remarks inside some of his statements showing that his essay is really informal. The tone of his essay probably could have been a little more formal since it was an assignment from his professor, but I think it keeps young readers like myself entertained, compared to with Trask's, which I didn't completely read =D.



Bride v. Pride


The movie Bride&Prejudice is aimed at an audience of young girls, probably pre-teens to late teens. The movie Pride&Prejudice is targeted at a older audience of women, most likely early twenties and up. The tone of Bride&Prejudice is more fun, humorous, and kind of like a romantic fairytale,…”a new twist on a classic tale”, while Pride&Prejudice is more of a serious romance movie. This is expressed by the dull colors and colonial clothing of the characters and the kind of classical music in Pride&Prejudice, compared to the lively colors and exciting clothing, and loud music of Bride&Prejudice.

Maus

In Spiegelman’s graphic novel, Maus, most of the characters are shaded, and a select few are white. The characters that are shaded represent the Jews that didn’t think twice about having to go to the stadium to get their documents expected. The white characters represent the Nazi commanders and the Jews that know what’s going on; know going to the stadium is a trap. Spiegelman shades the Jews that are oblivious to what’s going on because it’s kind of like their “in the dark”.

The fact that the novel is told in a comic strip format makes it easier for the reader to follow the story. It shows everything scene by scene. And if there were no pictures, it would definitely be hard to follow what was happening. The pictures allow us to see exactly who is talking and show us the flashback on a much stronger level than just reading about it. The pictures also let us know that not all of the Jews were completely ignorant to what was taking place.

Spiegelman sets the tone of the novel by using a specific contrast of color. By using black, white and gray as the colors of the visual, the readers get a sense of the novel being very serious and kind of gloomy.

The text and the visuals interact together by how the text is used in its bubbles. The bubbles that go with the pictures of the Nazi commanders are rigid, showing that they are yelling through a megaphone and have authority. The bubbles that are rounded are from the Jews that have direct dialogue. The bubbles that are square make a statement that sums up the overall feeling of the mass crowd of Jews. It’s as if it’s spoken by a narrator, perhaps the father. And the text not included in a bubble or box is the transition to the flashback.

The Words of Alicia Keys

My favorite R&B singer is Alicia Keys. I have been a faithful listener and fan of hers since her first album was released. For me, Alicia doesn't just sing to sing, she sings to send a message and speak out to people. Listening to her songs, I feel that if the songs on her CD's were expressed as a poem, or just read as lyrics, they would have the same effect as listening to them with music and her voice. Don't get me wrong, her voice has so much power and really expresses what she's saying, but the words of the songs say so much for themselves. Some of her words give women a feeling of encouragement and make them realize how special they are. Some of her words relate to relationships and express exactly how you feel about someone one. I believe, no matter who you are, if you were to go look up Alicia Keys lyrics to any song and read them, they would have an amazing effect on you.

Opposite Turtles

This image represents me by showing how I can be shy and to myself at times, yet open and social at other times. It also shows my love for turtles! Looking at the turtle on the left, with its head tucked in, represents my timid side. It shows the side of me that isn’t able to just walk to people and talk to them or speak out in class. The turtle on the right, with his head popping out of the shell shows my willingness to be open and get to know people. When you bring them together, you get a part of me…part of my personality.

Once the image and text meet, the text can be fully understood my looking at the picture. The picture almost speaks for itself, but the text helps show how it’s meaningful to me. As for the position of the text, in reference to the picture, I chose to display the text under the picture to show that there was an balance between what was being said. My text wasn’t leaning toward one side of the picture. For me, I tend to look at the picture before I read the text, and then as I read, I will occasionally look up at the picture…