blog assignment 6

In the "A Way With Words, or Away With Words: Effect of Texting and IMing on Language", which was written by Timothy Barranco, the author used many sources as the evidence to support his opinion: texting language is necessary for youth to communicate and it doesn't have side effect on their writing skills.

"The use of short forms, abbreviations, and emotional language is infinitesimally small, less than 3% of the data (Tagliamonte)", as an example of quotation in this article, proved that "short forms, abbreviations, and emotional language" is just a small part of the texting language by providing the data from a research. Texting language is actually mainly made up with Standard English with a few omissions of some letters, so it will not have great effect on people's writing skills. Quotation with the exactly same words as in the original text can accurately show the opinion of its author.

Another example of paraphrase is "what they are saying is that in order to shorten any word people must first know the word they are shortening. In order to abbreviate a phrase, on must know its constituents, and so on. In order to master txt, one must first master the proper English language. While young children may pick up a few acronyms with meanings yet unknown to them, on the whole, it would not be feasible or advantageous for somebody to use txt without knowing English too (Tagliamonte and Denis 27)". The author used his own words to clearly explain the conclusion made by Tagliamonte and Denis. At this time, the sentences in the original text may be a little hard for readers to understand. It is a good way to make every point clear by paraphrase the original sentences. In this paraphrase, the author showed that if a person can use texting language well, he must master the proper English language, so people don't need to worry about texting language will make people gradually forget the proper English language.

By showing the two examples above, people can find that both quotation and paraphrase are good ways to quote other people's opinions. However, they have their own advantage and should by used in different situations.

blog assignment 5

History is always written by winners so that people cannot know all of the truth because winners would like to hide the shamed part and to show what they are proud of. However, if the losers wrote the history, it would be totally different. For example, Christopher Columbus, who is seen as a hero because he bravely adventured to sail around and found the New World, actually did many things to the native people that were extremely brutal. When they just arrived at the New World, they could not survive without the help from the native people. However, after overcoming the difficulties, the white men recompensed good with evil. The native people were forces to accept the white people's way of life and were kidnaped to Europe as slaved. The people who refused to follow the white men were all slaughter. Almost all of these bloody history were coverred or mentioned roughly by winners. If the losers wrote the history, they might mention more about the white men’s cruel behavior and how innocent the native people were.