Capitolo Sedici (Ch. 16)

What counts as evidence? Lunsford et al. 2007’s chapter sixteen provides the sources to confirm the qualifications of evidence. Evidence can be used to prove an oral statement or physical performance. We are to compel the match between evidence and type of argument to increase its effectiveness of writing. We also should deploy the tactics of using evidences at right time to make an essay relevant. Each criterion in chapter sixteen suggests the adversity of confirmation of its evidence. Lunsford et al. 2007 writers supported the idea that finding evidences would be difficult and there are numerous options that could characterize evidence.

In R.G. Collingwood’s philosophy book, The Ideas of History, he wrote, “And when we try to define ‘evidence’ … we find it very difficult.” It aimed to Lunsford’s writings which added that evidences could be persuasive in one time and place, but not in another; it could convince in a kind of audience, but not in another; it could work with an argument specifically, but not for other arguments (Lunsford et al. 2007 page 470). That citation I found is the most important part of chapter sixteen for me because the majority of the web sources were mistakenly recorded which could lead into wrong information that could impact your argument. Every web source, to me, is a piece of domino waiting to be toppled on. Let’s talk about interview which is one of subtitles in chapter sixteen. It suggests that direct interviews could obtain the best evidences, only from the consultants of experts. To approve of its expertise, you have to ask for the background information and personal accounts. It proves the genius and inventiveness of Lunsford et al. 2007 that every thing, every evidence must be backed up with the formal check-up before pointing out in an argument. An attempt to find strong evidence is no picnic for all of us, freshman undergraduates, and the uphill struggle to find the one is idealness for academic writing.

To all of us, the newbie to academic writing, the advanced scholars will praise us for our excellence of finding the evidences because of its paradoxical combination matching with type of argument and the timing. Taking our time off on finding the better evidences could take us a mile further. Google provides the advanced search to specify my needs of finding a reliable source (Lunsford et al. 2007 page 485). Patience is what all scholars need to advance their academic writing and there are multiple sources including Google that will expand our search. I acknowledge the quote by A.J. Ayer in his Philosophy in the Twentieth Century “… ‘the study of evidence’ would be a better choice than ‘the study of language’”. According to his words, mastering the placement and findings of evidence, in my opinion, is the most important feature for academic writing.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evidence/

Lunsford et al. 2007

Del Toro's Archetypal Features on Names

This intense film, Pan’s Labyrinth, including the combination of fantasy, history, and horror mixed them up with dizzying brio, is a searing cinematic experience created by Guillermo Del Toro. Del Toro had set up the goal of displaying many meanings behind the picture with his visionary of “…manifesto, a tour de force of cautionary zeal, humanism and magic.” (Hornaday, Washington Post). However, in my own eyes, I believe that the confirmation of the evidences behind the symbolisms and depictions in the movie can be only approved by the director’s voice. In Del Toro’s interview, he mentioned about the origins of the name that applied to the disobedience of each character, per se.

To start, let's look at our protagonist's name - Ofelia. Ophelia is a Shakespearean character associated with madness and delirium. In Hamlet, Ophelia was overcame by the trauma of circumstances and went beyond her control. Perhaps she had what we might call a sane response to an insane situation - she lost the touch with an unbearable reality just like a little innocent girl (Julian Walker). Ofelia was faced with the dangers in the war-torn little town and according to her response; she entered the fantasy world to escape her reality. To me, the only way an innocent girl who knows no of violence can show the disobedience to the society is escaping the society itself.

According to New York Times, Del Toro incorporated lot of archetypes in his films which are greatly proportional. Look at our antagonist, Captain Vidal – He carried so much of sadistic features with dark tone of color. He murdered people; he annihilated the souls of innocent farmers in isolated towns of Spain, and yet he praised the new life of his own son. That carried the oxymoronic message of Del Toro’s name choices for which Vidal means “life-giving”.

Last confirmation of my analysis goes to Mercedes, Vidal’s housekeeper. Like I stated above, Del Toro’s characters served the purpose to show the disobedience to the society, and Mercedes, next to Ofelia, showed the most prominent action of disobedience. In the movie, rebellious Mercedes helped the struggling guerillas in the mountains for which she showed the mercy to poverty-stricken villagers. According to the history of origins, Mercedes is given by the name of mercy that derived from Virgin Mary in the Bible. My belief of the reason why Del Toro chose the name, Mercedes, is that he wanted to provide the analogy between Jesus and Mary, and Ofelia and Mercedes. Mary and Mercedes offered a huge love of being a mother to their non-biological kid. Del Toro resonated the oscillations of characters with the irresistible inevitability of a timeless myth that offered us with infinite symbols.

The result of the labyrinthine interplay is an eerily instructive, and it deepens our emotional understanding of fascism through the eyes of Del Toro’s definition of rigid ideology's dire consequences. It leaves you feeling exhilarated at the rejuvenating power a well-told story, no matter its subject, can have. “If you like Harry Potter, you will love this movie. If you don't like Harry Potter, you will still love this movie.” (Rodriguez, Miami Herald).

http://julianwalkeryoga.gaia.com/blog/2007/5/myth_fairy_tale_and_psyche_in_pans_labyrinth

http://www.washingtonpost.com/gog/movies/pans-labyrinth,1122604.html

http://ae.miami.com/entertainment/ui/miami/movie.html?id=772007&reviewId=22080

Purdue's OWL

The Online Writing Lab (OWL) at Purdue University, located in my hometown, Indiana provides the free information for the students worldwide with the useful writing materials to improve their writings. The website also assists students with all of writing resources to help them succeed in their future such as professional writing or job searching writing. As I analyzed the website thoroughly, I found many things extremely helpful to me and it covered many sections what Lunsford et. al had sufficed. I would recommend any students to look in OWL website when they are struggling with English, because the website, without a question, has the tools to maximize students, or scholars’ writings to the fullest.

I feel that the website is the most credible source when it comes to writing a piece of paper from the range of a poem to the twenty-page essay. Writing out your ideas permits you to evaluate the adequacy of your argument and to find the adequacy; OWL covers all of the resources and tools you could think of. Do I recommend it to Gallaudet University’s writing department? Yes, not just limited to Gallaudet, but to the schools nationwide, even worldwide. OWL is like a world’s most beautiful rose hidden in the thorns and no one would bother to look for it. We need to clear the path and show it to the world how effective and helpful OWL is.

The resources OWL provided astonish me because the website covers every writing details and every writing struggles such as APA formatting, grammar mechanics, writing a literal analysis, English as Second Language, etc. If I am to fit in Exemplary Skills in Gallaudet Writing Rubric, then I should use all of vital resources in OWL website to shape my writing to maximize my capacities and place myself on far right column of the rubric. Rubric shows us the topics that we need to master at which are citing, conventions, critical thinking, organization, and author’s audience awareness and the website covers all of those criteria. Lunsford et al. 2007 is an utilitarian resource, yes, but it only covers on materials to strengthen my argument. Is it for everyone to use as their daily aid? No, and I aye to OWL as the best ingredient for all academic writers worldwide.

Let’s talk about the specs of the website. It is regret for thousands of teachers nationwide to overlook the assistance of the website. What shocked me the most were that the website actually includes ethos, pathos, and logos and their detailed information such as email etiquette for Professors. Have you thought of email etiquette for professors before? That proves how unbelievable the website is. They included the specifications that couldn’t overlook any struggled writers such as English as Second Language guidelines. Minorities in the world find that guideline inevitably vital because it would help us to move up to the bar of standard academic writing. I believe Lunsford et. al 2007 is already effective, but I now realize that OWL is much convenient and much savvy for all of scholars ranging from middle school students to graduate students. I say it should be a campaign nationwide to heal the places of much struggled writing society. Unlike Dr. Wood, I believe this website is a Koran to me.

Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth

Pan's Labyrinth can be most accurately summarized as a fairytale turned nightmare, characterized by grotesque mutations of beloved creatures both real and imaginary. Though the film seems most obviously to be the nightmare of a little girl lost in an unrelenting world of pain, violence, and death, the nightmare is not contained; all people who inhabit the valley are caught in a nightmarish manifest of the world authorized by Fascist regime. Magical realism is a fragile creature, too much pressure in any direction and the creature collapses into a silly Cinderella. Del Toro knew how much pressure to apply to each of the story’s parts to make it all work very well. That’s why Pan’s Labyrinth, to me, is the one of most complex movies I have ever watched, yet, simply structured.

Two particular importances in the movie were Ofelia, the young and frightened girl who merely wants to leave the nightmare of reality and embrace the decaying fantasy of her dreams, and Captain Vidal, the one who propagates the nightmare for the rest of the valley. Del Toro chose two people to contrast from each other to portray the definition of good versus evil. Every movie viewer including me could tell that Del Toro heavily emphasized on the idea of disobedience throughout the movie and the way Del Toro paralleled with the disobedience was displaying the scenes with the gore and disturbing images. That is what makes tragedy so tragic, the inevitability of it all. This type of narrative requires bloodshed and sacrifice, and the film offers up a heaping plateful of bloody violence, torture and death.

Besides the unpleasant scriptures in the movie, there are millions of symbols and unanswered questions in the movie, so I will only mention about one thing which is the religious parallels between the movie and the bible. As Del Toro emphasized on the term of sacrifice, I could identify the sacrifice of Ofelia for her baby brother as a parallel of crucifixion of Jesus. Jesus sacrificed for millions of sinners to cleanse whole community and refresh whole world with new hope. According to that, the new hope Del Toro gave us was the reincarnation of Ofelia to rejoice with her fictional parents in some kind of heavenly kingdom. Also the temptation of Ofelia led to the betrayal of Faun by eating the grape which Faun had forbidden her to do greatly image the allusion in the bible. Adam and Eve ignored the warnings of God and eventually ate the fruit which resulted in an exile from Garden of Eden. There are so much of symbols for us to analyze Del Toro’s way of approach to the world today.

What finally makes this film work so well is that the fabulous is not at all childish; it is a mix of the child-like and the recognition that the world is more complex than a child can tend to understand. At first, this adds a level of strange beauty to what is a very tense situation. Later it becomes the reason for us to despise the things that men do when we see a man destroy the barer of this imaginary ambience. Even for adults, a world minus magic is a cold place.

I post this note to make this as a disclaimer for forgetting to cite the first three sentences of the paragraph. As a freshman undergraduate, I will continue to improve and cite the sources properly.

Malcolm X Attempt #2

When you teach a man to hate his lips, the lips that God gave him, the shape of the nose that God gave him, the texture of the hair that God gave him, the color of the skin that God gave him, you've committed the worst crime that a race of people can commit. And this is the crime that you've committed.

- Malcolm X, Our Hair! (http://www.endarkenment.com/hair/essays/malcolm/index.htm)

Racial prejudice is an insidious moral and social disease affecting peoples and populations all over the world. The outbreak hysteria of racism occurred in mid-twentieth century, targeting African-Americans mostly. Institutionalized racial segregation was ended as an official practice by the efforts of civil rights activists such as Rosa Parks, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and El-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, known as Malcolm X.

Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965 in New York City while giving a speech, Our Hair!. He was a man who indicted white America in the harshest terms for its crimes against black Americans. Malcolm X offered an insightful perspective on the freedom of Black people. In the historical tradition of Black educators, he was undeniably committed to "uplifting the race" by encouraging Black people to become cognizant of their consignment in the American social order, and then proposing the necessary steps to rectify these conditions. Based on my analysis, Malcolm X’s piked coherence and constructive statement offered two different kinds of audience.

At the beginning of the essay, Malcolm X targeted to the plain folks with the bulleted points of what white Americans had made us to do. He connected between the black people’s actions and white people’s responses to catch the plain black folks' eyes first. Later in the essay, Malcolm X mentioned lot about the foreign affairs going on between other countries and USA. This time, he targeted the highly-educated people about the affairs for which most Americans wouldn't have understood it. So the way he could get everybody involved with his essay. Rather than relying on theoretical and philosophical abstractions, Malcolm X used his life and experiences as a basis for his critique.

Since Malcolm X did not leave a body of writings per se that addressed significant radical issues, the diction and sentence tools that Malcolm X used helped to create his voice in the speech even on paper. In his or her head, the reader can almost hear Malcolm X dramatically giving the speech. He had a very strong, confident, persuasive voice. A writer or speaker who has control of his language has control of his audience. Charismatic, articulate and statuesque, Malcolm X was able to persuade people how repulsive the word "hate" could become. He stated,

"We hated the African characteristics.

We hated our hair...

We hated our nose, the shape of our nose, and the shape of our lips, the color of our skin. Yes we did. And it was you who taught us to hate ourselves simply by shrewdly maneuvering us into hating the land of our forefathers and the people on that continent."

One thing Malcolm X lacked in his essay was the evidences to support his reason of the hate. He did not brace his evidences of black people of the distant regions who actually hated themselves. By the power of his charisma, he was capable to layer up the evidences with his emotional appeals which were ethos to make his argument reasonable. It is a moot question whether Malcolm X made any contributions to the Negro’s struggle for freedom, whether he was a catalyst to the cause or just a loud and strident voice crying in some personal wilderness foreign to the real needs and aspirations of the nation’s Negroes. By the speech of Our Hair, he bridged everybody's emotions no matter how complicated or simple it was.

Rhetorical Analysis on Malcolm X

When you teach a man to hate his lips, the lips that God gave him, the shape of the nose that God gave him, the texture of the hair that God gave him, the color of the skin that God gave him, you've committed the worst crime that a race of people can commit. And this is the crime that you've committed.

- Malcolm X, Our Hair! (http://www.endarkenment.com/hair/essays/malcolm/index.htm)

Racial prejudice is an insidious moral and social disease affecting peoples and populations all over the world. The outbreak hysteria of racism occurred in mid-twentieth century, targeting African-Americans mostly. Institutionalized racial segregation was ended as an official practice by the efforts of civil rights activists such as Rosa Parks, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and El-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, known as Malcolm X.

Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965 while giving a speech, Our Hair!. He was a man who indicted white America in the harshest terms for its crimes against black Americans. In the speech, Our Hair!, Malcolm X accused white Americans for making black people hate themselves for what they have; big noses, shape of lips, color of their skin, and texture of their hair. I, like Malcolm X, believe in the use of violence when it is necessary to shape the society.

In the speech, Malcolm X referred and, then, insulted American’s comments about the Congolese “cannibals” holding the white hostages. Malcolm structurally supported his opinions about inferior minds of white Americans. As Malcolm X notes, Americans didn’t give any shit about thousands of black people dying from the bombings in Congo, until they panicked about the white people being held as hostages. Malcolm X created a bridge to connect two facts into a forcible statement by telling the audience about the hidden image of Congolese’s war maneuvers. They just held white hostages to warn the pilots that they would kill their own white people if they kept bombing. Throughout the speech, Malcolm X’s feelings and tone were heavily implied to all of hearers.

Malcolm X’s piked coherence and constructive transition method were used greatly to connect between the black people’s actions and white people’s responses. Malcolm X noted,

“You still see the result of it among our people in this country today. Because we hated our African blood, we felt inadequate, we felt inferior, we felt helpless. And in our state of helplessness, we wouldn't work for ourselves. We turned to you for help, and then you wouldn't help us. We didn't feel adequate. We turned to your for advice and you gave us the wrong advice. Turned to you for direction and you kept us going in circles.”

The statement above, in my opinion, is the climax of the entire speech to remind the readers that even the tiniest amount of ignorance will eventually sum into the colossal neglect of justice. Malcolm X didn’t leave any messages in the end to make us think, instead, he just heavily criticized how inglorious bastards Americans are for making black people believing in for what they hate. I notice that Malcolm X gave the audience no flexibility because Malcolm X used only logos to appeal the audience’s emotions. Once the audience is given with only facts and reasons, there is no way audience could shape or bend the facts. Nevertheless, Malcolm X’s rigid and blunt statements awakened the world with the unheard comments from a minority.

In the conclusion, Malcolm X was assassinated because his comments disputed many of the opposed-viewers with broad non-pacifist statements. I can’t say that his argument in the speech was effective to all of us, only those people who believe in him. Malcolm X had given us with a choice, which is to raise our hands to the power or to let the society imprison the minority of black people because of the color of their skin or the texture of their hair?

List of things I believe in

The fallibility of our egos.

Man is savage at heart.

Practicing humility is a worthwhile endeavor.

Violence is the answer.

The déjà vu of the book, V for Vendetta.

Ability of one to create oneself own reality.

No man is an Island. A naked man with no tools will die in the wild.

Existence of UFOs.

A happy family is but an earlier heaven.

God.