Close Reading/ Proposal Idea

Close Reading of The Common Core:

Paragraph Chosen: Research and media skills blended into the Standards as a whole

• ·      He uses a blend of vernacular and specialist language. His choice of words at times is very casual yet he will also throw in very factual scientific and technical words or phrases.
• ·      He uses fancy phrases like “in like fashion” where one otherwise would probably just use the vernacular word “similarly”.
• ·      He is saying it is a social good to familiarize yourself with many different forms of technology and in order to become successful one is going to need to “produce and consume media”.
• ·      He is trying to create an action out of his words by informing students what they need to learn to be successful in today’s society. By writing about this subject, he is hoping it will motivate students to focus on the right subjects and in turn will eventually create action. This is like Gee’s idea that language is about saying, doing and being.
• ·      In the beginning of the paragraph he uses very specific language: “college”, “technological society”, “students”, “workforce training”.
• ·      Towards the end his language gets a little bit more vague: “extensive range of print”, “consume media”, “standards”. These words are very open for many different forms of interpretation. Instead of specifically naming things he uses a very broad definition in order to cover a wide range of topics in one sentence.

Thoughts on proposal idea:

I am not entirely sure if this topic is too broad for the ideas we have discussed in class, but I was thinking about discussing the idea of technology and the role in plays with changing our societies language. In short—I believe that the constant use of texting and facebooking, etc. is condensing our societies thoughts. We interact in short brief sentences, we abbreviate, and we speak in terms of what we think people want to hear, rather than how we actually feel. Rather than offer long advice to a friend, we opt for a short response, similar to how we would text, because we believe that no one will listen past a sentence or two. Similarly, rather than tell a friend how you are doing in detail, we usually respond in one word replies—good, bad, okay. I believe that the classroom is the last place where real discussions take place on a daily basis and I believe that it is one of the few places where people truly express their ideas in great length. I would want to write a paper on this idea. A lot of this is just my own opinion so I am not yet sure how to incorporate research in it (if that is even a requirement). I feel really passionately about this idea so I hope that it follows the basic guidelines!