McMahon Grammar Exercise: Essential and Nonessential Clauses
Birthdays that land on a Monday are a bummer.
Birthdays, which can be costly, are overrated.
Circle the relative clause and indicate if it’s essential with a capital E or nonessential with a capital N. Then use commas where necessary.
One. I’m looking for a sugar substitute that doesn’t have dangerous side effects.
Two. Sugar substitutes which often contain additives can wreak havoc on the digestive and nervous system.
Three. The man who trains in the gym every day for five hours is setting himself up for a serious muscle injury.
Four. Cars that operate on small turbo engines don’t last as long as non-turbo automobiles.
Five. Tuna which contains high amounts of mercury should only be eaten once or twice a week.
Six. The store manager who took your order has been arrested for fraud.
Seven. The store manager Ron Cousins who is now seventy-five years old is contemplating retirement.
Eight. Magnus Mills’ Restraint of Beasts which is my favorite novel was runner up for the Booker Prize.
Nine. Parenthood which is a sort of priesthood for which there is no pay or appreciation raises stress and cortisol levels.
Ten. I need to find a college that specializes in my actuarial math major.
Eleven. UCLA which has a strong actuarial math program is my first choice.
Twelve. My first choice of car is the Lexus which was awarded top overall quality honors from Consumer Reports.
Thirteen. Mangoes which sometimes cause a rash on my lips and chin area are my favorite fruit.
Fourteen. A strange man whom I’ve never known came up to me and offered to give me his brand new Mercedes.
Fifteen. My girlfriend who was showing off her brand new red dress arrived two hours late to the birthday party.
Sixteen. Students who meticulously follow the MLA format rules have a greater chance at success.
Seventeen. The student who tormented himself with the thesis lesson for six hours found himself more confused than before he started.
Eighteen. There are several distinctions between an analytical and argumentative thesis which we need to familiarize ourselves with before we embark on the essay assignment.
Nineteen. The peach that has a worm burrowing through its rotted skin should probably be tossed in the garbage.
Twenty. Peaches, which I love to eat by the bucketful are on sale at the farmer’s market.
Twenty-one. Baseball which used to be America’s pastime is declining in popularity.
Louis CK video on Conan in which Louis CK criticizes smartphone addiction.
"Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?"
"How Social Media Is Having a Positive Impact on Our Culture"
Lexicon:
- Luddite: someone who is afraid of technology because it brings great evils. A Luddite is paranoid and exaggerates the "catastrophe" of change because deep down he fears he's missing out. He suffers from Sour Grapes Syndrome.
- Narcissists: people who have a pathological craving for high esteem and admiration of others at the exclusion of substance, accomplishment, and moral character. Their contradiction is that while they crave the esteem of others, they have nothing but contempt for people. How could people crave the admiration of the very people they despise?
- Online identity or avatar: the pretend self that gradually can become the “real” self, created a delusion in not just the creator of the persona but others who see it, as we see in the case of comic personas who are taken seriously like Stephen Colbert. It turns out some conservatives watched him not knowing he was doing a parody of conservatives.
- Truncated emotion: emoticon
- Technology-driven neediness
- Banalities of real time confused with substance because of dopamine infusion
- Lowered social expectations from social media
- Facebook friend is a “low-risk connection.”
- Cognitive faculty decay, especially in the realm of attention span
- Control paradox: being controlled by the need to control
- Solitude aversion and the crack cocaine-like addiction of smart phones
- Dopamine overload and depression
One. How does technology allow us to fall in love with the idea of life while disdaining the reality of life? “We are lonely yet fearful of intimacy.”
Why are we fearful of intimacy? Because social media is about convenience and control and is antithetical to intimacy.
Intimacy requires the following:
compromise
listening skills
sharing
reciprocity
loss of control
long-term commitment
long-term sacrifices
generally speaking, intimacy requires more effort than a "social media friendship"
We run away from intimacy into a phony cyber world.
Two. We make our technologies and they make us; they shape us. In what way? That would make a good thesis.
The technologies must indulge us, make us the center of attention and thereby raise our self-regard.
The give us a sense of control.
They give us the illusion of intimacy without responsibility, empathy, and compromise with other humans (the very essential ingredients of real friendship and intimacy).
Technology spares us the possibility for disappointment, rejection, and loss; and we begin to prefer these fake friendships to real ones.
Three. The result of all this technology is the following:
We become fake, we become narcissistic, we become controlling, we become simulation-mongers (over the real) and we become tech addicts and we become partial attention bots.
You either agree with the description or do not. Or perhaps you believe in something in-between.
Here's a question related to the above: Do well-adjusted people react like the above or only addictive personalities?
Or can well-adjusted people, under social media influence, become addicts?
Four. How do smartphones make us cyborgs living in a perpetual adolescence?
We live in a “world of continual partial attention.”
We’ve all become “pauseable,” meaning people can “pause” us and get back to us when them want to.
Five. How do distinctions blur between the “real” world and the cyber world? 153. We are “absent but tethered” at the same time. We're in class, but we're not because we're texting a friend.
Six. What does Pete, and his avatar Rolo, say about Pete’s life? He craves a “life mix,” going in and out of Internet, mixing the two worlds. We can take private party conversation and post it on blogs so we can “appear on a larger virtual stage.”
Seven. What is the slippery slope of Facebook?
We begin with using Facebook to supplement friendship but then eventually Facebook becomes the core source of a weakened friendship and is preferred over spending real time with our friends (perhaps now former friends)
Eight. Does having a Twitter, Facebook, and blog presence, required for many people to appear "current," enhance or detract from the job?
Many people feel spread thin. Good luck taking a vacation because your Twitter, Facebook, and blog interaction have to remain current or you could lose business by appearing "inactive."
Nine. What is the false magic trap of texting? It feels like magic because we can text while doing something else so we feel that magic has taken place: time has been added to our busy lives, but in reality we fragment our attention and become the lesser for it.
Ten. What antisocial behaviors result from smartphone addiction?
No hello, no engagement with parents, no safety rules during driving.
Eleven. What is the "always-on culture" and how does it affect us?
We constantly feel behind, inadequate, anxious, and unable to enjoy solitude and intimacy. There is this fear that if I go off the grid, for even a week or two, I may return irrelevant and forgotten. This is a sort of psychosis.
Twelve. Why are young people drawn to smartphone culture or a "networked life"?
One, because the Net is something larger than they are and they can become of this Larger Thing.
Two, they feel they are stealing time by multi-tasking.
Three, they can play roles they can't play otherwise because they can control and embellish their online "profile."
Four, being networked gives them a sense of independence from their parents (though parents can keep tabs on them with software).
Lexicon Part II with Review
1. New Solitude: We are mentally absent (partially attentive at best) but tethered to others in a degraded way through the "Network," Twitter, Facebook, texting, etc.
2. Avatar: a created persona that becomes our Network identity. This identity lacks complexity and as such becomes a "flattened personae."
3. New Taboo : Authenticity, the messy real becomes loathed in place of preconceived archetypal forms.
4. emoticon: a pictorial representation of an emotion such as a happy or sad face.
5. New Pseudo-Intimacy: We are massaged and caressed by our Network relationships, which indulge our narcissism and we feel in control of these relationships so we avoid real intimacy,which requires compromise and give and take.
6. Off the Grid: going off the Network and disappearing for a while.
7. Technological Narcissism: Our gadgets make us feel like we're the center of attention and this feeling of being at the center (cynosure) becomes an addiction making us addicted to our Network.
8. Perpetual adolescence: living a life of "continual partial attention" as we multitask from one network to another. We toggle ourselves into adolescent multitasking.
9. Pausable: Anyone can be put on pause as we navigate our Network, which makes us feel supreme and in control. This feeling is valued over real relationships.
10. Life Mix: Navigating between our real and avatar selves.
11. Facebook Slippery Slope
12. Always-On Culture
13. Douglas Rushkoff talks about "present shock," the "diminishment of anything that isn't happening right now--and the onslaught of everything that supposedly is."
14. We are according to Rushkoff slaves to the cult of now, trivial things we put on Facebook and twitter, which have a false relevance. As he writes, "we tend to exist in a distracted present, where forces on the periphery are magnified and those immediately before us are ignored."
Thesis Examples (some weak; others strong)
We need to turn off our cell phones and computers and turn on to life.
We need to acknowledge that social media addiction is a disease that afflicts many of us.
Facebook is overrated.
I'm burned out from being on Facebook too much.
While there are obvious benefits from social networking, the empirical evidence so abundantly clear in Sherry Turkle's Alone Together points to a widespread social network-fueled pathology consisting of narcissism, false expectations of others, the distortion of time, the addiction to one's fictional cyber life, and compromised brain function from multi-tasking.
While social media is only about a decade old as of writing this research paper, Turkle makes a convincing case that our connection to social media is self-destructive in many ways, which include __________, __________, ____________, and ______________.
Turkle's diatribe against social media is a failed argument because her data cannot include long-term studies with such a new technology, she focuses on extreme cases, which can be found in anything, she uses too much anecdote rather scientific study, and she fails to counterbalance her claims with the prevailing benefits of social media.
Even though Turkle makes many valuable insights about the deleterious ways social networking affects us, her warning has come too late. Her book should have spent less time diagnosing our inevitable malaise and devoted more pages to the ways social networking can and should be used for our self-interests.
Those who dismiss Turkle as a Luddite offering no reasonable solutions to the problems she describes are misguided in their critique when we consider that ________________, _______________, _______________, and ___________________.
Turkle's pessimism is an exercise in intellectual charlatanism and buffoonery evidenced by her sensationalistic exaggerations of social network "mental diseases," her refusal to acknowledge the vast benefits of social networking, and her bullheaded stubbornness, which compels her to resist inevitable social and technological change.
Turkle's shrill diatribe against social networking is little more than a gloomy cloud of fraudulent brouhaha evidenced by _________, ___________, ___________, and _______________.
Study Questions
One. What is so pathological about needing to be tethered (always being leashed or connected to your social media)?
See page 171 in which we see the compulsion to see contact updates (being tethered or connected to smartphone) is so strong many sacrifice driving and walking safety, resulting in bruises, chipped teeth, even death.
On a level of anecdote this is true, but how pervasive is this pathological behavior?
See distraction injuries.
See car accidents.
People are degraded by our social media addiction in these ways:
People want to be interrupted. They are waiting for it. This speaks to a particular type of desperation.
There is no downtime. Therefore, there is no solitude, which is necessary for processing experience and information. Most importantly, as Turkle observes in her Ted Talk, solitude is the prerequisite for intimacy and connection with others.
Everything is rapid response without reflection. We lose our humanity.
Emoticons simplify who we are and strip us of nuance and complexity.
We lose the boundary between public and private life, sharing smartphone photos around the room.
The adolescent is denied alone time, a necessary rite of passage for independence. Instead of independence, the teenager becomes needy for approval and attention.
We have new emotional expectations. I know a young man who is mad at Facebook because his Facebook friends were either not commenting at all or enough at his posts.
We develop an unbalanced need for the validation of others rather than from our inner strength.
Being tethered makes us narcissistic as we read on page 177: “. . . one speaks about narcissism not to indicate people who love themselves, but a personality so fragile that it needs constant support. It cannot tolerate the complex demands of other people but tries to relate to them by distorting who they are and splitting off what it needs, what it can use. So, the narcissistic self gets on with others by dealing only with their made-to-measure representations.”
More and more young people are only “speaking” online at the exclusion of everything else. As a result, we are becoming more disconnected and more lonely.
We see on page 179 that when the self is compartmentalized or fragmented in so many online spaces, it does not mature but stays juvenile, immature, narcissistic.
We’re open to Facebook annihilation. One of my friends broke up with his girlfriend of 5 years. They shared dozens, perhaps hundreds of Facebook friends. He decided it was too awkward to keep his Facebook account and engaged in “Facebook annihilation,” deleting his account to avoid the awkwardness. This kind of thing didn’t happen a hundred years ago.
Minute preferences—for books and movies to name a couple of examples—become blown out of proportion in terms of one’s profile. Do the others approve of these preferences? Too much is at stake for these minute choices.
People are “always on” for their Facebook friends, so their life becomes a never-ending avatar performance.
This “Second Life” on Facebook takes over their real life. See page 193.
Two. What Are the Causes of Phone Fatigue?
People feel more protected “on the screen,” that is to say texting or IMing.
People feel more in control of their image communicating “on the screen.”
People are too tired for phone conversation after all their multitasking.
Calling others might be looked at as “too demanding” and needy. Peer pressure says, "Don't be a caller; be a texter."
Calling might be perceived as urgent, pumped up to a level that is not true. If you call, you've lost your cool facade.
Calling violates the rules of efficiency.
Calling has “insufficient boundaries,” that is the call could get messy, complicated, dramatic, time-consuming, in short an unappealing prospect.
Calling others requires full attention and we’ve become accustomed to having only partial attention.
Examining Facebook Addiction
McMahon's the 10 Signs That Facebook Has Become a Self-Destructive Chimera and You Should Probably Delete Your Facebook Account
- You start “sharing” increasing gradations of meaningless trivia with your “friends” like what kind of dog food you purchased, what kind of nail polish you’re using before vacationing in Maui, how taking Omega-3 fish oil capsules makes you burp, etc.
- You’re spending 18 hours a day “managing” your friends’ comments ("No one has commented on my juicy entry that was posted almost 30 minutes ago. Damn them all!") and losing more perspective on what’s important in your life like getting out of the house, making real friends, and embarking on something truly creative.
- You become paranoid as to why a “friend” deleted you from his or her friends list and start losing sleep over why more and more Facebook people are deleting you from their existence.
- You become jealous and resentful when you see a “friend” commenting on someone’s “boring” post but that same person ignored your more “interesting” post.
- You start competing with your other Facebook “friends” for amassing more and more friends and comments.
- You fret when none of your Facebook friends wish you Happy Birthday.
- You obsess over the fact that one of your lifelong friends is engaging in more Facebook activity with a new Facebook acquaintance who has demoted your friendship ranking.
- You lose Facebook friends because you don’t reciprocate their offers to play Bubble Shooter, Pokemon Tower Defense, Trollface Launch, Whack Your Boss, and other games that require too much time for anyone who is gainfully employed.
- You become a Facebook snob, rejecting friend invitationsfrom people who have fewer than 300 Facebook friends.
- You become a Facebook elitist only accepting friend invitations from people who have a bare minimum of a Masters Degree, share your political beliefs, and have published or produced a work of art that was reviewed by a major publication.
See Facebook Fatigue
See Facebook Fatigue--It's Real
Maybe the above links hurt the author's argument because they suggest we have a self-correcting mechanism that makes us move on when we've saturated ourselves with something. Maybe we've reached the saturation point.
But think again. A study says Facebook Fatigue Is Setting But Other Social Media Is Growing.
So perhaps other social media simply take the place of the old stuff even though the "new stuff" is the same as the old.
Sample A Introduction and Thesis in Support of Turkle
Recently I wrote something mildly amusing on Facebook about my twins, how they preferred to be lazy and take the elevator rather than be strong and take the stairs as I had urged them, and I started getting a torrent of “likes” and comments. I found myself checking my Facebook status more often than necessary to monitor the growing attention my post was getting and I realized I was enjoying a pathetic dopamine ego massage from all the adulation I was receiving. I was, for a brief while anyway, Facebook’s King of the Mountain and Super Funny Man, a talented force who no doubt, my post proved, could have made a handsome living doing the stand-up comedy circuit.
And then it hit me. I am pathetic. I am woefully and egregiously needy. I am a disgusting wretch who’s allowed the technology of his time, social media and Facebook specifically, to ratchet up his neediness.
Gloating over all my perceived exaltation was not a sign of my wit and strength. To the contrary, it showed how bereft and pathetically trivial my life had become. I was yet another pathological pawn in the social media game, trying to connect with my Facebook friends when in fact I was “together” on Facebook but woefully alone, or as Sherry Turkle’s book succinctly puts it, I was another casualty in the social media’s merciless mouth, a member of those who are Alone Together. Turkle’s book of the same title remarkably analyzes the way technology has changed who we are degrading us in many ways, not the least of which is ______________, ___________, ______________, ________________, and __________________.
Another Successful Example
I am a nineteen-year-old student taking McMahon’s English 1A class, which features a final essay, the most heavily weighted essay in class, about the dangers of social media. I belong to a generation immured in Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter, Vine, to mention a few. Is McMahon’s choice of book, Alone Together, an implicit excoriation of my generation? The book in question, by MIT professor Sherry Turkle, sounds off the alarm bells about the grave dangers of social media: It’s addictive; it makes us dumb; it disconnects us from others; it makes us insecure narcissists. The alleged weaknesses of Turkl’s argument are several and include the following: Because social media is such a new phenomenon, we don’t have any long-term data to support her claims; her extreme anecdotes point to outliers but not mainstream users of social media and we can always find outliers in any category of human behavior; her zeal to wean us off social media blinds her to its benefits for those of us who are not pathologically addicted to it; technophobe and Luddite arguments have been around for centuries and they always prove to be shrill, paranoid overreactions to inevitable change. Having examined these criticisms in the face of a careful reading of the book, I have concluded that Turkle has written a legitimate, relevant, and compelling argument, supported by empirical research and sound logic, about the ways social media is destroying, not a fringe, but a pervasive segment of society in the realm of addiction, physical injury, narcissism, dehumanization, attention deficit disorder, and generalized loneliness.
Sample B Intro and Thesis Against Turkle
Is MIT professor Sherry Turkle, author of Alone Together, a healthy voice in the wilderness decrying the pathologies of social media or is she a shrill technophobe alarming us to the coming Technological Dystopia? As a nineteen-year-old college student, am I well served by heeding the vivid warnings in Turkle’s polemic? I doubt it, for while Turkle does a good job of showing the variety of pathologies engendered by social media, her argument collapses under the weight of her one-sided bias, her excessive focus on extreme, outlier anecdotes, her Procrustean exposition (picking only the data that serves your purposes and ignoring the data that contradicts your claims) forcing a narrative of dystopian madness to fit into her rigid, preconceived thesis; and her lack of access to any real long-term studies to give us an accurate, objective look at the alleged self-destructiveness from social media.
The above would be an A; however, it suffers from mapping overlap. Let's try to fix it.
Here's an A grade Revision
Is MIT professor Sherry Turkle, author of Alone Together, a healthy voice in the wilderness decrying the pathologies of social media or is she a shrill technophobe alarming us to the coming Technological Dystopia? As a nineteen-year-old college student, am I well served by heeding the vivid warnings in Turkle’s polemic? I doubt it, for while Turkle does a good job of showing the variety of pathologies engendered by social media, her argument collapses under the weight of her one-sided bias, her excessive focus on extreme, outlier anecdotes, her rigid either/or fallacy regarding the worthiness of the Internet; her confusion with correlation and causation; her willful ignorance of Sturgeon's Law to push her over-simplistic argument, and her lack of access to any real long-term studies to give us an accurate, objective look at the alleged self-destructiveness from social media.
Sample Introduction and Thesis
If our posts on Facebook get us a lot of attention in the form of “likes” and comments and we find this attention makes us gloat like we’re the King of Facebook, we have to ask ourselves: Should we be getting our thrills in this manner? Of all the things to get thrilled about, the birth of a baby, the expulsion of a fascist leader, the discovery of a cure for some terminable disease, why do so many of us jump for joy upon getting Facebook “likes” and comments?
Could the answer be we’ve lowered our expectations about what defines our own happiness? Before Facebook, we had more exalted expectations that drove us, that defined our goals, which made us truly happy. But now we sit in a robe while eating a Pop Tart and copy and paste something someone else wrote on Facebook and the attention we get from our posts makes us happy.
Maybe we shouldn’t be happy. Maybe we should be ashamed. Maybe we should be full of self-loathing. Maybe we should be full of disgust.
In addition to a Facebook “like” category, there needs to be a “Get a Life, You Pathetic Loser” category, so that my real friends can remind me how far down the rabbit hole of a wasted life I’ve allowed Facebook and Twitter to send me.
Such are the sentiments of Sherry Turkle, the author of Alone Together who argues convincingly that Facebook and other forms of social media have denigrated the human condition by ________________, ________________, __________________, ___________________, and ___________________________.
Intro: NYT article about how connected and alone we are.
Study Questions
One. What is the liminal world and how do we get lost there?
See page 213 in which we see there are worlds beyond our daily life routines where we feel encouraged to experiment with our identity and alter ego, giving it a powerful life that can get out of control. This is where we nurture our avatar and we lose boundaries with ourselves and others, surrendering to a life of excess fantasy and cutting cut off from reality.
Two. A flourishing human being experiences “flow,” we read on page 226. What is “flow” and how does the networked life impede it? What are the consequences? Flow means being fully immersed into the present, being fully focused, having undivided attention. People who are truly happy experience flow; people who are miserable distract themselves from their misery by texting and checking their Facebook status.
Three. What is the “seeking” drive and how does it make us addicted to being networked? 227
We crave connectivity so much that we're vulnerable to the ping of a new email or some other sound summoning us. As a result, we live a life of fragmented distraction.
Four. What are the rules of texting such as the ten minute response rule and others? See page 265. Also “full attention reciprocity” and its imbalance. One friend tries harder and feels less because of it.
“I text you more than you text me. And my response time is quicker than yours. What gives? Should I end this friendship?”
Five. What does the abused man on page 281 say about people, even sadistic ones, that makes them better than robots? They have a story. There is a "back story" like characters in a movie. They are part of life. Robots are not.
Six. What is the Facebook Friend Paradox? See 280. We have so many "friends" on Facebook but Americans say they've never had so few friends.
Seven. Summarize the abuse of technology and this abuse’s role in dehumanization. See 292, 293, 295, and elsewhere.
The abuse is gradual. As Marshal McLuhan writes, quoted from The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, “The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts,” but alter “patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance.”
In other words, the Net or the “Media work their magic, or their mischief, on the nervous system itself.”
The technology takes over our minds and our bodies. There are psychological changes taking places, chemical addiction, a tingle of neurotransmitter when you see a red colored “like” on Facebook.
The technology has become so small, little handheld devices, that it has become ubiquitous and as such inseparable from us. It has gotten inside us.
An example of the Net’s growing power: In 2005 adults in North America spent six hours online weekly; by 2009 that number doubled to twelve hours.
For young adults, that number is much higher.
The average American teen sends/receives 2,272 texts a month.
Average American is “on screen” 8.5 hours a day.
Our technology as “remapped the neural circuitry,” writes Nicholas Carr.
Carr points out that our powers of concentration have diminished. We quickly get “fidgety.”
Former good readers can’t read long books or even long articles anymore. They can only skim info-bites.
We call less; we read newspapers less; we spend face-to-face time with people less, we read less, we use snail mail less; the list goes on.
Eight. What is realtechnik and how is it an antidote to our dehumanization? See the definition and others in this book review.
Page 267
As you read through Turkle's thoughts and observations, certain concepts stand out as especially important. Here I will mention a few that made a strong impression on me:
- Realtechnik — a way of thinking about the impact of technologies and the choices we can make about their uses.
What I call realtechnik suggests that we step back and reassess when we hear triumphalist or apocalyptic narratives about how to live with technology. Realtechnik is skeptical about linear progress. It encourages humility, a state of mind in which we are most open to facing problems and reconsidering decisions. It helps us to acknowledge costs and recognize the things we hold inviolate.
Nine. Distinguish between our vulnerabilities and our needs. See page 295.We are vulnerable to technologically-driven narcissism, and we have lost our real needs, real human connection, replacing them with artificial needs, control and adulation.
Carr writes, “We are plunged into an eco-system of interruption technologies.” The effect is fragmentation and the atrophy of our concentration and focus.
Ten. Turkle’s book is that of a Net Skeptic refuting the Net Enthusiasts. Some would call Turkle a Luddite. Is that a fair criticism? Explain.
Nicholas Carr writes: “The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value.”
Eleven. What effect does technology have on the brain? Carr writes that the brain is malleable, that it is shaped by technology, that parts of the brain die and other parts flourish depending on a changing environment. “The brain is very plastic.”
“There is evidence that the cells of our brains literally develop and grow bigger with use, and atrophy or waste away with disuse.”
Being hooked on the Net, we switch back and forth different interruption technologies and we lose competence, intelligence, and intellect.
Twelve. What effect does the Net have on our intellect?
Carr writes: “We enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning.”
Considering the brain’s plasticity, “if you were to set out to invent a medium that would rewire our mental circuits as quickly and thoroughly as possible, you would probably end up designing something that looks and works a lot like the Interent.”
“The Net delivers precisely the kind of sensory and cognitive stimuli-repetitive, intensive, interactive, addictive—that have been shown to result in strong and rapid alterations in brain circuits and functions.”
We read in The Shallows that researcher Maryanne Wolf says Net immersion makes us “sacrifice the facility that makes deep reading possible. We revert to being ‘mere decoders of information.’”
Carr writes that the Web is “an interruption machine” and “frequent interruptions scatter our thoughts, weaken our memory, and makes us tense and anxious. The more complex the train of thought we’re involved in, the greater the impairment the distractions cause.”
Carr cites studies that when we go back and forth from two or more tasks, we impede thinking and competence.
Other studies show that the more we’re on the Web, the more we become Skimmers, not Readers. Brain and eye activity changes.
A skimmer is called a “Power Browser.” The PB reads more but more superficially. “Hyperlinks distract people from reading and thinking deeply.”
As skimmers, we no longer value narratives, stories that tell important truths about ourselves.
According to Douglas Rushkoff, "The traditional linear story works by creating a character we can identify with, putting that character we can identify with, putting that character in danger, and then allowing him or her to discover a way out. We meet Oedipus, Luke Skywalker, or Dora the Explorer. Something happens--an initiating event--that sends the character on a quest." The characters embark on, what Joseph Campbell calls, a "heroic journey."
With "interactivity," the remote control, for example, consumers of entertainment are less likely to absorb a meaningful narrative. They'd rather skim.
Without meaningful narratives, we become ignorant, even dumb, according to Rushkoff, who writes that Americans are immersed in a "mediated disortion field," with such misinformation that the number of Americans "unsure about evolution increased from 7 percent to 21 percent, while those questioning global warming increased from 31 percent in 1997 to 48 percent in 2010."
Skimmers are not apparently well educated.
The Internet, Rushkoff continues, makes us skinners of "Everyone Is Equal" so that legit and non-legit opinion makers share the stage. See Cult of the Amateur.
Doug's Critique of Networked World with comments
Research Sources
Review of Internet Dangers
One. Multitasking results in divided energy and mediocre work as we live in a state of continual partial attention.
Two. Death of intimacy results from preference of control and convenience over compromise and reciprocity. Everyone is "pauseable."
Three. A networked life encourages narcissism and constant need for social validation from others; also a networked life makes us feel we're the center of the universe.
Four. A networked life flattens our personae into emoticans.
Five. We suffer off-the-grid anxiety because we have an always-on mentality.
Six. We live in the New Solitude, which means we're mentally absent from others but at the same time we're tethered to each other in a degraded way.
Seven. We live in present shock in which we see "the diminishment of anything that isn't happening right now--and the onslaught of everything that supposedly is" (Rushkoff).
Eight. We suffer from digiphrenia, as Rushkoff writes, using technology to be in more than one place at the same time.
Nine. Internet alters our brain circuits for the worse, turning us into "skimmers."
Links that accuse Turkle of being a technophobe:
From Jonah Lehrer in NYT:
There is no easy reply to these critiques. The Internet is full of absurdities, from the booming economy of virtual worlds — a user recently paid $335,000 for land on a fictitious asteroid in Entropia Universe — to the mass retweeting of ****** ******. It’s always fun to mock the stilted language of teenagers and lament the decline of letter writing. But these obvious objections shouldn’t obscure the real mystery: If the Internet is such an alienating force, then why can’t we escape it? If Facebook is so insufferable, then why do hundreds of millions of people check their page every day? Why did I just text my wife instead of calling her?
I certainly don’t expect Turkle to have all the answers, but her ethnographic portraits would have benefited from a more probing investigation of such questions. The teenagers she quotes complain about everything — phones, texting, e-mail, Skype. And yet, virtually none of them seem willing to turn off the digital spigot.
Perhaps this is because, despite our misgivings about the Internet, its effects on real-life relationships seem mostly positive, if minor. A 2007 study at Michigan State University involving 800 undergraduates, for instance, found that Facebook users had more social capital than abstainers, and that the site increased measures of “psychological well-being,” especially in those suffering from low self-esteem. Other studies have found that frequent blogging leads to increased levels of social support and integration and may serve as “the core of building intimate relationships.” One recurring theme to emerge from much of this research is that most people, at least so far, are primarily using the online world to enhance their offline relationships, not supplant them.
Needless to say, the portrait painted by these studies is very different from the one in Turkle’s fascinating, readable and one-sided book. We are so eager to take sides on technology, to describe the Web in utopian or dystopian terms, but maybe that’s the problem. In the end, it’s just another tool, an accessory that allows us to do what we’ve always done: interact with one other. The form of these interactions is always changing. But the conversation remains.
Jonah Lehrer’s most recent book is “How We Decide.”
Example Thesis Structures
Turkle's argument that social media has diminished our humanity is convincing when we consider ______________, ___________, _____________, ______________, and ________________.
Turkle's argument that social media presents dangers to our humanity is both exaggerated and erroneous evidenced by ___________, ___________, ________________, ____________, and _______________.
While Turkle does a good job of showing the narcissism and disconnection from the misuse of social media, her vision of a future techno-dystopia is misguided because _______________, ____________, _______________, and _________________.
Objections to Sherry Turkle's Argument
One. She is too one-sided with only negative anecdotes and examples of the way technology disconnects us and makes us narcissistic.
Two. She exaggerates the pitfalls and dangers of social media.
Three. She offers no solutions to social media addiction and dehumanization.
Four. She resists the inevitability of change brought on by technology.
Balanced Critique of Alone Together from NYT
Most Common Error Last Essay: Pronoun Shifts and Agreement
We suffer learned helplessness when you feel like everything you do is a failure. A person suffering from helplessness will often have delusions that destroy all their efforts. When one feels helpless, we must exercise the Third Eye so you can see your problems from an objective distance. When a person has the Third Eye, they are able to develop strategies to transcend their sense of recurring futility.
Another Example
When a person repeatedly checks their status on Facebook, they develop an addiction that can result in you spending over twelve hours a day checking on your "status." We live in an age in which social media dominates our lives. Your self-esteem too often is affected by the amount or lack of attention you're getting while posting on Facebook. We need to step back, process what we're doing, and realize we're only hurting ourselves. So next time you get the urge to go on Facebook, think again. One's sanity depends on it.
Faulty Pronoun Error Reference
Different Types of Pronoun Errors
Subordination and Coordination (Complex and Compound Sentences)
Complex Sentence
A complex sentence has two clauses. One clause is dependent or subordinate; the other clause is independent, that is to say, the independent clause is the complete sentence.
Examples:
While I was tanning in Hermosa Beach, I noticed the clouds were playing hide and seek.
Because I have a tendency to eat entire pizzas, inhaling them within seconds, I must avoid that fattening food.
Whenever I’m driving my car and I see people texting while driving, I stop my car on the side of the road.
I have to workout every day because I am addicted to exercise-induced dopamine.
I feel overcome with a combination of romantic melancholy and giddy excitement whenever there is a thunderstorm.
We use subordination to show cause and effect. To create subordinate clauses, we must use a subordinate conjunction:
The essential ingredient in a complex sentence is the subordinate conjunction:
|
after |
once |
until |
I workout too much. I have tenderness in my elbow.
Because I workout too much, I suffer tenderness in my elbow.
My elbow hurts. I’m working out.
Even though my elbow hurts, I’m working out.
We use coordination to show equal rank of ideas. To combine sentences with coordination we use FANBOYS (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so)
The calculus class has been cancelled. We will have to do something else.
The calculus class has been cancelled, so we will have to do something else.
I want more pecan pie. They only have apple pie.
I want more pecan pie, but they only have apple pie.
Using FANBOYS creates compound sentences
Angelo loves to buy a new radio every week, but his wife doesn’t like it.
You have high cholesterol, so you have to take statins.
I am tempted to eat all the rocky road ice cream, yet I will force myself to nibble on carrots and celery.
I want to go to the Middle Eastern restaurant today, and I want to see a movie afterwards.
I really like the comfort of elastic-waist pants, but wearing them makes me feel like an old man.
Both subordination and coordination combine sentences into smoother, clearer sentences.
The following four sentences are made smoother and clearer with the help of subordination:
McMahon felt gluttonous. He inhaled five pizzas. He felt his waist press against his denim waistband in a cruel, unforgiving fashion. He felt an acute ache in his stomach.
Because McMahon felt gluttonous, he inhaled five pizzas upon which he felt his waist press against his denim waistband resulting in an acute stomachache.
Another Example
Joe ate too much heavily salted popcorn. The saltiness made him thirsty. He consumed several gallons of water before bedtime. He was up going to the bathroom all night. He got a bad night’s sleep. He performed terribly during his job interview.
Due to his foolish consumption of salted popcorn, Joe was so thirsty he drank several gallons of water before bedtime, which caused him to go to the bathroom all night, interfering with his night’s sleep and causing him to do terribly on his job interview.
Another Example
Bob dropped his peanut butter sandwich in the tiger’s enclosure. He leaned over the fence to reach for his sandwich. He fell over the fence. A tiger approached Bob. The zookeeper ran between the stupid zoo customer and the wild beast. The zookeeper tore his rotator cuff.
After Bob dropped his peanut butter sandwich in the tiger’s enclosure, he leaned over the fence to recover his sandwich and fell into the enclosure during which time he was approached by a hungry tiger, forcing the nearby zookeeper to run between Bob and wild beast. During the struggle, the zookeeper tore his rotator cuff.
Don’t Do Subordination Overkill
After Bob dropped his peanut butter sandwich in the tiger’s enclosure, he leaned over the fence to recover his sandwich and fell into the enclosure during which time he was approached by a hungry tiger forcing the nearby zookeeper to run between Bob and the wild beast in such a manner that the zookeeper tore his rotator cuff, which resulted in a prolonged disability leave and the loss of his job, a crisis that compelled the zookeeper to file a lawsuit against Bob for financial damages.
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Your Annotated Bibliography
Your annotated bibliography, like your Works Cited page, shows your sources (in this case 5) in alphabetical order.
Under each listing, you need 3 paragraphs:
Provide a concise summary.
Show the significance or quality of the source (authority, credibility, thoroughness, relevance).
Explain the source's purpose or usefulness for supporting your thesis.
Outlines for Essays That Argue a Position
Present the topic
Concede your opponents' position
Develop a thesis statement that both asserts your position and addresses your opponents.
Provide your first reason (mapping component) with support.
Provide your second reason (mapping component) with support.
(Etc.)
Counterargument-Refutation Section
Conclusion
Harvard College Writing Center Conclusion Advice
Purdue Owl Formal Topic Outline
Common Errors: Comma Splices and Sentence Fragments
Find the comma splice:
Grading freshmen composition essays makes you lose IQ points. Why? Because there’s only one of you grading over 500 sub-literate essays a semester. You don’t raise them up, by sheer numbers, they pull you down. Try telling this to your Dean and see how sympathetic he is. He’ll say, “We hired you to change the future of America, you nincompoop!”
Identify Comma Splices and Fragments in the Following
I’m in a constant struggle to lose weight. I exercise like a fitness demon, that’s not the problem. My problem is that I eat like a crazed survivor of a famine whose every meal must compensate for the deprivation I’ve suffered in some cosmic universe that doesn’t exist. Except in my gluttonous imagination.
I embraced the six meals a day philosophy a long time ago. The premise is that you should eat several small meals, each one no bigger than the palm of your hand. Rather than eat three large meals and thereby overburden your digestive system. The problem is that my six meals aren’t palm sized, they’re more the size of a watermelon and even then I’m still hungry. Now that you mention it, I don’t even eat six meals a day, I eat ten. And not small snacks either. We’re talking substantial heaping cartloads of food.
Did I tell you I can’t stop eating after one plate? I like to take seconds and thirds. Sometimes fourths. And then there’s my daughters’ leftovers, Panini grilled cheese pesto sandwiches, popcorn, tortilla chips, pancakes, waffles, French toast. I snort it all up like an anteater as I clean the kitchen table.
Have we discussed chocolate cake? I need two large slices, about twice a week, to fend off the existential vacuum. I’ll take red velvet in a pinch. Though it doesn’t penetrate my craving sensors as deeply as the chocolate.
My wife is currently baking coffee cinnamon swirl cake because she likes to bake a dessert before we watch our favorite show Game of Thrones.
I told her I didn’t want any coffee cake as I’m trying to trim my waistline, but she reminded me that I already ate over half of it. I don’t even remember what I’m eating, I think I’m in trouble.
Sentence Fragments on Owl Purdue
According to Andrea A. Lunsford in The St. Martin’s Handbook, Eight Edition, there are 20 writing errors that merit “The Top 20.”
One. Wrong word: Confusing one word for another.
Here's a list of wrong word usage.
A full-bodied red wine compliments the Pasta Pomodoro.
Compliment is a to say something nice about someone.
Complement is to complete or match well with something.
The BMW salesman excepted my counteroffer of 55K for the sports sedan.
The word should be accepted.
Kryptonite effects Superman in such a way that he loses his powers.
Effect is a noun. Affect is a verb, so it should be the following:
Kryptonite affects Superman in a such a way that he loses his powers.
There superpowers were compromised by the Gamma rays.
We need to use the possessive plural pronoun their.
Two. Missing comma after an introductory phrase or clause
Terrified of slimy foods, Robert hid behind the restaurant’s dumpster.
In spite of my aversion to rollercoasters, I attended the carnival with my family.
Three. Incomplete documentation
Noted dietician and nutritionist Mike Manderlin observes that, “Dieting is a mental illness.”
It should read:
Noted dietician and nutritionist Mike Manderlin observes that, “Dieting is a mental illness” (277).
Four. Vague Pronoun Reference
Focusing on the pecs during your Monday-Wednesday-Friday workouts is a way of giving you more time to work on your quads and glutes and specializing on the way they’re used in different exercises.
Before Jennifer screamed at Brittany, she came to the conclusion that she was justified in stealing her boyfriend.
Five. Spelling (including homonyms, words that have same spelling but different meanings)
No one came forward to bare witness to the crime.
No one came forward to bear witness to the crime.
Every where we went, we saw fast food restaurants.
Everywhere we went, we saw fast food restaurants.
Love is a disease. It’s sickness derives from its power to intoxicate and create capricious, short-term infatuation.
Its sickness derives from its power to intoxicate and create capricious, short-term infatuation.
Six. Mechanical error with a quotation
In his best-selling book Love Is a Virus from Outer Space, noted psychologist Michael M. Manderlin asserts that, “Falling in love is a form of madness for which there is no cure”.
In his best selling book Love Is a Virus from Outer Space, noted psychologist Michael M. Manderlin asserts that, “Falling in love is a form of madness for which there is no cure.”
In his best selling book Love Is a Virus from Outer Space, noted psychologist Michael M. Manderlin asserts that, “Falling in love is a form of madness for which there is no cure” (18).
“It forever stuns me that people make life decisions based on something as fickle and capricious as love”, Michael Manderlin writes (22).
“It forever stuns me that people make life decisions based on something as fickle and capricious as love,” Michael Manderlin writes (22).
Seven . Unnecessary comma
I need to workout when at home, and while taking vacations.
You do however use a comma if the comma is between two independent clauses:
I need to workout at home, and when I go on vacations, I bring my yoga mat to hotels.
I need to workout every day, because I’m addicted to the exercise-induced dopamine.
You do however use a comma after a dependent clause beginning with because:
Because I’m addicted to exercise-induced dopamine, I need to workout everyday.
Peaches, that are green, taste hideous.
The above is an example of an independent clause with a essential information or restrictive information. Not all peaches taste hideous, only green ones. The meaning of the entire sentence needs the dependent clause so there are no commas.
However, if the clause is additional information, the clause is called nonessential or nonrestrictive, and we do use commas:
Peaches, which are on sale at Whole Foods, are my favorite fruit.
Eight. Unnecessary or missing capitalization
Some Traditional Chinese Medicines containing Ephedra remain legal.
We only use capital letters for proper nouns, proper adjectives, first words of sentences, important words in titles, along with certain words indicating directions and family relationships.
Nine. Missing word
The site foreman discriminated women and promoted men with less experience.
The site foreman discriminated against women and promoted men with less experience.
Chris’ behavior becomes bizarre that his family asks for help.
Chris’ behavior becomes so bizarre that his family asks for help.
Ten. Faulty sentence structure
The information which high school athletes are presented with mainly includes information on what credits needed to graduate and thinking about the college which athletes are trying to play for, and apply.
A sentence that starts out with one kind of structure and then changes to another kind can confuse readers. Make sure that each sentence contains a subject and a verb, that subjects and predicates make sense together, and that comparisons have clear meanings. When you join elements (such as subjects or verb phrases) with a coordinating conjunction, make sure that the elements have parallel structures.
The reason I prefer yoga at home to the gym is because I prefer privacy.
I prefer yoga at home to the gym because of privacy.
- Missing Comma with a Nonrestrictive Element
Marina who was the president of the club was the first to speak.
The clause who was the president of the club does not affect the basic meaning of the sentence: Marina was the first to speak.
A nonrestrictive element gives information not essential to the basic meaning of the sentence. Use commas to set off a nonrestrictive element.
- Unnecessary Shift in Verb Tense
Priya was watching the great blue heron. Then she slips and falls into the swamp.
Verbs that shift from one tense to another with no clear reason can confuse readers.
- Missing Comma in a Compound Sentence
Meredith waited for Samir and her sister grew impatient.
Without the comma, a reader may think at first that Meredith waited for both Samir and her sister.
A compound sentence consists of two or more parts that could each stand alone as a sentence. When the parts are joined by a coordinating conjunction, use a comma before the conjunction to indicate a pause between the two thoughts.
- Unnecessary or Missing Apostrophe (including its/it's)
Overambitious parents can be very harmful to a childs well-being.
The car is lying on it's side in the ditch. Its a white 2004 Passat.
To make a noun possessive, add either an apostrophe and an s (Ed's book) or an apostrophe alone (the boys' gym). Do not use an apostrophe in the possessive pronouns ours, yours, and hers. Useits to mean belong to it; use it's only when you mean it is or it has.
- Fused (run-on) sentence
Klee's paintings seem simple, they are very sophisticated.
She doubted the value of medication she decided to try it once.
A fused sentence (also called a run-on) joins clauses that could each stand alone as a sentence with no punctuation or words to link them. Fused sentences must be either divided into separate sentences or joined by adding words or punctuation.
- Comma Splice
I was strongly attracted to her, she was beautiful and funny.
We hated the meat loaf, the cafeteria served it every Friday.
A comma splice occurs when only a comma separates clauses that could each stand alone as a sentence. To correct a comma splice, you can insert a semicolon or period, connect the clauses with a word such as and or because, or restructure the sentence.
- Lack of pronoun/antecedent agreement
Every student must provide their own uniform.
Pronouns must agree with their antecedents in gender (male or female) and in number (singular or plural). Many indefinite pronouns, such as everyone and each, are always singular. When a singular antecedent can refer to a man or woman, either rewrite the sentence to make the antecedent plural or to eliminate the pronoun, or use his or her, he or she, and so on. When antecedents are joined by or or nor, the pronoun must agree with the closer antecedent. A collection noun such as team can be either singular or plural, depending on whether the members are seen as a group or individuals.
- Poorly Integrated Quotation
A 1970s study of what makes food appetizing "Once it became apparent that the steak was actually blue and the fries were green, some people became ill" (Schlosser 565).
Corrected
In a 1970s study about what makes food appetizing, we read, "Once it became apparent that the steak was actually blue and the fries were green, some people became ill" (Schlosser 565).
"Dumpster diving has serious drawbacks as a way of life" (Eighner 383). Finding edible food is especially tricky.
Corrected
"Dumpster diving has serious drawbacks as a way of life," we read in Eighner's book (383). One of the drawbacks is that finding food can be especially difficult.
Quotations should fit smoothly into the surrounding sentence structure. They should be linked clearly to the writing around them (usually with a signal phrase) rather than dropped abruptly into the writing.
- Missing or Unnecessary Hyphen
This paper looks at fictional and real life examples.
A compound adjective modifying a noun that follows it requires a hyphen.
The buyers want to fix-up the house and resell it.
A two-word verb should not be hyphenated. A compound adjective that appears before a noun needs a hyphen. However, be careful not to hyphenate two-word verbs or word groups that serve as subject complements.
- Sentence Fragment
No subject
Marie Antoinette spent huge sums of money on herself and her favorites. And helped to bring on the French Revolution.
No complete verb
The aluminum boat sitting on its trailer.
Beginning with a subordinating word
We returned to the drugstore. Where we waited for our buddies.
A sentence fragment is part of a sentence that is written as if it were a complete sentence. Reading your draft out loud, backwards, sentence by sentence, will help you spot sentence fragments.
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