Alzaldua

Summary
Alzaldua explores art and writing by looking at art and her writings as pieces of art. She describers her writings as things that have minds of their own at times and build themselves up. Art is a major part of the writing, looking at the different styles and how these modern styles can relate back to writings. With art, comes expression, which is a major part of not only art but writing as well. With the various cultures discussed, she is aiming to educate the white american about the other cultures that are found in America and how their works educate those who do not know a lot about them.

Synthesis
The first artist I thought of while reading Alzaldua was McCloud because of the stress that is being placed on both art and expression. Another author that came to mind in the article was Smitherman. A big part of Smitherman's article dealt with culture and how these have a major impact on the style of writing. Finally, Elbow is easily relatable to Alzaldua because identity and voice are both major components of the two pieces.

Dialectical Notebook

Response	Quotation
I found this quote to really set the mood for the whole article. It made it relatable and added a family outlook on it.	“I preferred the world of the imagination to the death of sleep. My sister, Hilda who slept in the same bed with me, would threaten to tell my mother unless I told her a story.” (220)
I feel like this happens for a lot of writers. The minute that you start putting things together the story begins to write itself.	“The whole thing has had a mind of it’s own, escaping me and insisting on putting together the pieces of its own puzzle with minimal direction from my will.” (220)
Painting is something that has always been a hobby of mine so to see familiar terms that I have studied being used in the text it helped me to connect more. I also find a great interest in learning about other cultures so my interest was kept.	“Modern western painters have ‘borrowed,’ copied, or other-wise extrapolated the art of tribal cultures and called it cubism, surrealism, symbolism.” (221)
Writing can definitely lead to having to look at who you are more carefully which is hard for some people.	“Writing produces anxiety. Looking inside myself and my experience, looking at my conflicts, engenders anxiety in me.” (224)

My Thoughts
I found the article to be easy to read. I loved how she opened the story by starting off with describing how she used to read under the covers with her flashlight. I felt like the piece was easily relatable because most people have family ties that are based in other parts of the world, and I also know how language can be hard especially when in different settings. When I went to Spain, it was very hard to try and speak the language to people who are completely fluent because I did not want to mess up. More people need to be open to learning about different cultures and I do think one of the best ways is to study art because then you can see people expressing themselves, who are in their element.

Project 3

Link for Prezi from Project 3
http://prezi.com/rozo3gylcwkc/health-literacy/?kw=view-rozo3gylcwkc&rc=ref-20990717

Project 1 Introduction/Synthesis

You are standing alone in a room full of people trying your best to look comfortable and not at all awkward. You are playing with the straw in your drink, looking down into the glass, when someone finally comes up and starts up a conversation by asking who you are. Obviously you will introduce yourself with your name; this one name that is more than just a few letters strung together, it is who you are and what you identify yourself with. The same can be said when writing. You identify yourself through your text, and no one else will be quite able to mimic who you are as a writer, some can try but will never be able to master it. Keeping this identity is important to do in all writing, no matter if it is a fictional story or a documentary, you need to remain who you are. There will be a number of moments where instead of being yourself, you will create a character and look through the eyes of his or her character, but still certain aspects of who you are will remain in the writing. It is inevitable.

There are several known authors who have taken on writing about personal identity in a paper. Two very well known writers include Roz Ivanic and Walker Gibson. Roz once stated, “Writing is not just about conveying content but also about the representation of self,” and this one sentence really defines the importance of one’s personal identity in writing. Not only does personal identity help the author represent themselves in text, it also allows for a better connection between the author and the reader, allowing for something a little more personal, yet at the same time, there is information being put forth so that the reader has the benefit of both connecting and learning at the same time. 

3 Library Tutorial

How to Find a Book:

When finding a book in the library instead of trying to find it in the library, it is possible to use the online website to find it instead. By going on Alice and searching, one can enter a book title and find quick results. Then, by adding different words to the search to help limit the search, one can find several different books that are within the same topic. The site also adds the possibility of looking at a map in the library and finding exactly where the book will be based on the blue print provided by the site.

Finding Full Text from Citation:

            When having the actual citation for resource with the actual author, one can use this to find the full text for this article. By going on Alice and changing the search to periodical title, one can then generate a search to find exactly the article that they are looking for. After hitting search, different records will come forward allowing the person to locate exactly the source that they are looking for. After clicking on the record, one can locate several of the different databases that are offered. The only thing to make sure to have while searching is the author and any other helpful information from the works cited.

How to Request a Book:

            Sometimes the library will not have the book that one is looking for. Luckily, the Alice website can help with that by providing a way for a student to order a book and receive it by three business days. By using Alice, you can enter the title of the book that you need and find the book from different libraries. By saying that you go to Ohio University, the book can be delivered easily. This way, even though the library itself does not  have it, there is still hope that the book can be found and the student will have it within a few days. 

Viewpoint

Definitions
Whiteness: white: quality or state of the achromatic color of greatest lightness (breading the least resemblance to black) wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

Marginalized: to relegate to an unimportant or powerless position within a society or group
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/marginalized
Another definition: (to regelate to a lower or outer edge, as of specific groups of people) "We must not marginalize the poor in our society"
http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=marginalized&sub=Search+WordNet&o2=&o0=1&o8=1&o1=1&o7=&o5=&o9=&o6=&o3=&o4=&h=000

Heterotypical: Derogatory term for attitudes and behaviors typical of straight people and straight culture. (Obviously a play on the world "stereotypical".) It can either refer to a gender-schematic view of the world or to conservative attitudes about sex and relationships.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=heterotypical

Dialectical Notebook

Response	Quotation
There is a struggle with men because as women have gained more and more in history, there has been that final goal that women are looked at as equal to men. For me it is hard to always see women and men equal in power only because I grew up in a home where the male is served first, the male has the power.	“I write this as a woman, toward women. When I say ‘woman,’ I’m speaking of woman in her inevitable struggle against conventional man: and of universal woman subject who must bring women to their senses and to their meaning in history.” (247)
I feel that this is a bit rash. I understand that she is saying that instead of writing as a woman that is trying to not write entirely like a man, a woman has to simply write as a woman, but it is not that easy, especially when much of what is written by women is written in a way to make sure not to sound like a man.	“I write woman: woman must write woman. And man, man.” (248)
I feel like since this article was published there has been a major turn for women in writing. Women have made a major impact with writing, for me when I think of a writer I think of a woman.	“It is time for women to start scoring their feats in written and oral language.” (250)
She is taking such a strong stance that it is almost hard to agree with her at this point.	“We musn’t leave them a single place that’s any more theirs alone than we are.” (254)
A woman does not have to be powerful to prove that she is not afraid, however, men do have advantages that women do not have so women may have to fear that they will have to work harder.	“The woman who still allows herself to be threatened by the big dick, who’s still impressed by the commotion of the phallic stance, who still leads a loyal master to the beat of the drum: that’s the woman of yesterday.” (258)

Alexander

Synthesis
Alexander focuses mainly on learning about and defending the LGBTQ community, just like Malinowitz, which was another author who brought up the issues of being gay and using this in writing. Flynn is another author that is easily relatable because Flynn focused on whether or not males and females composed differently. In Alexander's article the main focus was whether or not males and females are different and the transgender community and how this all affects their writing.

Dialectical Notebook

Response	Quotation
Even though women do hold some of these positions, men have always been more dominant in the world. It isn’t a thing that can be argued because it is true, there are tons of more civilization that value men more than they do women. Does this mean that every single one of these places is homophobic? Of course not. Its almost like pulling out the race card every five minutes, the minute that someone announces that they are not heterosexual, everything has to do with being homophobic.	“In the opening pages of ‘Gender of Writing,’ published in 1989, David Bleich discusses homophobic responses among students, and he links such responses to the privilege that men in general have in our society: ‘All authoritative social roles are held by men – in politics, medicine, law, religion, science, art, and, of course, the academy. It should come as no surprise that the style of thought developed by these men in the name of all people should correspond with the structure of social relations that sustains their social privileges.” (197)
People write about what they know. Obviously who you are is going to play a major role because your voice is in everything that you write. When it comes to school situations, those that are gay may be more shy when it comes to drawing attention to themselves in class because there is that fear that people may know more than they are willing to share.	“Put another way, our students’ identities, informed of prevailing, politicized, and personal definitions of gender and sexuality, can have a significant impact on their participation in class, their sense of themselves as learners and knowledge producers, and, by extension, their engagement with writing as a mode of exploration, communication, invention, and discovery.” (198)
“Natural” and “normal” comes from being part of the majority. I do think it is important to understand the struggles faced by gays, lesbians, trans genders (and everything in between) however, with all minorities comes challenges the majority does not understand.	“Acknowledging the presence of the transgendered is useful not only for understanding those who are differently gendered or whose presentation or experience of gender falls outside our ‘norms’:’but also for helping us interrogate the constructs of gender that we often take for granted as ‘natural’ or ‘normal.’ (200)
By identifying the differences, it does help show the many stereotypes, but then again there are reasons why these are present. I know more men that like football than don’t. I can’t tell you one female that is one hundred percent confident in herself. The stereotypes brought up in the book of football and insecurity are true. They are simply generalizations that help target more people than not.	“For instance, we can help students question behavioral and attitudinal differences between men and women, which may clearly exist, as arising not from a biological imperative but from sociocultural experiences of sexism and privilege.” (201)
There is a reason that this is the case. Women are insecure because there is always expected so much from them. Also, try and find a guy who does not like to feel like a hero sometimes and feel like he is strong.	“.. deploy some of the more simplistic yet pervasive gender stereotypes in our culture – feminine insecurity and masculine idiocy.” (205) from one of the pages that we did not have to read**
While reading this I was thinking the same thing. All this is going to do is highlight the differences, I really do not see how this is going to high light the transgender community.	“I am not sure that our narratives of gender swapping and transition were necessarily helping liberate participants from gender norms, even though I believe they offered us opportunities to explore useful insights.” (212)

My Thoughts
I found this article to not really serve any true purpose. Transgender communities are something that many people do not understand, and after reading this article I still do not have any better of an understanding of them. I feel that Alexander was trying more to be defensive of the LGBTQ community and try and find differences between the genders and focus a lot on the stereotypes of the members. I put a lot of my thoughts into my responses to the quotes because it is easier to focus in on the sections of the article rather than trying to say how I feel about the article as a whole because there were certain things that I could agree with and then of course there were things that I could not.