Oh, How Far We've Come

Preliminary Blog Post

Let me start off by saying I hope you're all doing well with your exams and not stressing out too much! I know for me as a new freshman at BYU this is definitely a learning experience! In preparation for our "salon" tomorrow, here's a look at some of the great work our class has done over the course of the semester.

Montana & Shuan - Our Musings

For the preparation for the in-class salon, Montana and I decided to work together. We took the time today to look through all the blogs and selected 2 individuals to read through their experience in this class. We reminisced of all the projects and posts we have done. It was great fun to look back and see all that we've accomplished this semester.

Paper Again

So this didn't end up being as bad as I thought it would be. I managed to finish the paper although I didn't end up using all that much of my rough draft. I had talked with Morgan Mix on Saturday to talk about the project and she had had some very good Ideas. This paper was very challenging to write but that is what happens when you just randomly choose your topic from a list. Morgan and I had talked so that we could help each other figure out a direction to go with our papers and she had some very good ideas. Unfortunately the ideas didn't help me with writing my paper that much in the end because I stuck to writing on a bibliography instead of doing something more related to her subject. I'm glad that I finished the paper and in the end it wasn't as bad as I was thinking it was going to be when I posted and called the paper the paper of doom.

The Academic Paper of Awesomeness

The day of reckoning draws dearer, our papers are due tonight! I guess I could've posted about my progress earlier in the week, but as I'm sure we can all attest to, this week has been insane!! Either way I would very much appreciate your input, even at the eleventh hour.

As I'm sure some of you may have already inferred by my comments about it in class, (and I apologize if they've gotten annoying, I just really like this topic) my academic paper is about the political ramifications of applying print to legal texts.

 Here's my intro paragraph:

"The American Revolution, the English Civil War, and the French and Russian Revolutions, all are examples of unprecedented political and social change that occurred after a particularly pivotal event in history – then invention of the printing press. The application of printing to the law led to greater political change than any other singular event in history. This primarily brought about a change in the way people communicated legal knowledge, and thereby how they communicated their ideas on the subject. There are two main results of printed law that directly caused this change: greater public access to uniform legal decisions and court proceedings, and a more public discourse regarding law and its functions leading to the wide dissemination of political ideas. While some may argue that the transition from spoken to written law or some other turning point in history was more groundbreaking in its nature, it’s quite apparent that the transition from oral and written legal traditions to the printed word had an effect with far greater scope than those of other developments."


In case you didn't catch it, my thesis is, "The application of printing to the law led to greater political change than any other singular event in history." I think it's simple, provocative, and gets my point across. 

What are your thoughts? Did this really lead to more political change than ANY other single event in history? The only one I could think of was possibly The American Revolution, which I believe depended a lot on print knowledge in the first place. I think it's a pretty divisive statement, so I'm sure there will be someone who disagrees with me. Thanks in advance for your input!

A Different Path..

So when I was typing up the paper, I realized that I wanted to take the paper in a different direction. So I revamped my  thesis and intro paragraph.

Here it is:

          Since the start of elementary school, many students remember the multiple practice sheets taken home to repeatedly copy the same word over and over again to remember not only how to write the words but how to spell them. Orthography is the study devoted and concerned with letters and spelling of a language. Learning to read, while it may seem absurd to think it is especially difficult since the frustration once experienced took place, for the majority of the population, when they were very young. The acquisition of spelling is vital to orthographic knowledge that is gained while learning to read. Literacy is affected by the orthographic knowledge acquired because without learning how to spell correctly, word identification and comprehension become issues. Orthography has impacted general education in respects to literacy greatly and has affected how people gain the knowledge skills required to be able to read.

The Paper of Doom

While working on my paper on bibliography I have been having trouble finding articles that relate to the direction that I have wanted to go, which is that bibliographies are more than just a way to find the sources that others have used to write on their topics.

The only book that I have found that is truly useful is a book that was written in 1934. I found this really funny cause the book had stamped in the front April 4 1954. The fact that I was using a book that my great grandma could have been using really amused me.

The good thing that happened for me was that Professor Burton recommended a number of people that I could contact to interview them about bibliographies. I was able to contact Robert Means and he spent time with me discussing bibliographies. He made a number of really good points, which I shall let you know more about when I use them in my paper.

Here is the start of my paper I may end up changing it completely around after my interview but I wasn’t able to interview Professor Means before the rough draft was due. If anyone has any pointer on what I could do or use to better cover the topic of Bibliographies I would be happy to hear them.

While talking with some people who are not members of our class about the subject of bibliographies, they attempted to help me. Only after receiving some direction from them on where I could go with my topic did I realize that Biographies and Bibliographies can be easily confused. Many people don’t tend to think much about bibliographies. They will glance at the end of the book or at the footnotes to see where the information for the information that we are reading is from and that is as far as most people actually get on the topic. However, bibliographies have a rich history, and do much more than just point us to where writers get their information.

When we look at some of the first bibliographies we do not know who the compilers of the bibliographies are. These bibliographers spent many hours reading and attempting to find many books on the same subject. They would then compile what they had found into a sort of list or index. The few of the first bibliographies that we do know the name of the person who wrote the compilation, we only know because they included their name on the list.

Bibliographies come in a few different forms. We have the normal biography, which is just a list that includes the name and author of the work along with a number of other details. We then have something which when combined into a list on the subject is extremely usefully, the annotated bibliography.

An annotated bibliography is a summary of what the main points of the book are about. They include many of the same things that a normal bibliography has, such as the title, the author’s name, and the year it was published. The most important thing about the annotated bibliography though is the fact that it summarizes the thoughts of another author and allows for another to quickly search for what the book is about.

Bibliographies have come from

Brainstorming Individuality