Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Advice for next years students

Welcome to English 304!

You'll enjoy this class! It teaches you a lot of important information that you'll need as soon as you graduate but without overwhelming you. For example, anyone know how to complete a successful resume right now? What about a cover letter? You'll learn how to do both of those documents and if you already know, you'll get feedback so you can improve them.

My advice for the class is PAY ATTENTION! In class, you'll go over what is expected on assignments and when they are due and if you don't pay attention, you won't know what to do. Also, do your blog. They are not hard, just type up your ideas and reactions once a week.

My final suggestion is to utilize the weekly to-do lists on Angie's website. It tells you everything you'll be doing that week so there are no surprises. Also, if you have a particularly hectic week, you can budget your time appropriately so you don't get overly stressed!

Doing those things will help you be successful in English 304! Good Luck and Have Fun!!!

Sunday, April 20, 2008

Dehumanizing Language

This week, we did research on dehumanizing language. We looked for examples of the language online and in articles. I looked up articles on Hitler and the nazi's. I thought that dehumanizing language would be easy to find from things that Hitler said but I was surprised to find the opposite. In the information I found, he is very careful to not use any type of language that would immediately offend someone. He choose his words carefully for the most part and when I think about, it makes sense. Hitler was a great speaker and extremely persuasive and he could not be that way if he went around being offensive to people. He was careful to reach everyone.

I found it was hard to find a lot of examples of dehumanizing language. Apparently, public speakers are fairly careful to not use this type of language too much.

Sunday, April 13, 2008

Ethical lapses in the Workplace

The article seems like solid evidence that ethical lapses do affect the workplace and the productivity of the employees. However, this article does not shock me. These days people love scandal and gossip so when something unethical happens in their workplace, people are going to be distracted and talk to each other; therefore distracting others. I know that when an ethical lapse occurs in studio, we will talk about it with our fellow students and end up not getting any work done. According to the survey, I guess that's what happens in a workplace also.
I think that the article does a good job of describing how distracted the employees got and how they reacted to an ethical lapse in their workplace. We just assume that it happens but the article uses specific statistics to prove it.

Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Group Blog

I updated the group blog for this week's blog : )