confused about this

pink suit girl??

has he?

weird

Even beyond corporate emotion-management, there is a huge societal pressure to be happy. Rather than accepting their full range of emotions, many people ask the questions, "how can I feel happy all the time?", and "how can I avoid feeling sad/angry?" because society places a significant premium on happiness. Negative emotions can't and shouldn't be eradicated; they are signifiers that something has gone wrong and in some cases alert the "feeler" to potential problems to be solved.

Potentially the opposite process of training to be a flight attendant. Why do we promote one process for improved mental health and the opposite for a stable job? I'm amazed people in these jobs can put up with this degree of dissonance.

All of this is incredibly relatable to the previous passage. BS might require less work than actually becoming invested in, for example, an essay topic, but it still requires work. If even BS proves to be too difficult to create, a student or author is likely to just give up, or create BS which is too obviously phony to make the cut for a teacher or publisher.

perhaps the lack of study on the concept of bullshit is the literary society's attempt to pretend that our standards for written content by students haven't been lowering drastically as teachers' resources and patience dwindle in the modern political environment. (this isn't supposed to sound like a conspiracy theory)

Appropriate register considering that the entire essay is focused on the rather informal subject of "bullshit"

This section in particular is extra engaging because Grant draws strong and frequent parallels between the rap music she is studying and real-world conditions, followed by analysis of how the two interact. The section does a much better job of integrating all three promised subjects in the title of the essay than the last section.

This attempt to wrap up the entire discussion of gangsta image and causation of violence the course of a sentence is kind of disappointing. The subject matter was so intriguing, it would have been great to have an equally interesting and thorough conclusion.

I agree with Matthew's following comment that structure seems to be somewhat chronological in this article, but I don't think that it was the most effective structure she could have used. The peak of interest in this essay as far as complexity of ideas and intertextuality feels to me like it occurs in the middle, and the phrase "best for last" has cliche status for good reason. Having the most complex and exciting argument at the end of an essay tends to leave more of a lasting impact on a reader.

Here is a second instance of Mann using the personal experience of readers to the advantage of his argument. A standpoint reached from my own experience will stick with me more than anything Mann can form with his own examples. I find this technique to be quite potent.

they've used the word patina so frequently on HGTV that the word alone holds a strong white association for me. Perhaps white Americans like patinas both on music and metal home decorations.

at least country music is inclusive in this regard! You don't have to be an Okie from Muskogee to sing country music.

The wording of this is just short of clear, and I'm bothered by it.

It's good that there's a give and take of complexity between argument and structure. The argument is tough to follow at times, but we can give it extra focus because the structure is laid out plainly.

I like that Mann doesn't lead with, "here's something incorrect Bush said," but instead merely presents the excerpt to the reader without framing it that way just yet . In reading this I felt some mental dissonance, which subtly told me that this definition of country music isn't all that accurate. Because all of this wasn't plainly stated, and came from my own experience, I paid closer attention to the rest of the article.

“Human Sadness” by Julian Casablancas+The Voidz might be a bit unsuited for play at house party, and it is notably longer than the average song length at 11 minutes, but somehow I never grow tired of it. The broad title fits the song well, as it seems to be a narrative of both Julian Casablancas’ own sadness in his life as a result of estrangement from his father, as well as the sorrows that haunt all humans as a result of greed and too much dependence on emotion rather than reason. Casablancas writes lyrics that are quite personal and specific, such as “hits you on the head when nobody’s there / then he says ‘come here, could you fix my tie?’” regarding the way his father, the well-dressed founder of a modeling agency, treated him coldly when they weren’t in the public view. Between glimpses of Casablancas’ relationship with his father he writes about the human condition; “vanity overriding wisdom” being a way that social interaction can be corrupted. “Human Sadness”, by addressing both general woes of the human population and intimate details from Casablancas’ own life, is both relatable and personal. This seems to be the kind of alluring authenticity Barker and Taylor see in the blues songs they examine in their article.

Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8k3qB61lhk

Reminds me a bit of fundamental attribution error. If politicians are unable to see opponents as individuals of character apart from the mistakes they've made in the past, they are making what psychology and also many voters call an error.

If this is true, and we create our identity out of a series of decisions to either satisfy or contradict the wishes of our "significant others," then of course our identity would be largely based on others' recognition. If others place some stereotype upon us, we only have the choice to comply with it or to reject it, without the option to act as if the stereotype doesn't exist and act freely in some middle ground. Thus recognition plays a large and somewhat irritating part in controlling who we are.

Defining words that could potentially be misinterpreted like this is a big part of getting one's point across. I need to do this more often.

The structure of Taylor's argument flows notably well; I like that he presents the necessary examples for understanding an argument in a separate paragraph before continuing on to make his point.

phrases like "cross section" and "collect material" make Hurston's endeavor seem scientific, and thus probably more authentic from the public perspective at the time that desired to study "American Negro life".

this was my word

This fits with Wordsworth's desire to keep his subject matter realistic while still entertaining. Wordsworth doesn't need some freak occurrence to make his stories appealing to audiences like the novels of his day apparently do. Through his own power of storytelling he can spin interest even out of less than spectacular events.

3 Wordsworth believes there is a distinction between his own poetry and others in that he writes realistically about significant events, but through a lens of "imagination", while other poets of the time write using language that veils the true nature of their subjects. How does Wordsworth define this distinction in his preface?

2 With this statement Wordsworth clarifies that his motive is not to make poetry boring or overly tedious by any means, but rather to write about excerpts of real life which are extraordinary rather than manufacturing interest with excessive and pointless language.

1 We now know in hindsight that the collaboration of Wordsworth and his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge is indeed credited as a major contribution to the launch of the Romantic Age, but whether this form "[interests] mankind permanently" is still up for debate.

how will we practice writing to be understood by audiences other than the college-age-writing-student audience currently available?