Pollan

I love being a food consumer, because food is one of the greatest aspect of life. Foods from the basic vegetables, chicken, juice, milk, and definitely the sweets (candy, cake, ice cream, etc.) are the foods I love most. In the meat category, I mainly eat chicken and beef, and don’t bother eating pork. I refuse from eating pork because in the third grade I had a small obsession of the movie “Charlottes Web,” and thought the pig in the movie was the cutest thing on earth, and from then on I always imagined I would eat Wilbur the pig. In time, my family has always taught me to try new things and I ended up loving mayo and the vinegars from tasting my moms Subway Club sandwich one day. On the other hand, I do know a few farmers because Sheboygan is right next to cleveland. My friend Micah owns a farm, and he tells me how he slaughters his pigs to eat sometimes, and made me relate to “Power Steer” better than I thought I would. I’m not sure where most of the food I eat are from, but occasionally I turn to the label and see what state and where it was made in. 

Michael Pollan was born in 1955 in Long Island, New York, and in the future he marred a painter named Judith Belzer. Pollans education consisted of Bennington College, Oxford University, and Columbia University earning a Master’s degree in English. Other than creating the story “Power Steer,” Pollan wrote other books such as The Botany of Desire, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, and the Omnivore’s Dilemma. These stories related also the the agricultural industry dealing with farming, crops, growth and also the meat Industry. It seems like Pollan wants his intended audience to know about the food movements he’s discussing in his books. 

English 101 Experience

Being apart of English 101, has gave me new experiences. New experiences of interpreting a story, researching further information about a specific topic, and also learning how to use Tumblr, in order to communicate outside of the class environment about the course itself. These are the things I enjoy about english 101, and this course has improved my knowledge about english and writing essays from being in High School. On the other hand, I feel like the groups and blogs are good how they are, but everybody has different ways of teaching themselves how to learn. For instance work sheets, presentations, posters, or just small little things to help make a story understand better. By looking at the questions “What do you need from each other as classmates as you move closer to portfolio? What Concerns do you share?” I feel like we need from each other are good editing skills to help each other pass portfolio review. The one other thing I feel like is helpful, is going to the writing center because they go over your essay with you and present new ideas on how to help make your essay become more understandable. 

Interpreting the Course Goals

By looking at the English 101 Course Interpretive Goals, I feel as if i understand them most of the time. In the first section it states “Articulate and maintain a controlling purpose by…” This portion feels like its based upon the purpose an author/writer is trying to get across. Reading this section sounds like the english department wants us to have a thesis in our essays, so therefore the reviewers knows what we are going to discuss. With the purpose must come the audience, and it says “responding to what matters to or is at stake for those the writer addresses in the writing and those the writer responds to in the writing.” The readers are the audience and if someone reads a certain writing document, then they have thoughts that come with it. They could be imagining the concept of the story or guessing what comes next. Lastly, the final bullet point in this section says “creating and maintaining coherence and clarity for readers by shaping patterns of arrangement and other writing choices.” Arrangment seems like it’s refering to the word organization, and organization in a paper is very important because organization help keeps up a good flow. The English department seems as if they want us to have this for our three interpretive essays. 

The second section is called “Critically interpret course texts by…” In class we discussed this section and the details, which really helped make my understanding improve. I was first confused about the “describing and evaluating how the arrangement, design, and other material conditions of the interpreted texts shape a reader’s understanding.” This was confusing because I wasn’t sure how to make an essay shape a reader’s understanding. Now, this acts seems to mean that the writer must put a bunch of details and explanations included to help the audience interpret the specific sections from a story we talk about. “Incorporating, contextualizing, and examining multiple passages from the texts being interpreted.” seems to me this means, we must include a few or many different examples from a story to help get our purpose across. The second bullet point talks about “identifying and analyzing strategies, key terms, distinctions and questions being asked within the texts being interpeted.” I feel this defines as included and talking about the key words the author writes about, for instance if the paper is about “Immigration,” the writer would point out the difficulities they have, where they are coming from and why, the destination they are trying to reach, and quotes from interviews the immigrants have. 

In the last section talks about summaries, definitions, examples, grammar, and citing our sources. From reading this, it seems like it is a basic understanding without the big words, and a reader can know right away what they are talking about. The key terms i listed above is what this last section talks about. The writer must include some sort of background information and summarize the story in order to help the audience get a full understanding of the text and context from a story. Citing these sources we find and read from are important, because if we didn’t site them, first we could get in trouble for it, and second it shows what kind of place or medium we found information in. 

The one question I have about these interpretive goals is, If the English Department incorporated examples to help us, the readers, interpret these, would they have a better understanding to the people that don’t understand them?