Here are some examples of my journal entries. There are others I wrote
but I chose these ones because they relate to my personal life as well.
The first one about Rhetoric situations, was the first journal I read for this class and it was difficult initially. It was, in a way, the base for the rest of the readings I did in class. Bitzer's article explained how different situations call for different types of genres or writings. For example, situations that repeatedly occur , such as a wedding, require a common text to be involved, such vows to be written.I learned that different genres of writing are developed as a result of the world around us.In addition to learning this in class this also relates to my goal of dunking. I had to follow workout plans that were designed for someone like me, trying to jump higher. There was a repeated situation of people wanting to jump higher and thus programs were made to help them. The next article written by Sondra Perl discussed the idea of an unskilled writer. She expressed her idea that many unskilled writers may benefit more from conducting correct studies on themselves rather than a teacher trying to enhance their writing. Meaning if they study themselves in a systematic way, the student can analyze strong and weak points about their writing and develop better techniques. This helped me because I felt I was able to write well but actually reviewing my strategies learned a lot about myself. This also is seen in my workouts for my dunk training. I followed a specific workout that was developed by an expert but i still needed to do workouts based on what worked for me. Everyone is different so I had to do more of some workout and less of others to get the best results. Also I watched other people trying to reach the same goal on YouTube and saw what workouts they did and their results. This is similar to learning new things even from unskilled writers. The third article by Dominique Ransom was about a study she conducted on herself. She was able to learn about herself and improve herself as a writer. I also conducted a week long study on myself and as a result i became a more efficient writer and overall student. I describe more about that study on another page and i have a paper i wrote about it. This self study technique was also used in my training. I took videos of myself working out to make sure I was using proper form and doing everything correctly. It also let me see if i was making progress.I also recorded my progress and which areas i am improving kind of like a self study. The fourth article By John Swales discusses discourse communities. He defines six characteristics that outline a discourse community. I learned form his article that most places are a discourse community of their own and have their own specific language, public goals and even membership. This taught me even a place like a basketball court can be a discourse and after I did some research, it did have most of the characteristics which made the court a discourse community. You can a paper I wrote about this discourse community on another page. As for my dunk training, there seems to be a discourse community of people trying to dunk. Many people on YouTube record themselves training or attempting to dunk and I used this information a lot in my training. The fifth article by Tierney and Pearson explains how one needs to understand both process of reading and writing to master one or the other. By understanding the processes of one process , one can learn how to perform the other more effectively. For example, by understanding how someone reads something, you can compose your writing according to that audience. This can relate to my training because of two general concepts. The weight training and the technique, plyometrics training. The weight training is obviously using weights to build strength, while the plyometrics is jumping based exercises used to improve jumping technique and fast twitch muscle fibers. Doing a combination of both of these is the best way to train. One needs to do both to become successful. The last article by Stephen Fry is about his web video he made which had a voice recording playing and as every word was spoken, written words on the screen went along with it. In his video he explained how language is interpreted by different people and how some people try to act like they have mastered the language because they can correct other people's grammatical mistakes. He explains his view that simple mistakes do not make some one better or worse. One needs to know the true meaning of language. This relates to my training in the blatant way that it was a web video. I posted my training in many videos on YouTube. Also how some people try to correct my ways without even having a full understanding themselves. Some people give me advice that they haven't even been successful with themselves. These examples are just one way these articles related to me and my dunk training. keep reading to learn more about how they relate to my actual exercises. |
When i started my training i new the main goal i had in mind. This was to jump high enough and to dunk. When i first started my program i had to start doing new exercises i hadn't done before. I also had to do them daily and analyze my progress. Comparing this to the journal entries, I read the articles and analyzed them weekly and slowly learned about my writing process and writing in general, just how i learned how the workout helped me and saw my improvement. I also read articles by experts and non experts that both benefited me.
Here are some videos of my exercises i used during my training. |