Month: November 2018

For my final post this week, the travel guide destination of choice will be Chile. Again I will be covering two points of interest, two popular food items, and tips for the trip.

Points of Interest:

Algarrobo, Chile.

Algarrobo is a resort town that settles on the coast of Chile. I picked this place as a point of interest because there is so much to see and do there. You can spend your time relaxing on the beach, but do not forget that the water is very cold there! You can go horseback riding, drive go-karts, explore little markets, and even get your fair share of hiking. Algarrobo is also home to the biggest pool in the world! “The largest swimming pool in the world is more than 3,000 feet long, with a deep end that descends 115 feet” (Five Star Alliance). The pool is so big that people are allowed to go boating and sail on it. If you ever need to get away from your troubles, Algarrobo is the place to go!

Santiago, Chile.

While being the biggest city in Chile, Santiago is also the capital. Santiago is located in a valley that is enclosed by the Andes Mountains. There is so much to do in the capital of Chile! There are plenty of malls, markets, and parks for people to take a walk. There is a lot of art and history to see too in Santiago. Make sure to bring your camera to this city because the view of the mountains is gorgeous. Santiago is full of fun and excitement, and one could never get bored there. If you do visit, make sure to spend a couple days there because you can’t hit the whole city in one day!

Foods To Try:

Empanadas.

Empanadas are very popular among the people of Chile, and I suggest eating these in large quantities because they taste amazing. Empanadas usually are filled with meat, cheese, eggs, olives, and raisins. The filling is wrapped in a type of pastry bread and is then baked to cook both the inside and the bread. Besides empanadas with the variety of different fillings, just plain cheese empanadas can taste just as good!

Pastel De Choclo.

Pastel de choclo is another popular dish in Chile. This dish is layered by sweet corn that has been baked. The inside of the plate contains a lot of meat, onions, olives, raisins, and some boiled egg. Pastel the choclo is usually the main entree at dinners with family or friends. Another way to look at pastel de choclo is to think of it as a beef/chicken/pork casserole. I suggest trying this dish at least once if you ever visit Chile!

Tips:

Since my family is from Chile, I visited the country many times, and even lived there! There is a lot of advice I can give to future tourists. I will be starting with the best time of year to travel to Chile. I would go during the spring or summer because of the warm weather and a small amount of rain. No rain means that no outdoor activities have to be canceled! Another tip of advice is that if I were you I would take advantage of having both the Andes Mountains and the beach so close to you. One final tip is to use the subway system that has been established in Santiago. The city is enormous, and the subway system is the fastest and cheapest way to get around the city. Chile will never fail to amaze its visitors.

Hello everyone! This is my first official travel guide post, and I am very excited to share my thoughts and recommendations with you. Each travel destination will have its own post, and I will be covering two points of interest, two popular food items, and tips for the trip. The destination of choice for this post is Ireland.

Points of Interest:

Dublin, Ireland.

Dublin is the capital city of Ireland. I name this city a point of interest because there is much to see and do here. The city shifts from modern buildings to historical ones in just the blink of an eye. One second you are on paved roads, and the next you are on cobblestone. Find yourself inside the Guinness Storehouse, or Dublin Castle. You can also walk the many bridges Dublin has to offer over the River Liffey. The city of Dublin will never disappoint its visitors or residents.

Cliffs of Moher.

The Cliffs of Moher are an exceptional place to visit if you ever are to travel to Ireland. The scenery is breath taking, and the entire trip is worth your while. Usually tourists will take a tour bus to arrive to the cliffs, and along the way will go through hills and villages that are fascinating to see. Once at the destination, people will set out to see the natural beauty that has been created over time. At 700 feet high, the cliffs are run along the Atlantic Ocean, and have many paths for visitors to walk on. This is a sight no one would want to miss!

Foods To Try:

Soda Bread.

Soda bread is one of the most popular foods in Ireland. Throughout history it was a nationwide food for many of the poor in Ireland, but now has become a favorite among everyone. Soda bread is typically made with pastry flour, and sodium bicarbonate to help the bread rise. Also, soda bread is eaten with the main meals served in Ireland. Make sure to try some if you ever visit!

Irish Stew.

Irish stew is another favorite among the Irish. The stew can contain many different kinds of meat, vegetables, and spices. One of the vegetables that is often included is the root vegetable, which is native to Ireland. Other vegetables are potatoes and carrots. Popular meat used in the stew is chicken, beef, and lamb. Also, this stew is considered a main dish in Ireland. Personally this was one of my favorite meals during my visit to Ireland.

Tips:

I have many tips to share with you for your future stay in Ireland. Starting with the best time to travel to Ireland. In my opinion, fall is the best time because it is not too hot or too cold (I recommend still bringing warm clothes just in case). The colors are vibrant, making the scenery much more beautiful than it already is. Next I advise to be very smart with your money. Do not worry about staying in the nicest hotel, because in the end you will only be using the hotel for sleeping and showering! Also, try to limit yourself to one fancy meal a day. Most of the delicious food is not that expensive anyway. The best advice I can give is to explore! Get lost in cities, be daring, try new things, and have loads of fun with your travel partner/partners! Ireland will show you a good time, there is no doubt about that.

This will be my first post for week one. I have decided to stick with the blog I am using now, and make the next 15-20 posts my final project. My final project will be a travel guide, and my target audience is anyone who wants to tour the world. Most of my posts will be providing readers with information based off of my own personal experiences. The rest of my posts will be analyzing some exemplary blogs/articles that I have chosen to help guide me through this project. Thank you, and I hope you all enjoy my work!

The rest of this post will be analyzing a blog post that I found to help me with this project. The reason this blog post was helpful was because its layout was similar to what I had in mind for my own travel guide posts. The blog post that I found is titled, “Hello Stockholm! Three Days in Sweden: A Travel Guide“, by user Michalela@ThisFPPlanet (link in title). The reason I loved this blog post so much was because her structure was very neat and detailed. She began her post with a great attention grabber by telling her readers about her arrival in Sweden. She then went on to list many popular things to do in Stockholm, such as walking the colorful streets of Gamla Stan, watching the changing of guards at the royal palace, or exploring favored craft beer locations. This set up is very similar to what I will be doing for my posts. I will have a small introduction, and also name some popular things to do in the location of choice. Another thing that she mentioned in her post was the food of Stockholm. I loved this because I believe that it is important to recommend to your audience what to try while they are in a foreign nation. After seeing this part of the post, I decided that I will also be including a small section about food in my travel guide posts. It was hard for me to find something wrong with her post, but I do know that my favorite part was her use of pictures. I loved how many pictures were included, and the way they were included. The more pictures, the more fun/interesting the post becomes! She also used a picture after every section of her post to give the readers an idea of the things she was writing about. The last thing I will be talking about is the way the user ended her post. She finished her post by writing about the cost and logistics of the trip. She informed her readers how much money she spent on the trip, and what the money was spent on. She also mentioned a piece about her stay at the hotel she chose. She gave tips about what kind of transportation to use if you ever visit Stockholm, and also gave a total price to give people an idea of how much it is for two people to spend three days in Stockholm. I thought that this was a great way to end the post because it brought people back to the reality that travel is expensive, and must be well thought out. I know for a fact that I will be including something similar to this in my own posts so that I can to lend a hand to others. Again, I really loved the way this post was written and introduced to the audience. It helped me create my own thoughts about the way I will be writing, and it gave me a good idea of how to start my own travel guide!

 

 

For this reflection I will go back and analyze what the article was about. I will also talk about my own thoughts after reading this piece.

“Annoying Ways People Use Sources” is about well, annoying ways people use sources. There were many common mistakes or annoyances stated throughout the article that I will touch on later on. I believe that the main focus of this article was to explain to the audience what people are doing wrong in their writing, and how they can fix the mistakes that they are making. The two main annoyances that I want to talk about are quotes and citations. It is not that quotes themselves are annoying, but the way that people introduce them, and use them in their writing. Readers do not like unexpected quotes thrown at them with no context on why they were just stated. They would prefer an introduction as to why a quote is being said, and how it applies to the rest of the text. Following the introduction, after a quote is stated the writer should analyze the quote. This meaning you should explain what the quote is saying or what it is about. This is important because some quotes may be difficult for the reader to understand, and they may need a follow up analysis to guide them. Now that I have explained the annoying mistakes made with quotes, I will move onto citations. Wrong citations are annoying when there is little to no information of where a quote was found, and when they are incorrectly used. If you are to use a quote in your writing, it is very important that you make it very clear to the audience about where you got your quote. If you just cite a page number, the audience might as well not even attempt to find out from what book, magazine, article, etc the quote was taken from. Make sure to be specific so that your evidence is clear to find! People must also correctly cite their sources. Make sure you are including an author, title, date, etc. This will make your writing seem much more reliable, and let your audience know that you did your research!

Finally I will talk about my thoughts on this article. I really found this piece entertaining, interesting, useful, funny, and easy. Even the title grabbed my attention with the word “annoying”. This being because many people my age are always annoyed by something. I really liked how I was able to learn a lot from this article while chuckling because I realized that I have used sources in an annoying way. For me the article was very easy to comprehend, and I truly believe that I gained a fair amount of valuable knowledge after I finished reading. I also think that this article could be of fair use for thousands of other writers, and allow them to learn how to fix their mistakes. In conclusion I liked the article so much that I believe it should be used in all other English classes to teach students the proper way to handle/deal with quotes and citations in their writing.

Summary: 

• Very often readers are annoyed with the way things are written.
• The way people cite sources are one of the top annoyances in writing.
• One comparison made to annoying ways of writing was bad driving.
• One quote that could be a comparison of bad drivers and writers was, “You know the guidelines but you don’t care” (Bunn 243).
• One major annoyance is a poorly introduced quotation.
• The best way to fix a bad introduction of a quotation is to let the reader/audience know that a quote is about appear.
• Without worrying about the way you are going to introduce your quote, another useful thing to do is to analyze your quote after you state it.
• The use of evidence to support your statements will always be a plus for you as a writer.
• Using a quote as your entrance is a very good attention grabber.
• The way citations are created are also a big annoyance to readers.
• A citation that only lists a title is a big no from the audience.
• A quote without a citation is almost unacceptable.
• The way to fix bad citations is to make sure to be very specific to the audience of where the information came from.
• Another good tip is to also go back and edit your work various times until presentable to others.

Key Terms/Main Idea:

The main idea of this reading is to inform people the correct and incorrect ways to use/cite sources. This however is done in a humorous way that makes the article more enjoyable to read.

Annoying: Causing irritation or annoyance.

Evidence: The available body of facts or information indicating whether a belief or proposition is true or valid.

Quotation: A group of words taken from a text or speech and repeated by someone other than the original author or speaker.

Citation: A quotation from a reference to a book, paper, or author, especially in a scholarly work.

Source: A place, person, or thing from which something comes or can be obtained.

Commentary:

I really liked this article, and thought the author did a great job with his writing. It was very helpful and full of information that could be used in the future. I loved how the problems were presented, but then soon after the solution was given to the audience. I also liked the every day scenarios that were brought to the article to compare to bad writing. The bad drivers comparison made it very easy to understand how annoying some writer can be with their sources. I also loved the way the author incorporated humor into the text. This made the article much more enjoyable and easy to read. I did not have a hard time at all comprehending the reading, and I really did learn a lot of new things. I even have to say that I am guilty of doing some of the annoyances stated throughout the article. Thankfully I now know how to fix my writing mistakes, and allow myself to become a better writer. In conclusion, this article was a great read, and had a great purpose behind it.

 

This reflection will be a little different from the others. Instead of blogging about the article itself, I will blog about an idea that sparked from reading the article. I hope that you all enjoy!

The idea that stemmed from this article was to write about my own responses/reactions to a couple different novels that I have read. I will also go back and assess how I “read like a writer” for these common books. The two novels I have chosen are To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

I will first begin with To Kill a Mockingbird. I had many reactions to this book, and it felt like I was on an emotional roller coaster. This is because Harper Lee did a great job with setting the mood for each chapter in the book. Her tone led me to feel happy, sad, excited, surprised, etc. I can relate this to the article because there is a quote from there that states, “What is it about the way this text is written that makes you feel and respond the way you do?” (Bunn 72). This quote/question explains my connection of how Lee’s particular way of writing led me to react the way I did to the novel. Now onto how I read like a writer. To be completely honest, To Kill a Mockingbird was one of my favorite books that I have ever read. This meaning that most of my reading was for enjoyment. Looking back at the way I read this book, I remember considering the way the author chose to tell the story. I would observe if she was biased or not. I would observe if she was content or disappointed with the events that followed throughout the story. I believe that those were some ways that I read like a writer.

I will now talk about The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I had a couple different reactions to this book because the story line was nowhere near similar to To Kill a Mockingbird. This book was very satisfying until the very end. At the end I was disappointed, and even a little sad. I realized that I felt this way because of the decisions that the author chose to make in his writing. Looking back at the quote from the last paragraph, I can once again relate the article to one of the novels that I read. I believe that I read The Great Gatsby as more of a write than the previous book. This is because I had to read this novel for school and analyze a lot of the text. I found myself looking for the tone the author was trying to portray, and how he wanted the audience to interpret what he was writing. I did this throughout the entire book and came to a conclusion/opinion that F. Scott Fitzgerald wanted readers to pick a side so that whatever they chose would guide, and influence how they felt throughout the rest of the book.

Summary (How to Read Like a Writer) :

• Reading like a writer involves paying attention to the authors writing choices.
• One also pays attention to how the authors piece influences the audience.
• Another thing to focus on would be how different choices lead to different responses/reactions.
• The most important pieces of information are what should be looked for by the audience.
• Think to yourself if you want to make the same choices the author made, or if you want to come up with a new idea based off what the author did.
• Most of the time people read for information.
• The following quote best describes what reading like a writer means, “You are reading to see how something was constructed so that you can construct something similar yourself” (Bunn 74).
• Trying to read like a writer at first may be difficult.
• Two questions to ask yourself before you start reading: 1. Do you know the author’s purpose for this piece of writing? 2. Do you know who the intended audience is for this piece of writing?
• Sometimes you will have to read a little before you can answer the questions stated above.
• People should also consider the genre of the text.
• Genre could be a poem, article, short story, essay, etc.
• Some questions to ask yourself before writing: 1. What is the technique the author is using? 2. Is the technique effective? 3. What would be the advantages and disadvantages if I used the same techniques in my writing?

Key Terms/Main Idea (How to Read Like a Writer) :

The main idea of this piece is to inform the reader what it means to read like a writer. The article teaches the conclusions that should be drawn while reading, and how to utilize those to create your own thoughts and ideas.

Goals: An aim or desired result.

Contribute: To give in order to help achieve or provide something.

Context: The circumstances that form the setting of an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed.

Genre: Categories characterized by similarities in form, style, or subject matter.

Antiquated: Old fashioned or outdated.

Commentary (…and by islands, I mean paragraphs) :

Although this piece of writing was beautiful, it was very difficult to read. The part I found most frustrating was the fact that the paragraphs kept changing as I was reading them. I could never finish any of the lines! There was also no particular starting point, so I did not know what to read first, or if there was something that I was supposed to read first. Since there was no true beginning, I decided to read all the different islands from left to right. I also tried to find a solution to the texts changing, but I could not. Even though this was still difficult to read, I was still able to gain some information from the text. I realized that each island faced a different situation, and had its own unique twist to it. There was also an “island” explaining how islands can be closely related to the ways of writing and literature. In the end, I still enjoyed this piece because it was something different. It was challenging and creative, and opened up a new way of thinking for me.