Observation

Entering the Adanti Student Center and climbing up the two, dark grey colored stairs, your tired legs will take a few steps until you reach your destination. Bright colors and paper flyers cover the glass doors ahead of you filled with fitness activities and events that are coming up in the next few weeks. As you turn the slippery silver handle and enter the glass doors, you are greeted with smiling faces usually in gray tee shirts. “Hey, how are you today?” is the first question you try to answer but the smell of sweat and rubber overtake your nose. Then, you gently swipe your hoot loot, making sure the black bar code is facing toward you and hear a beep. The beep is your ticket into the gym and you are finally ready to begin your workout.

 Passing two more open doors to offices on the left and ten tall cardio machines on the right, the girl’s locker room jumps out at you. In this classy, all white and cream locker room, girls of all sizes are preparing for their workout or are covered in sweat already. The tiled floors have scattered spots of dirt from outside but are generally kept up well. Your worst enemy is staring you in the face with numbers ranging from zero to three hundred and a black platform to determine your confidence. A quick look in the full length mirror, and you step back out onto the speckled gray textured floor. Sounds of metal hitting metal and static from the machines along with faint music will fill your ears here, but most like to drown this sound out with ear phones and their personal music.

                Many different people spend their time here including students and faculty, but they all have a few things in common. The most obvious, sweat and beat red faces, but the less obvious, hard work ethic and determination. Working out is a life style that most believe is just physical but is mentally exhausting as well. Your mind set must be motivated and ready to take on what you think is the impossible just to get that body you’ve always dreamed of. Taking a few steps further, past the dozens of treadmills and elliptical machines lined in parallel rows, you look to your left and find a huge mirror coupled with black free weights and weight machines. Mostly guys will stand in this area to look at themselves and their progress in the mirror, very rarely will you see females here. In the way back of this straight lined facility, you will find two doors to enter into a room. This room always reminds me of my ballet room as it has ceiling to floor mirrors and light sand colored wooden floors. Used for group exercise and space, this room can be turned into one of the most fun places on campus, being able to socialize while working hard. The SCSU fitness center is filled with positive energy and various people constantly trying to reach their goals which rubs off on any new comers or even the regulars. 

7T

Blog 7T

Observational Writing- comprises analytical, informative, and thought provoking portraits, or profiles, of a person or place

Perspective- the main idea or cultural significance that the writer wants readers to take away from reading the observational profile

Participant observer- becomes an insider, joining in the activity with the people being interviewed and observed

Detached spectator- the writer acts as an independent reporter, watching and listening but remaining outside of the activity

Quote- used when language is especially vivid or memorable, giving an impression of the speaker as well as providing important information

Summary- used to condense lengthy information

Paraphrase- used when the writer needs to go into detail but can put the information in a more striking form that the speaker originally used

Independent Clause- can stand alone as a sentence, with a subject and verb, beginning with a capital letter and ending with terminal punctuation such as a period.

Organizing the Information:
Topically- the writer brings up a series of topics about the subject.
Narrative- the writer tells a story that extends over a period of time
Spatially- writer takes the readers on a tour of a place, pointing out interesting sights and bringing up various topics about the subject as they move through the scene

7R

Blog 7R

                Throughout the past few classes, we have been focusing on polishing our autobiographical essays which have been very beneficial to me. More peer review helped me to definitely recognize that my thesis was not specific enough to my memory and I also had the chance to re-read my essay in class to look at sentence structure and transitions. These two lead me to change a lot of my sentences to include more variety and further make my sentences clearer and flow nicely. I went paragraph by paragraph and specifically focused only on the topic and ending sentences to make sure they supported each other as well as supported the thesis. Also in this workshop, I once again could see that I still need additional practice on writing an effective and strong thesis and I think most of my classmates would agree with this themselves. Hopefully by the end of the semester I will finally become proficient at this skill! I was also refreshed when went over the correct use of the semi-colon. Having heavy practice in rhetoric class senior year, I was once very good at knowing all of the grammar rules, but have since become a bit rusty. Another helpful work shopping tool was discussing how to avoid run on sentences and making sure the subject “I” did not begin every sentence.

                On Thursday, we were introduced to a new kind of writing known as Observational Writing. I am familiar with this type of writing and have already completed a paper in Anthropology which uses this strategy of using your five senses and creating vivid scene for the reader. The activity held in class was to observe the classroom and describe it, then observe the tabletop podium and describe that. It was definitely much easier to describe the classroom because there was more to look at, but describing the podium lead to much abstract thinking and really made me pay attention to detail. Further, we wrote a thesis statement to make an argument about one of these which was challenging, but I certainly liked the practice. We also read two observational pieces in our book and discussed them in class this week. I have always known that annotating my readings have helped me in the past and this week just supported this. The class discussed in small groups different analysis assumptions which pushed us to investigate what we read and answer questions having to do with if we thought Mr. Yeganeh is a bully or if his actions are justifiable and also assumptions about customer service. I liked this activity in that it took apart the story and I could use some work in recognizing these assumptions or themes in the pieces that we read to formulate more meaning to them. From a writing standpoint, it is a somewhat new form of writing for me, so I am curious to see how effective my observations of a person, place, or thing will come across in my writing.