Blog Reflections

To be honest I think I’ve learned more about myself as a writer or responder than a reader. After all this redundancy and practice with responding to texts, it’s no longer a chore for me. I’ve established some sort of stamina and willingness to express my feelings or thoughts on a book, considering this used to be somewhat difficult for me.

Now I’ve figured out different ways to say what I want to say in the most coherent yet formal way possible. It’s almost as if every couple of weeks was a new challenge to expand my vocabulary, and I’m positive it has grown since the beginning of the year, as well as my writing skills.

Although I don’t feel like I’ve changed as a reader as much as a writer, I think that I’ve established a new perspective or way of looking at a text for things such as building an argument, understanding an author’s craft, or being critical and objective towards a text. All of this  practice has ensured my growth as a writer.

I’ve seen this by reading my old responses, and even I could say that I’ve seen an improvement in my vocabulary most of all, my ways of reaching out to the reader, and just my strategic measures of getting my point across.

All in all, this blog has helped my reading and writing grow in many ways.

NF Critical Analysis: A Smarter Gun?

In “A Smarter Gun” by Patricia Smith and Gabriel Tyler, Smith and Tyler discuss a new invention, originally created as a science project, which introduces a new way to achieve safety when dealing with guns. One thing Smith and Tyler do is start out the reader with some brief statistics, like “In 1999, two students at Columbine High School killed 13 people at a shooting rampage”. Then the authors explain how this could be a possible motive for Kai Koepler to create this gun. After that the rest of the article builds off of that, and explains “the debate over guns [which] goes back to 1791”. This chronological order of thinking is very coherent and could help the reader understand how this all ties together.

Smith and Tyler intend to present an objective, Koepler creating ‘a smarter gun’, and connect that with the history of guns. After informing the reader of all sides of the story the reader forms an opinion. This happens by designating an entire subsection, “Two Centuries Of Debate”, to the history of guns and the laws regarding them. Also, the authors present an objective piece of the Constitution, “ A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right to people to keep and Bear arms, shall not be infringed”. This quote could be taken in two completely different ways, where guns are either in favor for the militia or the ‘free people’. This way the reader could form an unbiased opinion based on history, as it was.

I think Smith and Tyler have achieved their supposed goal of presenting an unbiased overview of a very important debate in history. Therefore, this is a good source and presents this issue of guns in an accurate way.