Ang's Blog 1

Summarizing texts is a beneficial skill because it allows for the reader/writer to accurately compress the information. As a writer, it is very important to have a general understanding of the various ways that larger bodies of work can be put into a smaller text. There are also situations where the reader/writer will summarize a text that is already in a small form; such as a tweet or advertisement. Learning how to summarize a small text is important because in some cases it can be more difficult expanding a small text versus compressing a large text. An example of these two concepts involves either taking a story from Ethics in Higher Education, for example, and summarizing the text into a paragraph including the important details the reader picked up while reading. The other side of this concept is what we did with the bumper sticker project, which required students to look at bumper stickers on cars and interpret a summary on what that bumper sticker means and why the driver might have it. Learning how to view texts has increased my personal understanding of writing and authorship because it put the realization that every text presented in any form can be interpreted and summarized. I enjoy this quote from Albert Einstein because I also believe that you can not accurately summarize a text if you do not have a full understanding of it.

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For P1 I have decided to write about the article “Combating Myths About Distance Education” by Todd Gilman. Gilman is an academic librarian at Yale University and teaches online courses. Gilman writes a text about the various concerns that many faculty members as well as general people have on the effectiveness on college courses. Gilman does an exceptional job at using an effective frame of reference pointing out to his audience that he has taught courses in many subjects. His ethos is represented when he describes the online courses he has taught and researched and he also continues later in the text to point out that he was a face-to-face instructor for a long time previously. Gilman represents his ethos in more than one way through out the text by offering advise and tips to other potential online professors reading the text. The most obvious pathos that Gilman has in this text is when he compares himself to “Pinocchio”, not a “real boy”. This makes his audience feel sad for him because online professors are still very credible even though they are not in a traditional classroom setting. Gilman shows Logos throughout the entire text as he continuously gives advise from experience and a good amount of comparisons for logical backup. In my opinion, Gilman’s main point throughout the text is to get across to his audience that online instructing provides students with similar if not the same benefits that a face to face classroom offers. The tone throughout the this reading is informative yet relaxed and conveys the message that online teaching is an effective and beneficial teaching of style. Something unique about this text is the fact that Gilman offers the readers a sense of advise throughout the reading. The reason for this could be because the article appeared in Chronicle of High Education, so the recommendations are taken into account by people directly effected.