Blog Post 1

The ability to summarize large bodies of texts is beneficial to me because I am able to gather all the important and necessary information. Besides just summarizing the text, I rephrase much of the information in to my own words so that it becomes easier to understand. I believe it’s important to be able to have critical thinking skills both as a writer and individual because texts are absolutely everywhere you go. Being able to analyze and question information is a beneficial skill to have as it prevents you from being gullible against the information that surrounds us in everyday books, articles, media, etc. Learning to view texts in multiple different ways has helped me comprehend texts since every text has its own and unique message. Having a broader level of comprehension helps you figure out what the social, and cultural influences the author had when writing the piece of text; not only that, it can also help you evaluate the period of when the text was written and what are the author’s ideals. In these 3 weeks of class, we have red 3 different articles from the EHE where we identified the context and main ideas of these texts. With the help of the rhetorical triangle, we managed whether the author had any credibility, the reason why they are writing such articles and the message they want to deliver through these texts. Finding all these bits of information helped me comprehend why the authors wrote the articles and what are the main ideas that they are trying to deliver to the readers.

For P1, I decided to write about Davis’ article titled Should Student Athletes Be Paid? Why, They Already Are. Seth Davis is a well-known author for Sports Illustrated who also has a regular column on SI.com. He is also a sports analyst with CBS Sports and hosts a show called “Courtside with Seth Davis” on CBS College Sports Network. All of this background discloses Seth Davis as a very reliable source when it comes to discussions about College sports. Davis’ articles starts by making clear that he is not addressing Taylor Branch’s recently published article. Davis argues that student athletes, even though they are generating millions of dollars in revenues to their school, they are already being compensated for their efforts through tuition, housing and all services that are available at such school; through scholarships, some student athletes are able to earn up to $200,000 over the course of 4 years. He also explains that even though most of these athletes receive some sort of educational compensation, when they graduate or get to the minimum drafting age, there is nothing stopping them from moving on from College sports and having the opportunity to become multimillionaires by becoming a professional athlete. At the end of his article, Davis writes “Giving someone free education is akin to enslavement? If that’s the great watershed idea of our time, then we are living in a very dry world indeed.” Davis believes that people seem to not understand that receiving an opportunity for free education by playing a sport for that school, is one of the best payments a person can get.