I chose to write a letter because I think it creates a sense of intimacy and personal connection between the reader and myself. Since the purpose of this assignment is to write about my own experience with writing and since I cite non-academic examples quite a few times, a letter felt best suited for this assignment. I also chose an informal tone for this assignment since that made it less daunting and easier to work on. Hopefully it is also easier to read for my audience.

   A Letter to my Cousin

Dear Anisa,

In this letter, I am going to detail my personal relationship with writing as well as what I have learned about writing so far. I talk about mainly my English class and how it transformed my relationship with writing from despising it to making it tolerable. I also try to explain my theory as well as practice of writing.

As you already know, I am not as passionate about writing as I am about reading. Mostly because I am unable to find the right words and have difficulty organizing my thoughts. I can analyze and scrutinize others’ work well but when it comes to writing on my own, I feel unmotivated and anxious due to a fear of failure and anxiety of saying something I would regret later on. However, as you may have noticed, I am starting to overcome this debilitating fear and crippling anxiety of not being able to organize my thoughts properly. I am aware that this is something we both struggle with, so I am going to try and explain my writing process as well as how I have struggled and what I have learned. 

Before starting my Freshman English Composition class, I believed writing was tedious as well as overbearing. Writing felt like a repetitive process of brainstorming, choosing a topic, brainstorming, researching, brainstorming, writing whatever it is you wanted to write and then receiving a grade for said assignment. I was introduced to rhetorical strategies and was taught how to analyze them in others’ work but was not taught how to incorporate them in my own. Writing was introduced to me as a chore, something you would get over and done with as soon as possible due to its tedious nature. It was very evident from my writing that it felt like a burden as opposed to something people enjoy doing. I came into class with a negative attitude towards writing, something that lasted well into the semester, but I realized that one does not write with a repetitive and endless cycle of brainstorming mixed with a little bit of research. Instead, I learnt that everybody has a writing process and it takes time to understand and perfect yours. I think that this is the most important piece of information that you have to remember when writing. I realized this after drafting multiple papers for this class and doing so through different processes. 

For the first assignment, the Source Based Essay, I remember being so demoralized by the word count that I had not started it until a week before it was due. Before coming to this class, I had no clue as to what a rhetorical situation was, let alone how to use it in my practice of writing. So being overwhelmed, I submitted my first draft. I had not followed the steps properly which resulted in a low grade. My writing process was built on the habits I had from high school which was brainstorming, brainstorming and brainstorming. I felt that there was no proper outline to my writing process. After this, I started working through all of the steps in the learning modules- this provided me with a structure to base my writing process and theory off of. The most impactful assignment I worked on would have to be the Research Essay I did. Due to this assignment, I understood the importance of an annotated bibliography. I had never written a research paper before this assignment, so I was new to the format. Doing the research and finding reliable sources proved to be the most important component of this assignment. This would be very obvious to somebody that had already written a research essay earlier but to me, that was unclear. So I had spent more time on writing the essay itself as opposed to finding sources. This proved to be unfruitful, however, this helped my practice and theory of writing since I was able to start developing my theory of writing and work on a research paper for my Macaulay Honors College Seminar Class. After this assignment, I realized that I had developed a part of my theory of writing which was: brainstorming, research, first draft, peer review and last draft. However, this still had not helped me since I still had not felt satisfied with what I was doing. This changed with the composition in two genres assignment. This assignment had compelled me to put the different rhetorical strategies I had learned to use. Earlier, I rarely ever considered the audience and genre of what I was writing and how it affected my writing. I would write letters the same way I would an article. I would also rarely ever think of my own stance on an issue. However, due to this assignment, I started to create a rough outline of who my audience would be and what genre I would use. I also started working on what tone I wanted for this assignment as well as what my purpose would be. Having a purpose for my writing also greatly impacted it since it redirected my focus when I found myself getting off track- which again would be very obvious however, due to lack of experience, I had not known this. Due to this assignment, I had further refined my theory of writing. I think what works for me is: brainstorming, research, rough outline, first draft, peer review and final draft. Lastly, for the theory of writing, I realized that self-reviewing also helped. As previously mentioned, I had not known how to do a self-review since I am horrible at providing feedback to myself. However, with help from the internet and simply looking at my work as somebody else’s I was able to provide feedback to myself and consult my peers on what they thought. This brought my theory of writing to brainstorming, research, rough outline (what rhetorical strategies I would use and how to incorporate them), first draft, self review, second draft, peer review and final draft. 

Since beginning this class, my theory as well as practice of writing went from being non-existent to procrastinating to brainstorming, research, rough outline (what rhetorical strategies I would use and how to incorporate them), first draft, self review, second draft, peer review and final draft. My theory of writing has immensely impacted my practice of writing since I feel that there is a process which I can rely on while writing and truly do my best.

Opinion Article

Your Attention Span Is Narrowing. What Can You Do To Fix It?

What is Attention Span?

According to Oxford Languages, “​Attention Span (​əˈten(t)SHən span/​noun) is the length of time for which a person is able to concentrate mentally on a particular activity. Simply put, it is how long a person can focus on a single activity. The attention span of a goldfish for example, is on average 9 seconds.

What Are the Trends for Human Attention Span?

According to a study published by researchers at the Technical University of Denmark, people are quickly losing interest in a topic as opposed to being able to keep their focus on a singular issue.

According to another interesting study done by Ping Feng, a thesis for Masters of Art to The Temple University Graduate Board shows, “The results suggest that although the movie trailers are much shorter than the whole movies, the average shot lengths of the trailers still display a declining trend over the past 60 years, and the variations in the shot lengths are also decreasing. Second, the motions within each frame do not change significantly over the years, while the correlation coefficients between the shot lengths and the motions within the shots are moving toward a more negative correlation relationship over time, suggesting that the trailers are subject to an editing evolution trend that the shorter the shot is, the more motions there are within it, and this also aligns with the overall movies’ editing pattern evolution trend.” This shows how people have been conditioned to expect something new and exciting every few seconds in order to focus properly.

How does this affect me and how can I cope?

One good aspect of a short span is that people are able to absorb and learn a lot of information in a short amount of time. However, according to the National Health Institute, a shorter attention span can result in increased irritability as well as inability to focus on one task at a time. As a means of coping some suggestions include:

• Practicing grounding exercises- Sometimes people can get distracted with one’s own thoughts so in situations such as this, grounding oneself can help. Grounding roots oneself in the here and now, resulting in better focus.

• Taking short breaks: Short breaks can help one refresh and recharge oneself and lead to one becoming more focused on your work. Overworking can release to burnout and fatigue. Taking breaks can help minimize that.

• Practicing breathing exercises- Breathing exercises can help soothe and calm one. Focusing on exams and similar activities can be stressful. Deep breathing and breathing exercises helps the body relax so the mind also follows suit.

• Trying not to multitask- Multitasking can lead to attention being diverted which can lead to a decrease in cognitive effort- the engaged proportion of limited capacity central processing.

• Studying with white noise playing in the background- White noise can also calm one since the equal distribution across frequencies creates a steady humming sound.
• Trying the Mozart Effect- The Mozart Effect is when one listens to classical music while performing a task. This helps with better memory retention as well as focusing on the task.

Poster:

According to the American Psychological Association Dictionary of Psychology, the definition of attention span is “​the length of time an individual can concentrate on one specific task or other item of interest.” Simply put, attention span is how long one can concentrate on a task. In the fast paced world of social media, people, especially teenagers are getting better at multitasking which gives the impression that the attention span now-a-days has been getting shorter and shorter. This begs the question,​ ​how is social media affecting teenagers’ attention span in the US and what may be some ways to cope?

In the era of social media, teenagers have been flipping back and forth between using social media and focusing on school work and real life. As defined by the American Psychological Association, “​Cognitive effort​ is defined as the engaged proportion of limited-capacity central processing.” Simply put, cognitive effort is the effort by the brain on processing or completing a task.​ ​In their “​Internet is giving us shorter attention spans and worse memories, major study suggests”, Mike Wright and Ellie Zolfagharifard cite an unnamed study and claim, “Experiments reviewed in the study showed that people who spent their time constantly flipping between short activities online “require greater cognitive effort to maintain concentration”.” This can be alarming as this suggests that not only are attention spans getting shorter but the work done by the brain in order to complete a task has been slowing down. Cognitive effort helps people in decision-making processes as well as in completing tasks within a given amount of time. This might bring one to question why might this be the case? Why does multitasking require more cognitive effort to maintain concentration? ​Wright and ​Zolfagharifard claim that this happens because, “The​ limitless stream of prompts and notifications from the internet encourages us towards constantly holding divided attention — which then, in turn, may

decrease our capacity for maintaining concentration on a single task.”​ The more notifications-whether it be from emails or social media-pop up, the harder time people have focusing on their tasks. This constant need of multi-tasking and holding divided attention can cause one’s brain to be tuned into a routine of dividing one’s attention. One may think that this might be the case only for online activities. However, Wright and ​Zolfagharifard further claim citing other unnamed studies, ​“Overall, the available evidence strongly indicates that engaging in multi-tasking via digital media does not improve our multi-tasking performance in other settings – and in fact seems to decrease this cognitive capacity through reducing our ability to ignore incoming distractions​.” Overall, this article establishes the claim (with evidence) that attention span (in general) is not only decreasing but so are memory and retention abilities.

In McClinton’s ​“Global Attention Span Is Narrowing and Trends Don’t Last as Long, Study Reveals.”, McClinton states,​ “​Released on Monday in the scientific journal Nature Communications, the study (done by Technical University of Denmark) shows people now have more things to focus on – but often focus on things for short periods of time.” McClinton also claims, ​“​The empirical data found periods where topics would sharply capture widespread attention and promptly lose it just as quickly, except in the cases of publications like Wikipedia and scientific journals. For example, a 2013 ​Twitter global trend​ would last for an average of 17.5 hours, contrasted with a 2016 Twitter trend, which would last for only 11.9 hours.” Here, McClinton delves into how Twitter trends represent people’s interests in that topic and how the trends on Twitter seem to last shorter and shorter. The study done by the Data collected by different experimenters suggests that people lose interest in a subject just as quickly as gaining interest in it. McClinton evaluates how people, in this case mostly teens, have a diverse range of

topics that they’re interested in but only for a short period of time. This is seen in the data collected by the author and interests seen on Twitter. However, one counterpoint to this may be that not all trends seen online are lost offline as opposed to the study from ​Mike Wright and Ellie Zolfagharifard’s article​. One such example is the Black Lives Matter protests. According to the article, History of the Hashtag #BlackLivesMatter: Social Activism on Twitter by PewResearch, the tag trended on Twitter for a few days but offline, the biggest waves of protests had lasted for months with many continuing on until now. McClinton’s article fails to recognize how people on social media present themselves differently than offline, especially when taking the route of selective activism, showing one’s personality and completing tasks. This can be especially true for teenagers whose interests might change from week to week. Overall, this article establishes the fact that attention span is in fact shortening, however some of the arguments used in the article, specifically the one regarding online interest vs offline interest was very intriguing and somewhat inaccurate in terms of generalizing.

In the “Age and the effects of news media attention and social media use on political interest and participation: Do social media function as leveller?”, the authors suggest that social media might actually help people focus on their daily lives. Growing up in the age of the internet, it can be easy for teenagers to feel overwhelmed with an influx of information causing them to be hyper-aware. In the article, the authors state, “​The findings, based on a four-wave panel study conducted during the 2010 Swedish national election campaign, show (1) clear differences in media use between age groups and (2) that both political social media use and attention to political news in traditional media increase political engagement over time.” Different age groups in the study used social media for different

purposes. Teenagers, however, used this in order to participate in politics and increase civic engagement. ​This specific article shows how social media can help with that and deliver news in small bits and pieces, especially for political and civic participation. Social media can help teenagers more interested in exploring different ideologies as well as be intrigued in learning more about politics. It can also level the burden of learning information in classes where information is not presented in a fun manner or is too overwhelming and instead learning in bits and pieces on different social media websites. Social media has been traditionally viewed as a means of engaging younger audiences and being addictive. However, this article changes that perception of social media being a means to an end and instead be seen as a leveller between reality and the online world.

In order to cope with a changing attention span, Lodge and Harrison recommend focusing on completing one task at a time and taking short breaks periodically in their “​The Role of Attention in Learning in the Digital Age”​ article. They suggest that there is much speculation on whether or not attention spans are in fact changing much, if at all. In order to cope with difficulty paying attention, they suggest to focus on one at a time and to manage one’s times better by planning out daily activities.

Citations Page

Wright, Mike, and Ellie Zolfagharifard. “Internet Is Giving Us Shorter Attention Spans and Worse Memories, Major Study Suggests.” The Telegraph, Telegraph Media Group, 6

June 2019, www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2019/06/06/internet-giving-us-shorter-attention-spans- worse-memories-major/.

McClinton, Dream. “Global Attention Span Is Narrowing and Trends Don’t Last as Long, Study Reveals.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 17 Apr. 2019, www.theguardian.com/society/2019/apr/16/got-a-minute-global-attention-span-is-narrow ing-study-reveals.

Kristoffer Holt, Adam Shehata, Jesper Strömbäck, Elisabet Ljungberg. “Age and the effects of news media attention and social media use on political interest and participation: Do social media function as leveller?” SAGE Journals, 11 Feb, 2013, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0267323112465369

Lodge, Jason M, and William J Harrison. ​The Role of Attention in Learning in the Digital Age​. 25 Mar. 2019, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6430174/.

The protests against police brutality that were sparked by the death of George
Floyd at the hands of four Minneapolis Police Officers have been labelled as the Biggest
Civil Rights Movement. The wide scale protests on local, national and international
levels has not only brought about legislative changes (New York repealing section 50
a), changes in Hollywood and opened room for diversity and inclusion as well as proper
representation but has also created a whole generation of activists and advocates.
However, coordinating and organizing protests on such large scales would have been
impossible without the aid of social media platforms.
Olivia Rudgard in her “A decade on from the Arab Spring, social media has
changed how people protest; Social media has the power to spread messages and
bring people out onto the streets. It can also spread propaganda and disinformation”
article, discusses the rhetorical situation of how social media has not been as beneficial
as people had hoped a decade ago. In the Telegraph Online article, Rudgard provides
the readers with a summary on the current Black Lives Matter protests going on and
then moves on to compare the role of social media in the protests by stating, “In 2020,
the online platforms are more complicated than it was a decade ago.” Since Rudgard is
a US Technology Reporter, Rudgard adds in her own insight into the role of social
media and technology by stating that “the claims of executives like Facebook’s Mark
Zuckerberg that unfettered free communication between all people is unambiguously
good now seem somewhat laughable.” Throughout the article, Rudgard criticizes social
media for spreading misinformation but also acknowledges how vital it has been by
stating, “it’s undeniable that social media has been a huge help for spreading the word.”
Rudgard while explaining the benefits of social media and how it has helped bring
people closer, also addresses the issue of social media algorithms and how
coincidentally, it seems that people of color and minorities do not have an equal
platform as others. She also provides examples of leftist and right-wing social media
users and how the protests are viewed differently by the two sides by stating, “Social
media posters have stretched to claiming that Mr Floyd is not really dead, and that
George Soros, the billionaire who is a frequent target of right-wing, antisemitic
propaganda, is funding the unrest.” and “while left-wingers have suggested that violence
is being started or provoked by right-wing agitators and white supremacists.” This
provides the readers with an understanding of Rudgard’s neutral stance and her critical
tone. The purpose of her critical tone is to evaluate how much has changed since the
vital role social media played in the Arab Spring of 2010 and to shed light on the fact
that many companies such as Facebook are not regulating information on their websites
properly. The target audience for this article are people aged 35 and older. This can be
understood by the wordy and lengthy title of the article as opposed to something that
would be considered attention catching or even “clickbait”.
In Jessica Guynn’s “ACLU: Police used Twitter, Facebook to track protests”
article, Guynn summarizes how according to the ACLU, the police had been tracking
protestors in Missouri using Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. According to the article,
Geofeedia provided data to the police by sifting “through real-time feeds of social media
posts to deliver analysis to clients, including the locations of users.” After this discovery,
Instagram and Facebook cut off Geofeedia’s access to public user posts and to a
topic-based stream of public user posts, while Twitter suspended Geofeedia’s account.
Guynn’s stance throughout the article is neutral which can be understood by her
succinct article filled with informative language in it. This can be understood as Guynn
uses statistics such as, “The ACLU uncovered Geofeedia’s reliance on data feeds from
social media through a public records request of 63 law enforcement agencies.” Rather
than explaining the situation in depth, by including which protests’ protesters were being
monitored, Guynn simply summarizes ACLU’s statement. The main purpose of this
article was to inform Guynn’s audience as opposed to giving her own opinion on the
issue because throughout the article Guynn uses third person language, quotes as well
as comments from others such as, “But, McKesson said, “we remain as committed
today as we were yesterday and remain undeterred by this recent discovery.”” in order
to explain the increased surveillance of the protesters. This may also be because the
target audience for The USA Today is mostly people who want to be up-to-date with
world events but not have to read an article as long as one in the New York Times. The
article
In the New Yorker Magazine’s “Second Act of Social-Media Activism” article, the
author, Jane Hu discusses the role of social media in organizing and coordinating
protests as well as educating new activists and protesters on how to safely protest. Hu
also references Zeynep Tufecki’s “ Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of
Networked Protest” as she delves deeper into the relationship between social media
and protesting in movements such as the Arab Spring 2.0, France’s “Yellow Vest”
Movement, Puerto Rico’s RickyLeaks and the Hong Kong protests among many others.
Hu also delves into digital activism and how at many points it has gone wrong proving
that offline conversations are much more fruitful in keeping a movement alive longer
than solely relying on online organizing and rallying people.
The New Yorker Magazine’s founding editor, Harold Ross stated that the
intended audience of the magazine was for a metropolitan audience, mostly the upper
middle class. Jane Hu, the author of the New Yorker Magazine article “Second Act of
Social-Media Activism” writes for the cultural criticism section of many websites and
newspapers including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Bookforum, The Nation,
The Ringer, and The Awl. The “Cultural Criticism” genre that she writes for is an overlap
between social and cultural theory. In essence, Hu is a culture critic who provides
criticism and analysis on culture as a whole. In this article, Hu provides the audience
with criticism on social media activism and the paradigm shift in activism culture due to
social media. Hu’s informative and critical tone can be picked upon easily due to her
language being informative as she states the benefits of organizing and coordinating
protests on social media as well as the disadvantages of doing so. This also conveys
her critical stance on social media activism as Hu believes that offline conversations
give people the chance to delve deeper into issues and address them as opposed to
simply tweeting something and moving on with one’s life. Hu’s article is most likely
intended for new protesters and activists or even people who are just curious about how
protests are organized since Hu explains the many different ways of organizing,
something that one would hope organizers know much about. Since the medium is a
magazine, it can also be understood that the intended audience are not organizers as
organizers are much more likely to read newspaper articles as opposed to opinion
pieces. Hu develops her relationship with the audience by providing personal stories
and conversations she has had with organizers and by also giving her audience
examples of different organizations as opposed to cherry picking stories in order to fit
her narrative. Hu’s rhetorical situation is well developed and well thought out due to her
being able to clearly convey her thoughts on social media and activism.
The “Anatomy of a Protest: Spatial Information, Social Media, and Urban Space”
article of Sage Publications deals with the rhetorical situation of Protests and its
relationship to Urban Space and Social Media. In the article, the authors, Alireza
Karduni and Eric Sauda Since this article is a research article, Karduni and Sauda keep
a neutral stance throughout the article. The research nature of the article is understood
as the article is broken up into different segments; Abstract, Introduction, Literature
Review, Data Source and Methodology, Anatomy of the Keith Lamont Scott Protests,
Discussion, Conclusion, Notes and lastly, References. This might also have been done
since the intended audience for the article are researchers and fractionating the article
would help the researchers find information more easily. as they discuss the Anatomy
of a Protest while using informative language, providing examples and including graphs
and charts. The main purpose of this article was to dissect how protests occur as well
as how social media and urban spaces can aid or harm any protest efforts. Karduni and
Sauda organize their article in different segments; This is so that the intended audience,
that is researchers can use the research and article in order to better understand what
Karduni and Sauda were trying to communicate through their article as well as their
findings. Throughout the article, an informative tone is used since the article is a
research article filled with different data and information on different protests with the
focus being on the Keith Lamont Scott Protest.
In all four articles, the authors delve deep into the relationship between social media and
protesting. Despite the articles dealing with the same rhetorical situation, the genres in which the
articles were written greatly affects how the authors interact with their audience as well as length
of the article. For example, in the research article, “Anatomy of a Protest: Spatial Information,
Social Media, and Urban Space” formal language is used and the article is divided into sections,
whereas in the “A decade on from the Arab Spring, social media has changed how people
protest; Social media has the power to spread messages and bring people out onto the streets. It
can also spread propaganda and disinformation.” the author gave her own opinion on the topic
with little to no statistics and the article was much shorter in length.

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