Alma Guillermoprieto "Telling the Story, Telling the Truth"

Guillermoprieto writes about her career as a reporter and a newspaper writer in this essay. She begins with an account of a report she made about Salvadoran soldiers and their massacring of 800 men, women and children. She wrote an article for the Washington Post about the very repulsive act done by the soldiers to a small ten-elevator country. After, been among the only two reporters to write an article on this story, she was labelled by the Reagan administration as a person who cannot be trusted. 
Eventually, Central America became unrecognized on the U.S. media map. It dropped of it. She says, "it was as if I had dropped into that void as well." It seems that the media had ignored Central's America's history, strives, pains and its existence in the world. However, her desire is to make it impossible for "the U.S. reader to ignore Latin America." As such, she writes stories not hard news like that of the U.S. media. The hard news contains fact and to her has no connection to reality. When she writes, she blends information, analysis and her reactions. She makes the reader focus on Latin America not the U.S. To ensure that, she does not mention the U.S. in her writings. She does not interview ambassadors or any U.S. official in order to keep the reader's focus on Latin America. She does research or spends a month in the locality she will be reporting on. To get the U.S. readers to savor Latin America, she is specific about her writings. She wants the reader to feel, see and experience what she did. She says she places the reader in a discomforting zone by using the word "I."  She plans out a choreography in which she casts the major and minor characters. She figures out how t use the characters in order to portray the truth to the reader. One main idea is that she balances her strengths and weaknesses in writing the stories. in the end the advise is to give yourself the "freedom to fail." 
I liked reading Alma Guillermoprieto essay because she shows how to tell a story and make your readers focus on what you want them to not what they want to. I think this article will help me in writing telling my story to my classmates. So that they do not focus on what they expect me to be or tell them, but they see my story from my perspective.

"Transforming 100 Notebooks into Thirty-five Thousand Words" by Sonia Nazario

Sonia Nazario writes about a fourteen year old boy's journey from Mexico to United States in search of his mother. Nazario reports the life of the boy after he is in the States. After a series of interviews, research and retracing Enrique's steps, she says, "I had a hundred and ten notebooks, hundred of hours of taped interviews, and typed notes from more than one hundred phone interviews." Looking at such a superfluous amount of information, she says,"I was overcome with a feeling of paralysis."

She knew she had reduce the information somehow.

The first step of the process was what her editor, Rick Meyer, insisted on: the transcribing stage. Nazario used six full weeks to write out all the reports she had collected using MS Word. This made everything organized and easier to keep track of. This is an important step especially since we have to sort of a report for our final project. Transcribing all our reports will organize them and make it easier to know what to use.

This leads to the next stage which is "garbaging it down." Nazario compresses all the information she has into the first rough draft. In this stage, Nazario ignores the left side of her brain. She only cares about the chronology of the records. She says," Chapter 1 began the day Enrique's mother stepped of her mother's porch, leaving her five-year-old son behind. It ended the day Enrique decided to step of the same porch and find her." I think this stage is really important for us because we have to tell our story. We don't want it to start with something that should have been placed at the end of our video. Nazarro said the draft had to through 10 more drafts before it was reduced to 35000 words.

Nazarro narrates how in getting to her goal she reduced the draft by taking out all the unnecessary characters and accounts. She realized that it was okay to leave some information out and skip some of them. Some details did not take away or add any meaning to the story of Enrique. However, some trivial information in the beginning was valuable in the end. For example, Enrique wearing two left shoes was evidence to the mother that she was really speaking to her so.

In the end, Nazaro says she is on the eleventh draft. It is not easy to cut down more information at this stage. However by asking her self questions like: "Is it  really necessary?," If I keep it, how can I make it better, shorter?" will help her. 

In the initial stages of my final project, I have taken a lot of advise from Nazaro's essay. I plan to make sure the account I present is very important and necessary in telling my story.

Reflection on Essay 2

I think the essay was a very interesting topic to research and write about. The topic of originality is a very complex subject. I loved writing about it. I think I did a great job with my claims and argument. The peer review gave me a chance to see things I could change and make better. My partner told me to  take each of the technological advancement and talk independently about them. I think the reason I did generalize the t.v., telephone and radio was because I was trying to show that all three were as a result of the need to communicate. Also, it was a little difficult finding resources to show the history of these three. I think I will definitely expound on the three inventions further in my revision. So far I have not seen anything I want to delete. However, I think my idea of the plagiarism was not clarified in my essay. Devices like "turn it in" that picks up ideas that are "original" should not exist. There is no such thing as stealing ideas, just researching. Of course, that is a really controversial claim to make. However, everything we think and those we research are not our own, but that of someone else. Thus, all papers written today are not original. They cannot be. To take Barthes advise, there should be no name on a students essay except the original writer of that idea. I hope that will clarify my point about plagiarism.

"If Black English Isn't a Language,Then Tell Me, What Is?" by James Baldwin

This week's reading is James Baldwin's essay "If Black English Isn't a Language Then Tell Me What Is." Baldwin explains the meaning of language as a "temporal identity," that "divorces one from the communal community." As he expounds on this point, Baldwin's explanation of language is indisputable. Perhaps, the most powerful phrase that I saw in Baldwin's essay is:

                                    A language comes into existence by means                   of brutal necessity, and the rules of the                 language are dictated by what the language                     must convey"

No honest truth have been spoken than this quote from Baldwin. It also does not fall from what we have been discussing in class and what my narrative essay tried to convey. Language is a great tool. It is an indelible mark between people that makes it plausible for them to express their ideas, thoughts and concepts to each other. For a person outside the language "umbrella"-so as to speak- to understand this language, will be a "smash" to them. Why? Baldwin suggests that "language reveals too much about oneself." He gives an example: "to open your mouth in England...you have confessed your parents, your youth, your salary, your self-esteem and, alas, your future." Watching the documentary 7 up makes this claim more potent than not. I don't know if these children lived in England, but some lived in parts of London. You could predict-by looking at the lives they had as kids -whether with regards to school, or interests- then, you could tell what their future was like - a claim that might not always be true. However, the general picture is that the way a person speaks can tell you their whole story-if only you can understand their language.

Baldwin continues with another great quote, "It is not the black child's language that is in question, it is not his language that is despised: it is his experience." Baldwin says a child cannot be taught to let go of his experiences. It cannot be forced to enter a "limbo" in which she is not black or white. What Baldwin says here goes in line with his quote, "language is a proof of power." Language is an attribute that shows the world how distinct a particular group is. For whites who could not or might not still understand black English, power is taken away from them in this regards. For when every person or group develops a language, they tell the world they are independent, strong and capable. Probably, another scary fact is having a language shows ownership. However, that scares people. For those who are used the status quo, that idea is a great grief on their minds.
For us who speak a different language, we should not view it as a way of assimilating into a new culture, but as a "new language" of our own culture that we have the privilege to understand and own when most people around us don't.