Framing Statement:
The essay that I selected was the final Essay on climate change. This essay was created through the uses of an interview, a mini-movie, and a chapter from a larger book. The blog post I selected compared and contrasted Charles Duhigg and Bill McKibben. In it I use quotations from both articles in order to highlight which pieces of their arguments supported the other as well as made the others argument seem less like the only strong one. When reading these pieces, I made sure to read it once over just to get a sense of what it was about and then went through and highlighted pieces that would be useful to have for the future of an essay or similar writing project. Finally, I went through and made a note of what I could connect with and have a conversation with in my head about. Susan Gilroy, author of “Interrogating Texts…”, claims that we need to “Make [our] reading thinking-intensive from start to finish” (1). This could either mean that one, no matter which time we read it, it needs to be thorough, or two, we need to only read it once and just go way slower so that we can process the information at hand easier and in greater depth. Either way, the process needs to go in more depth than what most people would probably do on average. An example of this can be seen in my annotation of a piece in Charles Duhigg’s writing when I ask the question “Will this work now when everyone is taught to be unique and think how they want to?” in response to him using peer pressure to create the momentum needed for social change. This goes deeper than just saying that the idea sounds logical because instead of assuming that everyone does as they say like they used to, it looks at how society currently thinks about controversial topics. In the future of reading critically I would like to read over the piece and make notes in pencil and then go over in pen and either underline or trace over the thoughts that still make sense days later when I am reading the piece again and see how the thoughts change from day to day after different life experiences that take place over the course of just a few days.
Blog Post:
Duhigg Versus McKibben
Charles Duhigg author of “From Civil Rights to Megachurches” and Bill McKibben, main speaker from the short film “Do the Math” both have ideas of the changes that have occurred in the country and why it happened. Duhigg goes about this by using the equal rights movement for black people in the United States and analyzes how it became so monumental and effective so fast. His reasoning included “People who hardly knew Rosa Parks decided to participate because of a social peer pressure — an influence known as ‘the power of weak ties’ — that made it difficult to avoid joining in” (90). This was an important piece because according to Duhigg, weak ties make or break everything and it makes sense because they are the ties that are able to tie together many different kinds of people that would normally not be connected. Just like Duhigg, McKibben also believes in weak ties between people in a sense. However, his approach is slightly different. He primarily believes that everyone should just work together in order to prevent the world from going beyond any repair. This is seen in his talk when he says “we’re no longer at the point of trying to stop global warming, too late for that. We’re at the point of trying to keep it from becoming complete and utter calamity ” (3). Nowhere does he say we need to reach out to our weak ties, he just says that we need to do it no matter if we know each other or not. Therefore, while both Duhigg and McKibben believe in people working together, who and how they work together is where the differences are seen.
Images of Annotations:
Charles Duhigg “From Civil Rights to Megachurches”
Kathleen Moore “If Your House is On Fire”
