Grencik_Introduction

Dear Reader,
For the most part, I love to write in my room. I need to put on my headphones and listen to my “hardcore” music. I wear some sort of hoodie to keep me cozy warm with my hood up to narrow my vision strictly on my laptop. If I come across writers block for more than 30 minutes, that’s when I go to the library (still with the headphones and hoodie) and sit in one of the white cubicles and force myself to type. I do a very basic outline with what would be subheadings in the paper to organize my thoughts, and then type away from there.
The purpose of my first essay is to persuade readers that illegal immigration isn’t as bad as for those who are highly against it believe. I do want the readers to see things from the illegal’s point of view just to have some sort of sympathy and compassion towards these people, rather than just seeing them as “aliens.” I did about two hours of research on the matter finding mostly scholarly or attributable resources to strengthen my argument, and then a few that oppose it. Comments from my peers helped me by allowing me to see things that I may have not noticed before (e.g., I have a tendency to use a lot of parenthesis explaining my previous sentence or to go further into detail, such as this sentence here).
The essay does what my letter promises, as I go into a lot of detail on the troubles these illegal immigrants face in their home country. Regardless of whether or not the person is persuaded to see that it’s not as bad as people make it out to be, they will still see the other side and (if they have any morals or feelings) will sympathize for these illegal immigrants.
The first paper shows how I have grown as a writer because I feel that this is my most thoroughly revised essay, as you will see all of the red text (all of which are revisions). I revised citing my sources where they needed to be. For example, I opened a paragraph with “Most illegal immigrants cross the border through Mexico,” which one can question. Thus I found a source and made sure to cite that source directly after that sentence.
The purpose of this Google Map is to inform those whom are unfamiliar with Denver, Colorado about the music scene. What kinds of different venues are there in Denver? Do a lot of different bands come through and play? What’s the atmosphere of these events like? I want to answer the question of, “Is paying a few dollars worth the cost to go see a concert in Denver?” Hopefully the answer to that question will be yes after you read the descriptions of the different concerts. Choosing this topic was one of the easiest decisions I had to make during this project. The one “thing” that I love most is music, so why not go to different concert venues and watch some live music? Any chance that I have to make work fun, I will take be sure to take it.

Knowing now what I wanted to write about, I had to choose different concerts to go to and be economical about the situation as well. Considering I attended one of the best concerts with two of my favorite bands performing on March 27, I decided to include this concert as I will never forget a single detail of this one. Next our team found a concert at Cervantes that was cheap and we all could attend, so we did. Then we started hitting road blocks. With everyone’s different and busy schedules it was very difficult to get all four team members at one concert. To solve this problem, we would split up and each go to whatever concert we could, and made sure to get some sort of picture or footage. Finally, when putting together the final map, I could not find a way to embed the picture that I took from MusicFest. To solve this problem I decided to share the link where the pictures can be easily viewed.

The in class activities helped me figure out how to create and embed videos and pictures within Google Maps. The peer review also helped out a lot. It opened my eyes to see that I wasn’t being as descriptive about the surroundings and people as I needed to be. It’s so easy to miss details like that when you were at the show (so clearly you have a good visual image, but those who weren’t there don’t). This was especially true for the crowd reaction because the pictures give a good image of what the artists and lights were like, but each venue was dark in the crowd so it was near impossible to get even a “decent” photo (let alone one that could clearly show the types of people in the crowd).

That all being said, I hope that you will ultimately see that Denver has one of the most diverse and best music scenes in the nation.

The second essay I did in class is about how people view different music fans and their stereotypes towards them. I open the essay with previous studies done by other researchers to give you an idea of what exactly I intend on researching. I also take ideas from these researchers to form questions of my own. This background research provides credibility to my research as my sources are scholarly. By establishing credibility you should remain interested (or at least believe me) throughout the entire paper. I use more open-ended responses to help form the best and non-biased questions possible (i.e., “Please describe the typical listener of “X” genre) similar to that of the McDonald, et al. study.

The methods section describes step by step precisely how I will perform my research and will send you to the appendix for the exact questions. This will establish even more credibility as it's not some random research project thrown together, and it is in fact well done. I also include some similar methods done by the sources that I've researched to get the most out of my own research, such as the example question listed above. I’m not sure on exactly what I expect to come out of this research because of the large diversity of where people come from attending this University. However, like all stereotypes go, I do expect some agreements and disagreements on different genres among participants (but again, I’m not exactly sure what stereotypes will come of which genres).

I chose this topic specifically because I love music. Without music then I feel like my life would be much more boring. Nearly everything I do involves music. Working in the library, doing homework, goofing around on the internet, the list goes on and on. There are stereotypes about race, gender, even different social classes, so I wanted to research whether or not there is a stereotype for different types of music fans. Specifically all of my research is related only to the University of Denver. Ultimately, my goal is to educate you on what (if any) stereotypes do exist among the students at the University of Denver.