Aaron's Portfolio

The immediate context of this essay includes the author’s biography and when and where the essay was first published. The author, Yo-Yo Ma, was well educated at the Juilliard School and Harvard University where he became a professional cellist and songwriter. The essay was originally published in the World-Post, an online news and blog site. The essay was published the same month that the website was created and has some pretty powerful and influential contributors, such as Elon Musk and Tony Blair….

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Before I Added a quote: In his TED Talk, “The Transformative Power of Classical Music,” he tells of a story when he changed a little boy’s life forever. Through his explanation of how to listen and understand classical music, a little boy from Ireland finally cried and grieved his older brothers death. After I Added a quote: Through his explanation of how to listen and understand classical music, a little boy from Ireland finally cried and grieved his older brothers death as he told…

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Intro – Before: Intro – After: Shallow Pond – Before: Shallow Pond – After: The Little Seagull Handbook only really reaffirmed what my peers had said about my writing. What they had written for comments made logical sense to me, so when I opened up Little Seagull, it was no surprise that when I came to the sections on tightening up a paragraph and writing a great introduction paragraph(s) they said they same thing. I didn’t preview anything about Southan or Zander…

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My goals in revision for my essay is to revise my introduction paragraph in order to makes sure I fully preview what I will talking about in my essay and that I keep my personal opinions out it and save it for discussion on Zander and Southan. I also plan to restructure thoughts that make sense to me, the person who has spent time reviewing and analyzing these sources, and make sure they make sense to those who know nothing…

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Not often in high school did we do peer editing. When we did, it was to find the weak points in our essay and look for grammatical errors. So, this was a completely new experience for me and I loved it. I learned new techniques of how to argue claims and back them up. I saw the other writers using the different ways to convey a point over. One relied heavily on visualization, but she did it in a way…

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Reflecting on Nicole B’s work was very eye opening. I don’t often get to read other peoples essays regarding the same topic because we simply just didn’t do that in high school. So, getting to see how someone else rights was very nice. I got to read and experience another persons thought process for myself. It also helped to give me some ideas for myself. Nicole didn’t specifically start out with a personal anecdote, she used an experience she noticed…

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In Rhy Southan’s, “Is Art a Waste of Time,” Southan is going on a trip with some people from the Effective Altruism. These people believe in helping the less fortunate at all costs and believe that the money being put into music, art, theatre, and film, is a waste as it does not help the less fortunate. This is unfortunate for Southan as he is going away on a little trip to finish writing a film script, so these people…

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After learning about what the Effective Altruism (EA) actually does and want and learning about them in class and in discussion, I reread Southan’s essay even more critically than I did before. I made many comments expressing my confusion about where the author stood and what he was talking about. But after reading about what the Effective Altruism stands to do, I finally understood what Southan was aiming to talk about. My confusion, however, turned into taking a stand on…

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