Blog 9A

• "This growth, here and elsewhere in the West, is coming at a cost, according to conservationists: harmed wildlife habitats, higher regional temperatures, air and water pollution, more traffic and the introduction of invasive species."

Urban development is not only ruining the wildlife and environment that once was there but it also does several other things like harms wildlife habitats, higher regional temperatures, air and water pollution and introduces traffic and invasive species. It harms wildlife habitats because we are literally building right over them. How is an animal supposed to live within chaotic streets? Higher temperature result because of all the things going on to develop cities. We are not clean people even as hard as we try to be, which results in air and water pollution. Also, every city is going to have traffic which does not help with the pollution whatsoever. Finally, of course we would bring invasive species with us because many people simply don't care about the environment as long as they have a big shiny mall to shop in.

• Like Scottsdale, many cities and towns across the West that grew up after World War II have struggled to maintain their quintessentially Western features while encouraging growth and economic development. Hanging on to the West's characteristic "wide open spaces," officials say, is a constant battle.

The phrase of "the wild west" shouldn't be a new phrase to anyone; yet if development continues, the further generations will turn their heads in confusion when this phrase is spoken. Is that really what we want as citizens? Urban development EVERYWHERE? Personally, I love to look at the scenery of some places. This is slowly becoming extinct. 

• "You could talk to the most hard-core Republican in my community," Cave Creek Mayor Vincent Francia says, "and preservation is the most important thing -- it's the one thing we all agree on."

More and more people are joining the side of sustainability, yet urban development has ceased to build and build. We as society are the only ones that can do something about this. The west needs to stay wild and that is exactly what they people that live there think as well. If only all of us could agree with this, something could be done. We could keep the scenery and not do any damage to the environment. This is something that is overlooked in today's busy world but needs to be noticed. If only we could all agree, we could do something big. 

Blog 8A

There is a lot of importance when it comes to definition. Authors need definitions to help their desired audiences comprehend what they are really trying to say. An example of this that we discussed in class is say you are talking about girls and you say, "the definition of 'girls' in the dictionary is 'female'." This does not give the audience anything to go off of. Just the word female does not fully describe girls. This reason is why we don't really want to use the dictionary answer while writing. My article that I chose is about development hurting the environment. It talks about a town called Scottsdale Arizona and how what used to be beautiful western landscape is now shopping malls, golf courses, jewelry shops, and major league baseball training facilities. (The link of my article is found below.) The conversation that this fits into is environmental sustainability. The conversation is preserving environments.

facilities. http://search.proquest.com.dist.lib.usu.edu/docview/1460843522?accountid=14761

Blog 7A

In class and in our readings we learned about how visuals can help reach an audience and also how different gazes have different memory values to different people and audiences. Things that help us are tools such as indirect persuasion, visual structure, verbal anchoring, and openness. Indirect persuasion is when an author is trying to persuade an audience in an indirect way which could be really helpful to reach an audience. The next one is visual structure which is the way that an element is visually presented; we need to take this into consideration when trying to reach an audience. Verbal anchoring is when they hint at a metaphor but they may not come right out with it. The last one is openness and this is where the image is open to many different interpretations that just one or two. These are good tools to have when adding visual elements to reach your desired audience. We also need to realize that different people are going to have different gazes upon things. The example we used in class for this is when talking about the air force, most of us would think of our country as a whole where professor Merchant thinks of his comm rads that he served with.

Blog 6B

I compared my blog with Hailey Howells blog, of course because we have the same name so it was inevitable. Ironically I compared both of our compare and contrast blogs. Hailey's is a lot more simple and to the point than mine is. I like hers better in this way. In my blog I talked about compare and contrast in a way that it helps students put two things together and help them decipher between the two while Hailey talks more about compare and contrast helping people that are "on the fence" with different things. Hailey also talks about the side by side and subject by subject element where I talked more about venn diagrams and helping students more comprehend.

These are the two blogs I compared

http://howellhailey.blogspot.com/  
http://haileyschvaneveldt.blogspot.com/2015/10/blog-6a.html

Blog 6A

The element of compare and contrast help students obtain skills of comparing two subjects and distinguishing differences between the two. The idea is to teach students the skill of using Venn diagrams and visually seeing the differences between two similar things. Students learn in a more sufficient way when they are able to visually see the differences between two subjects. Venn diagrams are very important when it comes to the element of compare and contrast. In the article we read dealing with compare and contrast it said that students comprehend best when asked, "can anyone spot out the differences between these two songs?" The students could easily distinguish the differences after using the compare and contrast method. Using this method makes it so much easier for students to compare things and understand the text which they are reading. 

Looking in a writing perspective, compare and contrast makes it quite a bit easier when trying to explain differentiate between two things. Using the compare and contrast method helps the audience put the two ideas side by side and easily pick out the differences between the two. It is much easier to compare two subjects when they are placed and talked about close to each other. When the rhetor can successfully compare two subjects together in their writing, it makes it much simpler for the audience to understand the comparison and find the contrast between the two. It is important to remember the element of compare and contrast because it can help get a point across to the audience of what the desired ideas of the author are. It also helps the reader think visually and see the contrasts in a visual sense.