This podcast by Malcolm Gladwell titled ” The Big Man Can’t Shoot” talks about the concept on why good ideas and why they are so difficult to spread. They give perfect examples using famous basketball players and there method of shooting that nobody wants to use to this day. So why don;t people want to change if it can make them better? That’s the big question of this podcast. How do beliefs differ from thresholds. What encourages people to things opposite of their beliefs? Whats their motivators, their beliefs, and their concepts.

Gladwell starts by talking about one of the greatest basketball players Wilt Chamberlain, standing at 7 feet and 1 inch at 275 pounds. Most lengthy NBA players are clumsy and only serve defense purposes, but not Chamberlain. Chamberlain was a impeccable shooter, the season of 1961-1962 he averages 50 points a game. A record that will never has never been beat. Wilt even shot a solid 100 point game while being hungover. What makes him different from other tall players? Why aren’t other tall players good at shooting free throws? The answer is because Wilt Chamberlain shoots his free throws underhand, rather then the traditional overhand. Very few players shoot like this, Rick Barry, George Johnson, and of course Wilt Chamberlain. As well as 2 college basketball players being Rick Berry’s son and another player from a different continent.

So why, why don’t more players use this shooting method. A method that is a more natural movement for your hands, gives a softer touch on the ball, and clearly tested to work more efficiently. People simply do not like shooting under hand because it is not the traditional way of shooting and they are scared of looking stupid. There belief is that shooting overhand is only the right way. The threshold is shooting underhand, not caring about beliefs and doing whats good for you to make yourself a better player. Essential changing an aspect of the game. So what the difference between beliefs and the threshold?

As sociologist Granovetter explains that beliefs are an internal, and thresholds are external. Thresholds you are inspired by what is around you, how people around you act, and any other external motivators. Granovetter used riots as an example, people know they shouldn;t be throwing rocks threw windows. But when they see other people throw rocks they get inspired to do, and when that rock goes through the feel a sense of power.

So I believe that people don’t like to try other good things because they don’t want to ruin there beliefs. Also they are scared of being judged and looked at differently even if it will benefit them. Thus is why people should try to find that threshold for collective behavior. So they can open their minds into other ways of doing good and might even find a even better way to do it. Sometimes your beliefs aren’t always the best way, many times there are other ways of doing good in a more effective manner.

The Heritage talks about the matter of the American military paying sports team for promotions such as walking the flag across the field before game, letting a soldier take the first pitch, and more. They are trying to debate if this is wrong to do or not.

Sports teams and the military are like best friends, there is stuff that team owners know that normal citizens like us don’t know about. People say that the military paying the teams to be apart of the game as a way to get “sponsored” by the team is foul to do. The military sees it as a promotion of patriotism and the sport teams sees it as business. So does this make it right? Is this a form of corruption? Some say the military shouldn’t have to pay to hold their flag across the field. Some think that the military should have no part of the ball games. So who’s right and who’s wrong?

Personally, I believe the military shouldn’t be paying to get advertised on a ball game. There is so much more where that money could go. The military has gave millions and millions of dollars to help sport teams. With those million upon millions dollars we could’ve put that money into school, help people who can’t even afford to eat a meal, and helped with the nations debt. I understand that the military is trying to make more people patriotic and want to join the army, but there’s plenty more ways to do it then spending all this money just to hold a flag up. Also, being involved with military can lead to being tied down to information and not being able to tell anybody. Such as the death of Pat Tillman. A man who disagreed to become the poster child G.I Joe for quitting football to join the military.

The military could’ve done things much different to promote themselves. Such as get more commercials on the tv or the radio, setup more sign up tables at high schools and colleges, and promoted their clothing more publicly. All of this would’ve been much cheaper and less costly then promoting themselves. This making it so they have no tie ins with sport teams and the game can be kept all about the game as it should be

So who is the real patriot? Nobody in this case. The deal between the military and sport teams is solemnly a business deal. A patriotic act is something that comes from the heart not just because you got paid for it. If the teams let soldiers walk with the flag for free and no costs involved, that would’ve been a the real patriotic act. But as people say,” money controls the world.” More money means for more evil and this book shows you that. Are the sport teams wrong for accepting the money? That is an opinion but I believe so. But who wouldn’t want millions of dollars and military back up just to let them be apart of the game?

There are many ins and outs with our government and how they operate. Some people know them all, some people don’t know a single thing. The government just tries to make them look the best while not telling people what they do behind closed doors. Such as spend taxpayers money in non essential ways. I believe the act of paying for this type of promotion is uncalled for and stealing from the taxpayers. The military shouldn’t have to spend this money on promotion when there is bigger problems in the world they should be fighting.

This podcast by Gladwell enlightens the concept that doing good makes it feel acceptable to do bad after, and when does doing good leading into doing more good. They give excellent evidence used from real life situations that occurred such as the artist of the painting Role Call not being accepted as a member of the most sought after art gallery, Prime minister of Australia being shammed because of her gender, and even the relationship between Germans and Jews.

Many years ago in the 1870’s a artist named Elizabeth Thompson creates a masterpieces called “Role Call”. A painting that portrayed a Scottish Army in line that was detailed down to every single wrinkle in the Army’s uniform of around 300 men. Her painting got put into the most known art gallery in Europe, right in gallery 2. Where the most fantastic highly respected pieces go. And this being the first respected female artist and first female artist to be put into this gallery. The next year Elizabeth tried to join the art gallery club and they did not accept her in, for the fact they didn’t want to change their ways and traditions by letting a female in. Then they put her artwork in the black hole section. The section that is almost as bad as not even being put in the gallery hung up on the ceilings.

This is the art galleries response to doing good once. They accepted her art working being the good thing they did. Then they turned her down from joining the club and moved her art into the worse spot in the building. The members thought it was not going to be that bad of thing to do since they already accepted one her pieces in the gallery. This also shows that people who support something such as a female becoming known for being artistic, are also the ones likely to bash on the female community eventually and shame them. Gladwell also speaks on that when he talks about the experiment done on Barrack Obama supporters, the study showed those who are most likely to vote for Barrack are the same people who tend to use racial slurs. This also being a form of doing good can lead making it thing its acceptable to do something bad now.

In this podcast Gladwell said a quote from a journalist who did a writing on Elizabeth Thompson, the journalist said, ” real genius has no insurmountable obstacles in the English Art world.” This quote meaning no matter what or who you are everybody is capable of being great in the English Art world. Even though Elizabeth was a female she still made into gallery 2 and became a world known artist who even had more famous painting then “Role Call”. I find this quote very inspiring and think this should relate to everything in the world. I believe anything a man can do a women should be able to do it aswell, same thing goes for different races aswell. Anything a white man should do, an African American should be able to do with the same and succeed the same. I believe in today’s world this is still a problem we have to deal with.

Although it took me about 4 times of listening to this podcast start to end I found it to be actually very open minded and inspiring on real life problems. I think this podcast goes over the problems of what we are doing wrong to make everybody equal and even give evidence from 1874 with Elizabeth Thompson to 2013 with Julia Gillard former Prime Minister of Australia. This podcast is very insightful of the information they used and relating it to the problems. Although the speakers voice is sort of mono tone and not my style of podcast voice being its more of a gentle voice that was hard to pull me in. This podcast has great factual information that I think could help people change the ways the thing and turn doing good thing into doing even better things and even thinking about doing bad thing.

Part 3 of They Say, I Say talks about properly quoting and common mistakes in quoting. Such as hit and run quotes, how to make sure your quote is relevant, and everybody can understand what the quote means.

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HIT AND RUN QUOTES:

In a car accident, if someone hits you and runs from the scene it is a hit and run. In quoting it is essentially the same thing. A hit and run quote is a quote that doesn’t explain what the quote means, how its related, which can lead the reader to being confused on why that quote is relevant.

example: the author claims that, ” driving cars can be dangerous.”…….

This is a hit and run quote because the author may have said this there is essentially no background information. How can driving be dangerous? What makes driving dangerous? Where is the author coming from to make this statement?

QUALITIES OF A GOOD QUOTE:

A good quote must have:

• proper introduction, ex: The author states,”……
• a comma led to quotations after
• what the author said and still retaining his belief for the quote
• clear explanations what the quote means
• clear explanation how the quote relates to what your using it for

example: the author claims, ” Driving can be dangerous because vehicles can travel at high rates of speed and being over 2500 pounds a car accident could be highly fatal. Also, some drivers might not be alert as other causing them to be a potential hazard.”

This is a good quote because it shows what the author is saying and his meaning behind it which helps the reader understand why the quote is important.

Also another quality of a good quote is when you take the authors words and slightly rephrase what he is saying while making the quote still mean the same thing and reasoning as the original author intended.

BAD WAYS TO START A QUOTE:

When quoting you want to make sure there are no pin holes to argue the quote. You want have the quote be assertive and not misleading in any way

example of bad quotes:

Graff gave an idea that….

Graff made a quote that says….

examples of good quotes:

Graff asserted his idea that…..

a quote by Graff states….

Conclusion

This chapter of They Say, I Say might have been the most helpful one for me yet. I wasn’t really sure on how to make a reliable quote and give evidence with it. Also, for me the biggest thing was learning how to start quotes properly, I wasn’t to aware of the difference of wording the introduction could be. Other then the lesson Dr. Villanueva went over in class awhile back. This chapter I believe was a good learning experience to help me elevate my writing experience.

By: Alex Milewski

1. Marco Capovilla and Venezia Pulita took this photo on March 8th, 2020 in Venice, Italy

2. The message behind this picture is that with covid-19 impacting Italy deeply and causing residents to be quarantined. Has lead to there not being as many people out which entails that not as many are littering and its making our planet cleaner. Which in this compare and contrast picture you can tell the canals in Venice are more clear and cleaner then ever and more fish are to be seen in the waters. This is stated in the article NBC news made including this picture.

3. This is a very persuasive picture because it shows how easy it is to keep our Earth clean and how quickly this can be effective. This uses a logos appeal because it logically makes sense with great reasoning. Which being is that logically if more people didn’t litter our Earth would be abundantly cleaner. Then the reason littering isn’t happening right now is because covid-19 has caused many people to stay inside which means not as many people are out to throw there trash in the streets, water bodies, and not in proper trash cans.

4. This image is made for everyone to show people how much of a difference we can make in the world by not littering. This message is intended for everybody because everyone reading it is living on Earth and applies to them all. It is a group effort to make this planet we live on cleaner.

5. This image is floating everywhere over the internet right now since we are in the middle of the covid-19 pandemic. This is in current day and times showing whats going on in our world today and how quarantine might actually have some benefits.

Symbolic: This picture is a compare and contrast on how the waters in the Venice canals in Italy have became cleaner then ever due to corona virus pandemic. On the picture on the left which is the before picture you can tell how dark the water is , how hazy the reflection is, and how light doesn’t contrast off the water as bright. Also you can notice there are people in the waters. On the present picture, the right one shows how the water look in the middle of the pandemic while everybody is stuck inside. The water look much cleaner, the water almost has a reflection of glass, and the sun reflects right off the water. As you can tell that is with nobody in the canals.

Written: The caption for this picture is “Water in Venice’s canals appeared to run clearer in the absence of boat traffic in early March.” They get straight to the point by saying exactly the message of the picture. These pictures were used in this NBC news article to spread awareness that Earth is getting clean all because of covid-19 written by Dennis Chow.

In this article by Freeman and Merskin, they go over how men are pressure in a way by society and how they live and operate daily in life. They talked about how men are suppose to eat meat in society and the male species are pushed away from veganism, organic foods, and other healthy foods. This is because of the way advertisements, social problems, and historical ways are said to be. Back in the early times men were seen to be as hunters to get food for their family while the women stayed home. This giving a perception that to keep masculinity meat is a factor in it. Advertisements relating to meat mostly target to men aswell for them to keep their masculinity.

Today’s Society

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Nowadays in 2020 I like to believe men are now smarter and realize that healthy foods and organic foods are much better for your health. I can say personally myself I have seen more men become vegans or vegetarians and don’t let media control them. Which I believe is the truth because why would you decrease your health just because your a male and you should eat meat. Which could also be a reason America is one of the fattest countries in the world. Don’t get me wrong steak and pork are amazing foods but you need to portion it correctly and still interpret some kind of healthy foods into your meal.

Social Beliefs:

When you live in a society that believes that eating meat is associated with masculinity, it may be hard for you to experiment with veganism and healthy foods. Which personally I think is the most absurd belief. Which I am guilty of following aswell. My girlfriend asked me once to go vegetarian with her, and at first I didn’t really want to do because I was worried what people would think of me and I love a good T-bone. After further critical thinking about the subject that is a horrible way to think about it and letting society control me. I shouldn’t be worried what people think of me when it is going to benefit me greatly in the long run. Although I believe this belief is starting to fade away as many more people are starting to be more creative then society wants them to be, it still a real problem in today’s world.

Our world needs to stop worrying about what manly and what feminine and do what is best for you. You need to live how you want and not worry about what others think. At the end of the day it is your life and your health so who is really going to benefit from it? YOU! Its your life and live it how you and do your best doing it and have fun at the same time! This may also lead to a happier life and healthier life if you make the right choices. There are so many benefits to thinking like this and can open your mind to many new adventures, hobbies, and much more!

In this second installment of They Say, I Say by Gerald Graff and Kathy Birkenstein they talk about the “I say” part of writing. In simpler terms its about how to clearly and effectively give your own opinion on a topic or subject. They go in depth on the three type of ways to respond with giving your own take. This section to me was my most favorite and helped me a lot because I tend to struggle giving my opinion on stuff once I have already heard others opinions. The three types of way responding is by agreeing, disagreeing, or disagreeing and agreeing.

Agreeing

Agreeing tends to be the hardest for most writers to make, mainly because they do not want to seem like they are copying what somebody has already said. Although you can agree and sound authentic and agree by including a new concept to the idea. Thus making yourself give the same perception but with new ideas. “While you don’t want to present yourself as a mere copycat of someone else’s views, you also need to avoid sounding like a lone voice in the wilderness.”(Graff,Birkenstein. pg61). This meaning that it is better to restate what your agreeing in your words and giving examples and or new concepts to support this statement.

EXAMPLE

original statement: ” According to social standards today it is essential to wash your hair every other day because washing your hair daily may kill it.”

agreeing statement: ” I agree that washing your hair everyday is a healthier routine because washing your hair everyday can give you a dry and itchy scalp.”

Disagreeing:

One of the most easiest and most common ways of responding to a rhetorical question, disagreeing. Although you make actually disagree with a reading or statement, disagreeing tends to be the most popular choice to use because most people are scared to agree and always want to be different and show originality. To make a good disagreement statement you must have reasons to support your ideas, take in all relevant factors, and make no questionable assumptions. Disagreeing is a common form of critical thinking because it makes your brain work and push through to find what you disagree with and why and then putting those thoughts on paper. Their are 2 commons moves to disagreeing, the “DUH” move and the “twist it” move. The duh move is simply taking the whole assumption of the statement and disagreeing with it by stating the obvious. The twist it move is where you start to agree with the subject then logically twist it around to disagree with it, a more complex way of disagreeing.

EXAMPLE

Original Statement: “Blue is the best color because everything cool is blue.”

Disagreeing Statement: ” I disagree with this statement because, you can’t assume just because its blue its cool, because I hate blue jeans.”

Agreeing and Disagreeing:

Agreeing and disagreeing is a readers favorite type of responses, and personally the hardest one for me. This type of response is the most critical thinking for me because to successfully do it you half to agree with half of it and disagree with the other half. You have to find where to stress what you disagree with and how to stress it appropriately. It is indeed possible to make your argument complicated while keeping a clear response. It is key in all three of these ways that you keep your response clear of what side you are on. So for agreeing to disagree its more like you agree with the big picture, but there are some smaller things that need changes to be made separating this style of response from the others.

EXAMPLE

Original statement: Religion has a major impact on everybody and highly influences them daily

Agreeing and disagreeing statement: Although I believe that religion has a major impact on a lot of people and their daily activities, I don’t believe it effects everybody.

Evidence is a body of facts or information making something a fact. For example, the evidence cheese is a dairy product; because its produced from milk, the king of dairy. Evidence is a crucial factor of lawsuits, criminal issues, and mostly credibility. If you say something and you swear its the truth, if you have no evidence to back it up its nonetheless useless.

I see evidence being most effective in court rooms, evidence will lead you to beating the case. Say somehow people think that you committed a crime and have to go through a trial. If you can show real evidence you weren’t at the scene of the crime, your fairy off the hook. Evidence is the most effective way to make people believe you because it’s based off straight facts.

Evidence is the way to make yourself seem credible and make people believe in you. With evidence you can make others believe in any beliefs and morals, you can alter peoples point of views. Such as the most controversial person, Donald Trump, people always heard he was racist, then he came in trying to build a wall at the border and has made many racial slurs making people realize he is slightly racist. The evidence being that he wants to minimize the amount of ethnic people in America and his rude comments. That mans twitter is insane!

Evidence in writing the same exact concept. You make a writing and have facts to back it up to give your readers insight and proof on said topic. Also in writing without evidence, it so pretty much a fictional writing.You use evidence to make yourself sound logical and support your beliefs. So your body paragraphs is essentially your evidence. It gives the reader accurate facts and proof that you know what your talking about and what your trying to to convey!

Perception is how you view objects, what you believe an object is when you first see it, what you think the object means when you see/hear it. Perception is essentially how your brain works and what translates in your head when viewing or hearing something. Perception has a lot of physiological factors such as mental health, physical health, assumptions, and many other factors. Perceptions are given mostly off of your 5 senses hearing, touch, smell, seeing, and taste. For example the impossible whopper, it’s an all vegan patty but it tastes just like real meat. I bet if you hand the impossible whopper to a random person on the street they most likely won’t even know its an ALL VEGAN patty. Therefore they have the perception that they are eating a normal beef whopper.

Multiple factors come in play when it comes to perception, a happy person may look at something and think it looks beautiful and see greatness out of it, then most likely a depressed person will look at the same thing and think nothing of it and or think its pointless and has no meaning. Studies since 1954 have constantly proved this and show how many mental factors such as depression, anxiety, and social awkwardness play a role in perception. On top of that also cultural and political influences may change your perception on things, where as a Mexican woman may hate Donald Trump’s guts, but a older white business man might love Trump for his strategies. Perception is a major key for advertising campaigns, products, and getting someone to believe in you. If you can make somebody have your same perception you can lead them into how your mind is operating and show them what you believe is right and usable for them. Politics try many ways to change peoples beliefs to make them follow their campaigns.

Another critical factor of perception is influences, things you’ve already learned and have perceived may change your perception on new concepts and strategies. Like in 1960’s some of the coolest and fastest muscle cars were being produced then the 1970’s came and we had a huge gas crisis. Making all the car manufactures having to make their cars more fuel friendly which means not as fast. This had car enthusiasts were raging because they aren’t getting as cool cars as they were due to this gas crisis. But others who are more about saving the Earth and making resources last loved the idea that fuel wasn’t getting burned as much anymore. Because their perception is all about saving the world instead of let’s go faster. Now let’s imagine the perception that gas station owners had, i’m sure they were furious their sales started slowing down and many station didn’t even have gas to sell!

Perception is like they saying “there are 2 sides to a story” their is always 2 perspectives if not more to a concept or object. Grabbing your viewer to perceive what you perceive is all up to you as a writer. You have to use the right terminology and vocabulary to get into your audiences mind to point your reader in the right position as your mind and meet up in the middle. Also, having great recognizable people on your side already is a great way to influence people onto your campaign, product, or attributes. Let’s look at Nike for example, they have influencers such as Micheal Jordan, Kevin Durant, and RIP Kobe Bryant, as a way to promote themselves into making larger sales. In simple terms it works as ,” Hey look Kobe Bryant just scored 80 points last game in his Nikes, ima go get a pair now so I can score 80 points like Mamba.” They used a good player to influence people that their brand is the best.

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Perception is all a mind game, for me the best way to read something is to forget all my perceptions of the specific object, read or listen to what’s being told, and dissect the information that’s being told. Then I try to logically put those facts in and try to see where the viewer is talking about and compare them to my beliefs and how they can be wrong or make me change my morals. I try to think of everything from a 3rd person perceptive so I can try to make everything be fair and equal to everybody and I think more people in the world should try this. Never think your morals are extremely superior then other and always let new influences influence you if you still believe they are the right beliefs.

With there being about 6,500 languages in the world, languages are always changing with a new generation. One generation uses words as hot to describe temperature another generation uses hot to describe a man or woman. These are essentially synonyms. They are languages that aren’t fully established as a language that almost everyone in the world knows about. For example the text language; everybody knows what lol, lmfao, and rofl mean, It’s a way for people to socially express how they feel and their reaction.

Let’s take a step away from that concept and let’s see how words end up evolving after time; such as the word “bruh”.Bruh is a way to greet a close friend or a good way to start a good roast. At first the word started out as brother, then people started saying bro, then for small amount of time they said bros, and now has changed to bruh. After some research I discovered that the word bruh was came from San Francisco from everybody’s old favorite retired app Vine; in the 20th century.

Even some phrases are known around the universe, like “a dime a dozen.” This is a term used to define something that isn’t rare, that is plentiful, and not hard to source. “Those wheels on that car a dime a dozen bruh.” Also the phrase “barking up the wrong tree” every kid knows that phrase. Most kids know this because they were either pushing buttons with their parents or adult and the adult replied with, ” your barking up the wrong tree now!” This phrase is mostly used when someone is talking about a topic one person doesn’t want to talk about or irritates them so they.

My most favorite language is the text language! Text language is defined as slang and abbreviated commonly used with texting. I constantly use acronyms like hmu,lmk, and stfu. And I still haven’t found anybody in my generation not know what gtfo, rofl, stfu, lol, and so many more modern texting acronyms. To me this language came up out of no where and blew up faster then gas in a hot room. It’s also used a million times in everyday use by soooo many people in the world.

With there being so many different languages in the world it’s still possible to communicate with other in certain ways, either a hand shake, verbally speaking some words, or facial expressions. There are a million ways to express what you want to say and it’s up to you how clear you make it and who can understand it. For me this project opened up my mind on how universal languages really are and how you can pin point when and where to use certain languages. Such as when speaking to a foreigner it most likely is not the best to use slang. Or when speaking to elders some words have different meanings to them and won’t make sense unless you explain them what you mean, At the end of the day I think it’s best to speak in a language mostly everybody can understand make it very understandable.