ChangeBy Andrew Quakenbush

ChangeBy Andrew Quakenbush

Table of Contents

Author’s Note—————————————————————————# 1

Raising the Question—————————————————————# 2

Share My Judgment——————————————————————# 3

3 Versions Essay (Qua)————————————————————# 4

3 Versions Essay (Spa)————————————————————# 5

Amazon Review———————————————————————# 6

The Old Man and the Sea———————————————————# 7

Whale Teeth and Skyblanket——————————————————# 8

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Raising the QuestionAndrew Quakenbush

This piece is something that I wrote; the whole of the paper was about asking what the meaning of life is, and how we should be living in accordance to it. This particular paragraph described how every little thing that we do has an effect on the entirety of the world. Just like the flap of a butterfly's wing everything that we do changes the world around us in inconceivable ways. Maybe the change isn't as drastic as a tornado halfway around the world, but there is still a change. I consider it to be a good piece of writing because it references a movie as a way to elaborate the message that I am trying to convey. I know that it is not the best thing to be written, but from my writings this was one of my best paragraphs.

But what does the creation of life mean to our actions? Why does it matter if we came to be by an accident? Every action that we make has an impact on the outcome affecting everything around us. Just like in the movie "The Sound of Thunder" where a time traveler accidentally steps on a butterfly in the dinosaur era and ruined the time in which he was from, all of our actions have an effect, even if we don't realize it. Something as simple as a butterfly's wing flap can cause a shift in the winds triggering a tornado halfway across the world.

Author’s NoteAndrew Quakenbush

Change is everywhere and is in everything around us. Some changes are too small to be noticed and some changes take to long to ever be observed; but that does not mean that they are not there. You can see the slow change in a snail's position along the ground, but you can't see the minuet growth of snail's shell or the increase in the length of its spiral. A person can observe the damaging change of a boulder rolling down a hill, but they cannot see that boulder erode into a pebble. Just because we don't always see the changes that are happening around us, it does not mean that they aren't there. In all of the pieces and parts of writing that I chose as good there is change; many of the changes that are written about are apparent and easy to see, but there are always more changes, smaller changes, behind them that need to be discovered.

3

Share My JudgmentAndrew Quakenbush

A man gets home and he plants a new plant, that he finds so pretty, into his unenclosed garden. His plant begins to produce seeds, and those seeds get picked up and carried in the wind; they blow into a neighbors yard and sprout. The neighbor thinks they're pretty too, so she doesn't kill them. She lets them grow free and untroubled, then the wind kicks up again and blows the seeds from these new plants off into the wild. These seeds sprout out in the forest where they landed and begin to grow rapidly.

An invasive plant like the one that man brought home with him can be harmful no matter how beautiful it is. When the seeds of the plant sprout in a foreign forest it is the same as a illness infecting a body with no immunity to it. The plant spreads throughout the unprotected habitat and chokes out the life that was once thriving. A colorful garden vine might squeeze the life fro the trees, or a lush green lawn might replace a native field, a tree bearing delicious fruits might force out an ancient forest. Any plant, no matter how pretty, can be a menace to the environment.

These two paragraphs together are probably the best piece of writing that I did in class; they came from a bigger paper relating invasive plants to a disease or virus. These paragraphs have a lot to do with change and how it is bad it can be. In most cases change is natural and usually pretty good, like when a person grows older and they change into a more mature adult, but in cases like invasive plants change is harmful or even deadly. These are my two best paragraphs, in my opinion, because of the way that I wrote them. I wrote in a descriptive way that was lacking in many of my other pieces, I was able to make a clear scenario that the reader could easily picture and learn from.

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What it Means to BeAndrew Quakenbush

Every student that wants to get good grades tries hard in school, but I don't. I know that in order to get anywhere in life you need to try and do your best, and I know that I don't work my hardest in school. Even though I get good grades I skate by in school and need to try harder if I want to continue being good.When I was little I didn't care what I was learning in class. We were being taught how to read and write, but I was always resisting. Because I thought I wouldn't need these things, I didn't pay attention. Every day I would go to class and follow the motions, but I would not retain any of the information that we were learning. Reading was a struggle for me, and I tried to not do it. My writing was always poor so I also stopped trying to write as well. I was diagnosed with dyslexia, a disorder that affects the way a person reads and writes, it explained the difficulties that I was having in my learning. The things they were teaching me were important, I began to learn and understand. I started to following the lessons and became a better student. As I started to getting a little older I began reading on my own and my writing skills also improved. I began to participate more in classes and learned more about the things that the teachers were teaching the class. My grades went up and I started to become a good student. Every night I would work on my homework at the kitchen table and then I would get it prepared for turning in the next day. In class I would answer the questions that the teacher asked, I would participate more in the class discussions that we had. After a couple of years school began to get easier for me. When school began to getting too easy for me I stopped trying as hard. In middle school I didn't need to study for many tests and I only did homework to turn it in, not to learn from it. My parents told me that I would have to start trying harder as I advanced through school, and that when I got to high school I would start to fail because I wasn't trying hard enough. My effort decreased even further, when I entered high school. Instead of learning in class I would drift off I my thoughts, and I wouldn't do my homework at home I would instead do it before school started or during another class. My grades were always decent and I almost never got a F on any of my assignments, even though I was never trying. Today I haven't changed much, but I should start to trying harder and do better. Through out my school career I have been a decent student even though I don't try. I have never failed a class or maintained a low grade, but I haven't been good at trying my hardest. Even in other endeavors I have never tried my hardest, but I hope to improve myself and begin to try more in the things that I do. I must start focusing on each thing that I do so that I can devote myself to becoming someone who gives their best to the things that they care about. This essay was one of the first ones that I wrote this year, and it wasn't my favorite or the best, but it was good at showing how I myself have changed. I couldn’t take just one paragraph out of this essay because they all work together to show how I have changed since I was young and how I want to change for the future. Every person changes throughout their life, it is natural and necessary to become the best person that you can be. When I was little I did not understand many things and i didn’t want to, but as I grew older I changed and started to want to understand the things that were going on around me. It is because of changes like this that humanity can grow and learn new things; human expansion requires people to change from thinking about themselves to thinking about what is around them in the world. I think that this essay of my is a good piece of writing because of how it shows my progression through life and how I have clearly changed between each stage of my life. The end of the essay is rather good, because it shows how I want to change in the future, and doesn’t just state how I changed in the past.

3 Versions EssayAndrew Quakenbush

My life at school is completely different at school than it is at home, this is because my time for nothing is at home, and my time for getting work done is at school. Other lazy people figure out how to do all their work where they cannot relax, so that when they get to where they are comfortable they can calm down and forget the struggles of the day. While every lazy person is different and strives for different things they all have the same system, do everything right the first time so that you can relax for the second time.

I wrote this paragraph in an essay about how a person who is lazy behaves. I consider myself to be lazy, and the essay was about me showing the reader how much of an expert that I was at being lazy. This particular paragraph talked about my change in behavior between when I am at home to when I am at school. Everyone changes whom he or she appears to be depending on their setting; like how I am lazy at home and a hard worker at school, a man might be a coward on his own but courageous when surrounded by those he cares about. The writing in this paragraph is not great, but it is good; the narrative setting of it is well done, and I used personal examples from my life to highlight how I knew what I was talking about. For a single paragraph it is rather good.

6

3 Versions EssaySarah Spalding

The first day of school as a freshman in high school and it's like a whole new world possibilities has been unleashed. I've been accepted into a musical, classes are more challenging, new people, and seemingly some degree of more freedom. Time goes on and I can see that I still have a whole four years ahead of me. It seems like such a long time but as the year continued, I found myself becoming shocked by how fast the year is going by. Sophomore year comes and the days speed by until it's over. Junior year, I had a conversations with my friends about how quickly this experience of high school seems to be coming to an end. It's scary and a little unreal. That was me, a puzzled school child discomforted by this sudden shift in the workings of the world. Now it is senior year and it's all very real but still more than terrifying, with the real world of independence and decision making in sight. I've almost completely accepted that time will continue to move faster and faster until the world just flies past me in a wave of bright colors, motions, and decisions. The nights that used to be filled with pointless conversations and the dreading of long school days have suddenly turned into frantic periods of filling out application after application and pouring over information on schools I probably won't even get into.

These two paragraphs, written by Sarah Spalding, come from an essay completely about how she has changed throughout her life. Within these two paragraphs Sarah covered her entire high school career up until today. Sarah wrote little showing the change between each year, but what she did was great in getting its concept across. The way that each year and its change was crammed into only one sentence each makes the reader feel the rushed sense that she had felt going through it. The sudden way that the second paragraph starts brings the reader sharply back to the present and what Sarah current problems are. Her descriptions are great, they perfectly help the reader feel what she is going through and envision the world flying past her.

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Amazon ReviewGabriel Mayer

Let me preface this by saying that Halo 4 is made by a different developer than the other Halo games, so they were bound to do certain things differently. The largest changes are found in the design, the UI is done in a more modern rendition of the past UI. The graphics are a lot better as a whole, and the Lighting Engine was redone, making the world more beautiful as a whole. One major graphics function is missing: in past Halos, when more than one person would play on a split screen; the draw distance would decrease so the Xbox could handle the multiple players. On Halo 4, there is no change in draw distance. This means that the Xbox has to render a lot more per player, and this slows down the frame rate a lot. When playing with four players, I never get a constant 30 fps, it is usually less than 25, which is unacceptable. Another huge issue is that the crosshairs do not scale down with the size of the split screen. This means that when playing with 4 people, you are 3 to 4 times less accurate.

Gabriel Mayer wrote this one paragraph in a review of his about the video game Halo 4. He writes about the most apparent changes between this game and its predecessors. Everyone knows that a sequel has to be different than the original or else it will just be the same thing, sometimes the change is good and is a great addition to the original, but sometimes the new changes are bad and dispel what you loved in or about the original. Gabriel wrote mainly about how the way the game was played changed; the way a game is played is very important to how people perceive a game, so changing it can drastically change a persons opinion of what their playing. The way that Gabe wrote this paragraph was made the reader really think that he knew exactly what it was that he was talking about. By referencing back to previous games Gabriel showed how long he has been with the series, and by giving a detailed scenario of when he had problems it made them seem realer and him more trustworthy.

The Old Man and the SeaErnest Hemingway (1951)

You did not kill the fish only to keep alive and to sell for food, he thought. You killed him for pride and because you are a fisherman. You loved him when he was alive and you loved him after. If you love him, it is not a sin to kill him. Or is it more?

This is a very famous paragraph from a very famous book. The Old Man in Ernest Hemingway’s book had one goal, to catch this fish, but when he did he had to come to terms with what his life now is. As soon as the old man caught his prized fish his whole life changed, now that he has achieved his goal what else is there to do? The way that this is written is superb; it feels like you are in the man’s mind as he thinks to himself about what it is that he has done and what kind of man that makes him for doing it. The question at the end leaves the reader thinking about their own values and how they compare to the old man’s.

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Excerpt from Whale Teeth and Skyblanket

Abbey Mayer (2014)

This poem shows how people change each other in bad ways; the boy was stolen and tortured, changing him into a hollow and mindless person. I really like this poem because of the slightly confusing way that it is written. When reading this poem the reader has to figure some of the metaphors out for themselves, and they have to think deeply about what is being said to get meaning from it.

There was much death,great forests were erased.Then the poison leeched into the sea, they said,and smothered the creatures in the oceans.

The crowmen took the sleeping boy and went away.

First they destroyed his special clothing.Then they tried feeding him to the other crows.They pecked at him, all day, everyday,never resting, never tiring.They were still angry they couldn’t have the sister.

They said that for many years, they pecked at the boy,even when he was asleep.At last they had pecked a great hole in him,in the space between his heart and his mind.

The boy had only three things, they said,with which he could refill the hole.Memory, words, and time.He had no other belongings.

He put these in the hole,but after, his head was left strangely empty.He had trouble remembering things, they said.Things like his beautiful sister, their special forest and the sea.

The boy became unruly and difficult to handle.So the crowmen tried to fill his mind with their own concoctions.They tried milk, then sugar and sand, then loveless stories.They tried alcohol, then tea, and molten copper,silver and gold.Nothing held, they said.  It all ran out his ears, they said.

Finally they poured grease into his mind,which held fast.

This was all so much trouble for just a little bit of food.The crowmen grew weary of the boy.They decided to send him away.They found him work on the plains, in an oilfield.

He could no longer remember much of anything, they said.Not his beautiful, beloved sister.Not even his own true name.

They were both born to a good family, they said.He would grow to be a marriageable man.He had a twin sister, they said,who was born beautiful,of no clear race, they said,She was the daughter of Grace and Wealth.

Her skin was neither white, nor yellow,nor red, blue, black or brown, they said.Her eyes were large, elongated and black.Everyone loved her, they said.

The children lived together in a foreston the edge of a great ocean.

They were given all that they might need.The Forest wove her a cloak, they said,made from the downy underfeathers of blue falcons.

Then they sewed for him seal and otter skin armor.And wove two cloaks for him,one from strips of redcedar,and the other from a skyblanket of mountain goat wool.

Then one day, when the two were still quite young,three common crows that were not ravenswere blown to their woods by a far-away storm.They said the crows gave the boy some treats.He told them the tales from his ocean and forest.He had no reason to distrust them.

He ate their foods and fell asleep.Then the crows took off their crowskinsand revealed themselves to be three men.Each had a great hole in his chest, they said,and their left limbs were all withered and useless.They stood watch over the sleeping boy.

When the boy’s sister tried to wake him,one of the crowmen approached her.He tried to clutch her, they said.She slipped through his fingers,and flew away.

Some say she was taken by a killer whale.They say that she lives in a wooden houseat the bottom of the sea,surrounded by seals and otters.

The angry crow threw his black hat on the Earth, they say.All around it seeped a black poison.The poison, they said, began draining the life out of the land.There was much death,great forests were erased.Then the poison leeched into the sea, they said,

Expository Writing Period #2