How Effective Are Advertisements?

Above is a picture of my ad, I chose it because I think it is an effective advertisement. The advertisement's argument is to play Game Boy’s new handheld device. The author wants to convince the audience that they should play the new Game Boy. The author is Nintendo and we know they are video game producers. They value sneaking around and hiding stuff from parents. They have a very sneaky personality. The target audience is teenage boys. The audience would read this text because they like playing video games and it appeals to something that they go through which is being grounded. The text is found in the bottom of the advertisement. It looks like it might have been used in the 90s. There are no emotional appeals. There are no facts, or evidence provided in the ad. But the author talks about being grounded, which is something that many teenagers can relate to.

I thought the advertisement was effective because their message is very relatable. When you are grounded your parents usually take away your phone or they don't let you go out and for many guys, they will prohibit your use of video games. The handheld device, since small could be hidden. This may sound like I am a bad person or whatever, but I used to do this all the time when I was "grounded" I would just hide my iPod touch or hide my other devices, so that my parents would just take away my phone. It wasn't that bad of an idea. But the actual message they are conveying is bad because they are essentially telling you to sneak around and disobey your parents. None the less, the advertisement is pretty convincing.

Having a little sister, is literally the best thing ever!

I don't know how many of you have siblings, but having siblings is amazing. It's like having a pet that actually replies to you and sometimes gets really mad at you and yells at you or throws the occasional TV remote at you. But having a younger sister is the best. She will be your best friend till the end of time and she will share a bond with you that no one else will.

I love having a little sister because she is like the mini version of me. She is so alike but at the same time she is completely different. There's a quote that totally describes our relationship, it reads, "In a way I was incredibly proud of her (not that I had any intention of letting it show while I was beating the crap out of her)." It's funny because she is the apple of my eye but sometimes she can be so rude. I am the type of person that likes to show affection and be very in contact with others. My sister hates it when I go into her room and kiss her and hug her. There are literally a certain number of times she has told me that she loves me but when she does, she reveals a little secret about how much she admires and looks up to me.

If I didn't have her I don't know who I could share all my secrets with and who's opinion I would think about before I do anything stupid. I love it more than anything else in the world.

The Food Issue Response

While reading Foer's "Against Meat" I kept wondering why I had never thought about eating meat that way. Most of what Foer was explaining made sense but I really couldn't accept the idea. I feel like it doesn't make sense that we should not kill the animals because we would not kill another person. I strongly believe in the idea that we are part of a cycle. The only way to survive is to kill other animals and eat the meat. It makes sense. We have been doing this for so long, basically since time started. How could we as a society stop eating meat all together when it is a staple in our diets.

There were many other theories he described in the piece. Basically talking about human values and their ways of thinking. For example, when he talked about how parents lie to their kids and the kids with their naivety catch the parents in lies where they cannot get out, there is a sudden change in the game. We always grow up with these "rules" that no one ever really refutes because they are so drilled into our brains. It's the same with the meat strategy. Foer was so used to eating meat and his grandmother never shared stories to him of how the meat and the food was produced because no one really thinks about that, its just something that we know and that we do.

Technology...is it hurting our language skills or strengthening them?

After reading chapter 13 of "They Say I Say" there seems to be a substantial amount of criticism and support for the advancement of technology and how it has influenced our language/reading/writing skills. From my opinion, the text spoke volumes about reading online and the substance of online communication. I love reading articles and almost always, after reading an article, I read the comments and most of the time I do not respond simply because I find it to be tedious work (there are so many people/comments it seems overwhelming). But the comments for the most part are not irrelevant/stupid. I find them to be very controversial and a good way to spark conversation. I find it so interesting that we can communicate in any given time at any given place about the same thing, while never even meeting the other person in the real world. But I love this ability to perform online, whenever I read an article online I go for the comments after because that's the only discourse I could get out of the article. Most of the time, a teacher is not going to give the class the article to read and talk about and analyze, that's just impossible. But to think about all the ideas/questions I have after reading the article and having no place to go to after is dumbfounding, I like having those discussion boards and comments to look back to.

In terms of the rapidness and amount of information we get on a daily basis, that is different. My COMS 5 teacher said, just the other day when we were talking about using easybib.com, that it would be irrelevant for her to tell us not to use the site for our bibliographies, because it would essentially be like telling us not to use the library for books. She is right about that, she claimed she did not like the website because it made it easier for us to write our bibliographies when she and others before us had to suffer and look for everything manually. Yet, she understood that we have these resources at our availability and we should be using them. After all, someone did go out of their way to create the website, database, or whatever program/process for our use.

Yet, I am part of the millennial age group and our whole lives have basically been run by technology and we frankly cannot live without it at this point.

New Friends

Since I arrived at Sac State, I have met many people. Making new friends was king of hard for me at first. I felt like I had to do anything and everything in order to meet new people when I first got here. I made some decisions that were not the best when I first started and hung around people that were not really trying to be my friends, simply just making school harder and stressing me out about everything. Luckily, I met the people I am friends with now.

I honestly don't know what I would have done right now, that I've been in a need for friends, if I didn't have the people I currently hang out with now. Making friends in college turned out to be harder than I thought. Although the people here are very nice and they are open minded, you never know who is truly your friend.

Recently, I've come to realize that you never truly know someone until you hit their breaking point. It can be very stressful to hang around the wrong people and that's why you always have to be careful who you wind up with. But at a time like this and in the age we are in, friendship is what is going to get us through the hardest times we are going to face. College has proven to be nothing like high school and I have realized that you need people who will truly be there for you no matter the situation in order to survive through it.

Writing Process

Believe it or not, I haven't really written anything big since I started college. The biggest paper I wrote was last (also my first) semester and it basically stood as my final. The paper was supposed to be at least 12 pages long to get a C and 20 pages to get a B or an A. I thought the professor had not done a very good job teaching us in class and that he was being ridiculous for making us write such a long essay for basically only two topics that were simply not that extensive. I decided the best idea, which turned out to get me a C in the class, was to write close to the minimum (I wrote only 13 pages). This essay was really hard for me given that I had not written an essay that long before in my entire life and also that I had not written an essay in it's sense since May before I took my AP tests Senior year in high school.

My only approach was to simply start writing based on the little knowledge I already had about the topics. After that, I realized I really knew nothing about anything, so I did a little bit of research. My research was not great because I didn't really know what the professor wanted me to write about. He had simply given us a paper that had the two topics and a couple of questions. In drafting my essay I did not really think about the topic I just wrote down fact after fact I had researched online. In terms of getting feedback, I didn't even have a clue where the writing center was at and didn't bother to ask for help because I thought the professor might not even entirely read 30+ people's essays. I hated the class, it was my first semester and I didn't really find the assignment relevant to the class, which he cancelled basically every other week. So, writing a paper for the class was dreadful.

After I realized that I was not going to put in the hard work for the paper, I just decided I would write about a page everyday for a week. I mostly sat around my friend's house and asked them to help me as much as they could. They were the only editing I got done for that paper. I ended up writing half of the paper totally last minute (two days before it was due), that's probably also why I got the grade that I did. I know I should have researched the topics more, I was being lazy and I didn't want to get any help because I didn't really want to do the assignment. I know now that you must really take into consideration the different steps to writing a piece.

Hello Welcome to my Blog!

Hello everyone!

My name is Brianda Perez Avila. But usually I just tell people I'm Brianda Perez. My name is hyphenated but I don't do it. I am from Guanajuato, Mexico but have lived here practically all my life. I have a younger sister who is only sixteen, so it's just me and her.

I am a first year Government major with a focus on International Relations. I do not know exactly what I am going to end up doing, but for now I really want to join the CIA. I also want to learn Arabic or Farsi so I can travel to the Middle East. I hope to focus on Foreign Policy once I join the CIA. I want to go to the Monterey Institute of International Affairs when I finish my undergraduate studies at Sac State.

I am writing this blog for my English 5 class at Sac State.