Month: November 2018

My goal for revision is to work on strengthening my thesis and to refocus and finish my essay. My thesis has significantly changed since working through peer reviews and I now must work on choosing the parts of my essay that fit with my new thesis. In order to achieve this goal I will first rewrite my thesis, go through my current draft and pick out claim sentences and arguments that work with my new thesis, and work through a draft of my essay using my new focus. After that I will go back and rearrange and edit based on what I think fits and what does not. My biggest challenge will be having to rewrite a great deal of my essay and incorporating the multi-modal aspect. It might be difficult to find a way to incorporate three different types of media in my essay. I plan on providing links to the podcasts and inserting pictures but it might be hard to find a third type of media. If a challenge arises that I can’t solve on my own I will reach out to Professor Emerson or to someone I trust that can help me. I will also try my best to work through challenges on my own before reaching out but I will get help if I need to.

I plan on using photographs and links to podcasts in my essay. One specific image I plan to use is the cover photo of the article I found from Discover Magazine. It will help me explain one of the ideas I talk about in my essay and I also think its a really cool image.

I will link the podcasts that I talk about so that readers can listen to them if they feel they want to. Citing these will be tricky but I plan to use tips from The Little Seagull to help me with it. I will also put an in-text citation under the images that I use and cite them with my articles.

Finally, If I come across a video that I like that I think will fit into my writing I will embed it into my essay.

How can our experiences shape the way we see the world and influence the things we find beautiful? How can this influence our community? In John Armstrong’s essay, “La Bella Vita,” he talks about Friedrich Schiller’s ideas about beauty. He wants to know why we find certain things beautiful and why some things are beautiful to one person but not another. His reasoning has led me to believe that our experiences shape who we are and thus how we view the world. We may find something beautiful because it reminds us of a happy moment in our lives. It could be something as mundane as a leaf on the sidewalk that most people would not look twice at but to some people, it is beautiful. This leads me to believe that beauty is malleable and can differ from person to person. Beauty is not an objective measure and does not fit one person’s definition. 

In psychology, we learn that our personalities and behaviors are influenced not only by our genetics but also by the world around us and the things we experience. This is the famous nature vs nurture claim. I think that we see certain things as beautiful because society tells  us to. It is most likely that someone will find a natural landscape or a sunset beautiful. But why? Why do we find some people more physically attractive than others? I read an article about a mathematical formula for the “most beautiful face.” It attempts to explain how the ratios between certain measures of a person’s face can influence how “beautiful” they are. Though some people may be more proportionally “correct” than others, the perception of that person’s beauty is still largely dependent on who the other person is and what they have experienced. This has had major impacts on our society and our communities.

I consider my immediate community to be my school community at the University of New England. I do not see the effects of beauty here as much as I do society as a whole. In my small community here at school, beauty does not play such an overt role. In society, people tend to hold people who are considered more “beautiful” to a higher respect. There are many double standards in today’s world when it comes to beauty. People tend to get away with doing bad things depending on how they are viewed in their community. I think we need to start looking past what we see on the surface and take actions more seriously.

Beauty can be found in the dynamic of a community itself. I found beauty in my transition to college this year. Before moving in I was utterly terrified of school and being away from home. When I got here, I found that I was right where I needed to be. There was beauty in the change in environment that I did not know I needed until I got here. I have been able to shape my experience within my community by meeting new people and gaining new knowledge from the things I experience.

In my essay I will be using an article from Discover magazine titled “The Math Behind Beauty: A Plastic Surgeon Computes the Perfect Face” by Bruno Maddox. The article is talks about how plastic surgeon, Dr. Stephen Marquardt, used a formula created in ancient Greece which is know as the “golden ratio” to come up with a formula for the most beautiful face. The ratio is used to formulate the most aesthetically pleasing structures. I will use this article to complicate my argument and draw inspiration from how it defines beauty as an objective measure to come up with my own opinions.

I will also be using two of my peer’s podcasts in my essay. I plan to use Tehya Casey’s podcast and Liam Darcy’s podcast. These presentations stood out to me because I thoroughly enjoyed the perspectives of each of the people interviewed in each podcast. Both interviewees used contrast as a way to describe beauty. In Tehya’s podcast, her aunt talks about how the New England coasts being raw and rustic make them even more beautiful. This made me think that beauty should or usually comes from something real and natural and is not often man-made. Liam’s podcast lead me to believe that beauty can come from bad situations and the process of growing from these experiences is what makes it beautiful.

John Armstrong writes “To regard beauty as a luxury adornment or a social signifier was to miss the true potential of the experience” in his essay “La Bella Vita. I think that this statement means that if we focus too much on the material aspect of beauty rather than the experience then we will miss it. To perceive something as beautiful is more of an experience rather than a physical object. It is a feeling and if we get too caught up in the material then we will never see true beauty. I view beauty as something that is perceived differently from person to person. Something that appears beautiful to one person might not be given a second thought from another. Armstrong references the popular thought that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and says “people are delighted by wildly variant things and that’s how it should be, the thinking goes–so don’t get worked up trying to figure out which things are beautiful.” I don’t think we have to “figure out” which things are beautiful but we just feel that they are without thinking. I feel that the community here at the University of New England holds beauty in high regard. The people here take pride in the aesthetic of our campus and also the close-knit feel of the community. I think that we find beauty in making connections with each other and finding our passion in our studies.