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I like your professor! That's a good way to teach creative writing skills.

Anyway...I'd add something more to the discussion, if I knew what we're talking about (other than arguing about arguing?) So somebody throw out a tidbit and let's see if we can get a casual discuss going.
To be precise: Expository writing skills - kind of the opposite of creative writing.

This distinction is kind of important because that's what the class was meant to teach - there was no editorial opinion allowed, no suppositions or speculations without supportive data, no fiction, and nothing was written in the first person. It's the style of straight journalistic reporting as opposed to opinion pieces. Kind of like if you were writing a textbook where you assume the reader has no prior knowledge or understanding about the topic being discussed.

It was quite difficult and the professor would fill the margins of each assignment with red pen, tearing your work apart.
He loved to write "How so?" after most of my statements!
I remember my first moment of joy when (after about my fifth essay) I saw he wrote "Good!" after I fully provided support for a statement.
He was a great teacher though - the amount of correction he put on each student's work showed he was really looking at the work and not just throwing a grade on it.

I always remember the first day when he announced, "Everyone here will complete this class, not with a passing grade, but with an A! Anyone who does not get an A in this class simply will not pass it, getting no credit for the course and will need to repeat it. Pass or fail, people, those are the only two options here. I will guarantee you one thing - everyone who completes this class will know what expository writing is and how to perform it."

It took everyone about 3 months before any "A's" showed up on any papers, and if you didn't get an "A," you got an "F."



You ready? You look ready.
To be precise: Expository writing skills - kind of the opposite of creative writing.

This distinction is kind of important because that's what the class was meant to teach - there was no editorial opinion allowed, no suppositions or speculations without supportive data, no fiction, and nothing was written in the first person. It's the style of straight journalistic reporting as opposed to opinion pieces. Kind of like if you were writing a textbook where you assume the reader has no prior knowledge or understanding about the topic being discussed.

It was quite difficult and the professor would fill the margins of each assignment with red pen, tearing your work apart.
He loved to write "How so?" after most of my statements!
I remember my first moment of joy when (after about my fifth essay) I saw he wrote "Good!" after I fully provided support for a statement.
He was a great teacher though - the amount of correction he put on each student's work showed he was really looking at the work and not just throwing a grade on it.

I always remember the first day when he announced, "Everyone here will complete this class, not with a passing grade, but with an A! Anyone who does not get an A in this class simply will not pass it, getting no credit for the course and will need to repeat it. Pass or fail, people, those are the only two options here. I will guarantee you one thing - everyone who completes this class will know what expository writing is and how to perform it."

It took everyone about 3 months before any "A's" showed up on any papers, and if you didn't get an "A," you got an "F."
I remember when I had a professor/class similar to this and I enjoyed it. But I wouldn’t trade it for the writing I got to do in my major where you’re allowed to assume **** and jargon their ass. Boom! We don’t need no commas here. We gots semicolons and colons. And mine’s itching to drop a load: a fat one.
__________________
"This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined." -Baruch Spinoza



Everyone likes your professor, no one is actually available to do what he intended in the 24/7 real life. We all love to make other people reach our truth. I put those statistics in question not because I don’t like them (I didn’t even knew them), but because I put in question who made them. When I see someone hidden behind them as something irrefutable to make some point I obviously don’t like it, because in a planet with 7+ billion people you’re idea is just another, is not something everyone should believe, is not truth even if you base yourself on things you believe to be truths. Obviously for me to articulate this I had to put in question the author of the statistics and than say, basing myself on people that had some original thinking- why everything we believe is an perspective and why we want to make things irrefutable. Now, for argument sake, for psychological, sociological etc discussion I’m willing to reach an agreement to agree they’re unquestionable facts.



You said for me to post information I believe in? I don't have any. I read independent sources because that's what they are, independent. Do I base myself on there information? No, because anyone could obviously do what I just did, and do it even better. If I don't have reasons to believe official information is unquestionable, are facts no one can argue about, how could I believe my independent ones? I won't say I believe them the same way, because I don't, I presume the independent ones aren't corrupted like the official ones might be, because again, the darkest picture is always the nearest historically. When there is space for dough, and I can't think of many things without space for dough I don't think people should hide behind them. Yes, I quote people, not because I believe them to be facts, but because is a way I had to find to make you understand why I'm questioning the subject. I'll repeat it, if we're here to make the statistics hypothetical facts I'm willing to discuss them, because very honestly, that's what I'd like to do, this escalated out of proportion when someone used those stats to make me answer for something I didn't even affirmed. If you read anything I say, you've noticed by now, it's a walking contradiction, reminded me of Taxi Driver, but that's what I intended all along, like the professor said.





Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

written by the astronomer Carl Sagan

This have nothing to do with this thread, but I fond it so interesting I had to share.



You ready? You look ready.
I just stopped looking at it when I got so busy. I had plans to grow a second set of hands but alas I was too busy.

It’s ridiculous how busy I am.



Well, I keep trying to get a conversation going, but so far no luck I suppose I should say (insert political party or politician) is a (insert jaw dropping accusation or equally over the top praise)...that then would probably get me some attention!



Well, I keep trying to get a conversation going, but so far no luck I suppose I should say (insert political party or politician) is a (insert jaw dropping accusation or equally over the top praise)...that then would probably get me some attention!
Has this thread taught you nothing? Post a statistic!



That's not a bad idea. Let's start.

According to the poll by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany 2/3 of millennials and 4 in 10 Americans overall don't know what Auschwitz was; 49 percent millenials were unable to name a single concentration camp or ghetto, compared to 45 percent of adults; and just over half thought Adolf Hitler came to power in a coup, rather than in Germany's democratic election.

1 in 4 Americans thinks the sun orbits the Earth, according to a National Science Foundation study.

34 percent of Americans reject evolution entirely and believe humans have existed in their present form for tens of thousands of years, according to a Pew Research Center Religious Landscape study.
Pew said 62 percent of U.S. adults believe humans evolved over time. Of that group only 33 percent said humans and other living beings evolved solely due to natural processes; 25 percent of them say evolution was guided by a superior being.

20 percent of U.S. adults continue to deny climate change is happening, according to a spring 2018 survey by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.

7 percent of all American adults believe that chocolate milk comes from brown cows, according to a nationally representative online survey commissioned by the Innovation Center of U.S. Dairy. If you do the math, that works out to 16.4 million misinformed, milk-drinking people. The equivalent of the population of Pennsylvania.

In 2012, a Pew poll found that 35 percent of respondents considered sexual orientation a lifestyle choice.

In 2006, the Washington Post ran the results of a questionnaire that indicated 30 percent of Americans didn’t know what year 9/11 took place.

A survey by YouGov found that 41 percent of those queried think dinosaurs and humans "probably" or "definitely" once co-existed on Earth at the same time.

And this goes on an on. They should make an extra square: "Did you vote from Trump?". That would make things easier.



That's not a bad idea. Let's start.

According to the poll by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany 2/3 of millennials and 4 in 10 Americans overall don't know what Auschwitz was; 49 percent millenials were unable to name a single concentration camp or ghetto, compared to 45 percent of adults; and just over half thought Adolf Hitler came to power in a coup, rather than in Germany's democratic election.

1 in 4 Americans thinks the sun orbits the Earth, according to a National Science Foundation study.

34 percent of Americans reject evolution entirely and believe humans have existed in their present form for tens of thousands of years, according to a Pew Research Center Religious Landscape study.
Pew said 62 percent of U.S. adults believe humans evolved over time. Of that group only 33 percent said humans and other living beings evolved solely due to natural processes; 25 percent of them say evolution was guided by a superior being.

20 percent of U.S. adults continue to deny climate change is happening, according to a spring 2018 survey by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.

7 percent of all American adults believe that chocolate milk comes from brown cows, according to a nationally representative online survey commissioned by the Innovation Center of U.S. Dairy. If you do the math, that works out to 16.4 million misinformed, milk-drinking people. The equivalent of the population of Pennsylvania.

In 2012, a Pew poll found that 35 percent of respondents considered sexual orientation a lifestyle choice.

In 2006, the Washington Post ran the results of a questionnaire that indicated 30 percent of Americans didn’t know what year 9/11 took place.

A survey by YouGov found that 41 percent of those queried think dinosaurs and humans "probably" or "definitely" once co-existed on Earth at the same time.

And this goes on an on. They should make an extra square: "Did you vote from Trump?". That would make things easier.
An interesting good post, until you blew it at the end.



Humans and dinosaurs did exist at the same time and still do.
Alligators are dinosaurs. Sure, they've gotten smaller over millions of years, but are otherwise virtually unchanged from their larger ancestors.



Humans and dinosaurs did exist at the same time and still do.
Alligators are dinosaurs. Sure, they've gotten smaller over millions of years, but are otherwise virtually unchanged from their larger ancestors.
Alligators aren't dinosaurs. I'm pretty sure of that. Dinosaurs weren't just ancient reptiles. They had a hip structure that placed their limbs more directly under their bodies, like mammals and birds of today. But you're right that alligators are virtually unchanged from the days of the dinosaurs.



34 percent of Americans reject evolution entirely and believe humans have existed in their present form for tens of thousands of years, according to a Pew Research Center Religious Landscape study.
Pew said 62 percent of U.S. adults believe humans evolved over time. Of that group only 33 percent said humans and other living beings evolved solely due to natural processes; 25 percent of them say evolution was guided by a superior being.


What we consider modern humans HAVE existed for far more than tens of thousands of years.
Fossil evidence of modern homo-sapiens dates back to the Middle Paleolithic age, 200,000 years ago.



Alligators aren't dinosaurs. I'm pretty sure of that. Dinosaurs weren't just ancient reptiles. They had a hip structure that placed their limbs more directly under their bodies, like mammals and birds of today. But you're right that alligators are virtually unchanged from the days of the dinosaurs.
Ach! You're right! You've outfoxed me once again, Sir Rules!



You ready? You look ready.
34 percent of Americans reject evolution entirely and believe humans have existed in their present form for tens of thousands of years, according to a Pew Research Center Religious Landscape study.
Pew said 62 percent of U.S. adults believe humans evolved over time. Of that group only 33 percent said humans and other living beings evolved solely due to natural processes; 25 percent of them say evolution was guided by a superior being.


What we consider modern humans HAVE existed for far more than tens of thousands of years.
Fossil evidence of modern homo-sapiens dates back to the Middle Paleolithic age, 200,000 years ago.
Then why is cable TV still ****ty?



Ach! You're right! You've outfoxed me once again, Sir Rules!
I'm hardly ever right! But I use to watch those dinosaur shows on cable. That's before all the cable channels switched to home improvement shows



I'm hardly ever right! But I use to watch those dinosaur shows on cable. That's before all the cable channels switched to home improvement shows
I'm ashamed because I used to study paleontology (I wanted to be a paleontologist when I was little)! But yeah, I think the whole hip-bone configuration led to the current theory that any dinosaurs that survived the "great cataclysm" evolved into modern birds.

I still don't like these new theories that some dinos had feathers! It conflicts with my boyhood conceptions of giant scaly lizards!