Month: January 2019

While reading any work of literature for the first time it’s sometimes difficult to analyze and truly soak in the ideas that the author is presenting to their audience. Even with active reading, such as annotations it’s still difficult. It’s paramount that you read any literature more than once. “Glossing the text” was a very important aspect because it can help define, or redefine, and help make connections that you may have not previously noticed.

Overall, I would say that I didn’t realize anything new or outstanding. By glossing the text it just helped me to better understand the material and some of the connections that the author was trying to make the audience look at. Prior to class, for example, I was under of what the word “pseudo (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pseudo meant. In my first time reading it, I knew that he was using the term “pseudo mistake”, so I understood it was some type of mistake. What “glossing the text” helped me do was to realize that it was a fake mistake, something the author was doing purposely to grab the readers attention. In general, this essay was a pretty easy read and did not have many unknown words. If this were to be harder with more difficult words then “glossing the text” would be infinitely helpful. 

One interesting notion I noticed early on was the question of “can metaphors be designed?”. I found this very interesting because the way I thought about it was that everything is designed and created. How else could we go about creating something, especially with words? Don’t we have to have a design in mind? The author then goes on to say how they can be designed. He then discusses how metaphors are used so we can better understand abstract things. I agree and disagree with this. I think the author is right when saying it’s used to understand abnormal things but I also believe they can be used to understand anything.

Another interesting point the author made was the idea of mapping between two concepts and categorization proposals. While the author deems these two ideas to be different, I must disagree. I see little to no difference between them. In both cases you are taking something unfamiliar and pairing it with something more common/familiar so people can understand it. Also, in both instances you are designing and creating a metaphor. I didn’t truly follow the authors reasoning to how they are different because to me they seemed the same. The process may have been slightly different but overall the same.

I haven’t been using this blogging system for very long, but overall it seems fairly straightforward and easy to use. However, I’d still take a pen and a piece of paper over this any day. I’m old fashioned and am not always welcoming to technology. It does seem like a good idea though to have a public place where you can easily showcase your work.