James H English Blog

Across the web, there are various random generators that give you all sorts of different media and short bursts of entertainment. Depending on which internet generator you are using, you will encounter a mixed bag of subject matter and genre within that specific generator. Usually a generator will be geared toward one specific type of media, but the subject matter may still be very diverse within that generator. Let's take boredbutton.com for example, every time you refresh the page, the generator will present you with a different activity, challenge, trick, illusion, or some other type of interactive experience in which the user of the generator is entertained. Often you refresh the page and you are presented with a challenging game. Other times it might give you your age in weeks or some other interesting fact about you or the world. The point is, boredbutton.com falls into a specific genre of internet generators that gives the user an entertaining and somewhat "fun" ...

As you can see, the textual genre I chose was the standard job application. A few examples I pulled were applications from Kohl's, DSW, and a position at a hospital. From a first glance we see the ubiquitous empty boxes that ask us of our name, phone number and email address, but then things start to get more specific as we start to really unbox what makes a job application a job application. For example, job applications are one of the only places where we would need to provide our employment history and level of education in the same situation; this is a recurring situation when reading a job application. Something else that truly distinguishes a job application is the reappearing question of availability. This is a question you may be asked frequently in everyday life, but rarely on paper is this something we need to think about. Also, there is a repeated visual motif in all job applications that we need to acknowledge. The more basic observations would be that most to all...

The conventions of a horror movie would be lots of suspenseful moments where you don't know what is coming, shrieks, unpleasant sounds, artificial noises, and fast music all lend themselves to a horror movie. You could tell it's a horror movie by the level of anxiety the characters feel and what they are talking about. Something they say might denote a horror movie situation (kidnapping, being trapped, drowning, violence)   The conventions we missed could have been fast changing camera angles and dark lighting.

When annotating "Teaching Thinking by Teaching Writing" I first distinguished the first and second order of thinking then immediately knew to write a couple notes about that because I could tell from the title and placement of this information that this is what the rest of the essay is going to be about. When I annotate I often circle or underline the things I relate too because I know that I will then be able to talk about that subject in class more powerfully and be able to express myself in a more exciting way, like when Peter Elbow was talking about the fear of looking "silly or wrong" I could deeply relate to this; I believe I am sort of an overthinker. I also annotate things I do not understand that I believe to be important to get clarification in class about them, like when Elbow was talking about "thinking carefully." Corrin also jots down the main idea of the text. She writes down her knowledge of other things that remind her of something she...

My name is James Houstian, I'm eighteen years old, was born in a pretty small town and this is my first real move. My parents used to live in Philadelphia and have nothing but good things to say about it here, so I am excited to be in such a historic and lively city. I am a huge creative. I love making things. I, like most artists, started their craft with drawing. I am still an avid painter and drawer but also dive deep into the new mediums of the day such as Maya, Illustrator, Dimension, and Photoshop.  I love music and so do all my friends so we play together back home just for fun sometimes. My music taste is incredibly broad and I am always looking for new music. It's definitely some weird psychosis because I get sick of music extremely quickly and then need to find more as soon as possible so I still have more music to listen to. I love going to museums since Washington D.C. and Baltimore were about an hour from my hometown and I am excited to get to know Philly better a...