Edmund’s AP Composition Blog

William Feather said, “If we don’t discipline ourselves, the world will do it for us.” As a high school senior I have seen the ways in which discipline has influenced and shaped those around me. All of my friends have been subject to various levels of discipline—from being grounded to being arrested—and I have watched how they have handled, matured, and grown from it. A few of my friends, however, are disciplined noticeably less than others and I have come to realize that this is because they have self-discipline. Discipline is both a common thread that binds us all and a rare quality that only some possess.

Social discipline is something that has been a part of human society since the earliest records of civilization. It is the basis for maintaining order and harmony.

According to Immanual Kant, “Man must be disciplined, for he is by nature raw and wild.” In every culture discipline is evident on many levels. It is present on a government level, a community level, and an individual level. In the government the law is made and law enforcement punish anybody who does not abide by it. On a community level, teachers, coaches, and managers are responsible for disciplining their students, players, or employees. On the more personal level are parents, who are in charge of disciplining their children. Discipline has been present in human life since before the earliest civilizations; it is one of only a handful of things that transcends time and culture, permeating through all of our lives. This social discipline has a very important role in teaching people how to act. According to Michael Connor’s Down to Earth Discipline, parenting teaches children how to function effectively in society. Coaches make players run laps if they do not pay attention. Police officers arrest people for driving drunk. All of these levels of disciplinary actions target unacceptable behaviors and show that they have adverse consequences, and thereby teaching people what behavior to avoid.

While social discipline is common to all people, only few truly have self-discipline. One of these people is my friend Lucy Liu. I have known Lucy since the fourth grade and I have always admired her diligence, perseverance, and dedication. She has a very clear idea of what she wants and never fails to achieve it. She never gives into peer pressure and bases all of her decisions solely on her own beliefs. She also is very academically oriented and holds herself to very high standards. She takes classes that she knows will give a lot of homework and she is willing to put forth the required time regardless of the sacrifices that it will take. During most of the year she does not spend time with friends because she is either working on homework, running to choir, Chinese lessons, piano lessons, or violin lessons. Despite her hectic schedule though she still manages to excel in everything she does, get her homework done on time, and still get a decent amount of sleep. Lucy’s life, according to John MacArthur’s Learning Self-Discipline, is a prime example of someone who has discipline because she is able to put off things that provide instant satisfaction in order to do things that are much less fun but will reap more long-term benefits. Self-discipline, like social discipline, shapes the way a person acts and even though it is not “what everyone else is doing” their actions are often very respected. Harry Emerson Fosdick said, “No horse gets anywhere until he is harnessed. No stream or gas drives anything until it is confined. No Niagara is ever turned into light and power until it is tunneled. No life ever grows great until it is focused, dedicated, disciplined.” It that kind of personal control, to do the things that are important but not necessarily fun, that truly is a rarity in our world.

I have seen the affects of discipline throughout my friend’s lives. I have also noticed that though social and self-discipline both shape the way a person acts, they are two very different things. Getting disciplined is something that everyone endures through their entire lives and thus is a commonality that all people share. Self-discipline however, is an extraordinary thing that is possessed by very few people.

claims that power in the United States is diffused among three primary branches: the government, the underground world of crime, and most importantly, our social structure. My nuisance thesis for this passage would be, “Kennan’s observation of how power in the U.S. is distributed unevenly among three parties, most of the power going to the social structure, seems to be an eternal truth of how our society functions since it still accurately reflects what our lives are like; however, in the present, more power has be taken out of our social structure and given to our government.” My claim would be supported by current examples of how our government and their institutions have accumulated more power over the past few years. For example, the wire-tapping policy created to spy on U.S. citizens. This increase of power in our government has shaped our opinions of how we perceive different groups. By having an influence on the culture, the government has taken more power of out of our social structure. I would use 2 current examples that shows 2 different ways that our government is increasing power and perhaps one counterexample that is analyzed in a manner that would support my claim as well.

Pro:
The death penalty is just justice.  They took someone else’s life so we in turn are taking their’s.  Not to mention it makes the world a safer place because it would be getting rid of the killers. It gives peace to the family who lost their loved ones because they know that they killer is getting what they deserve.

Con:
How can you punish someone for killing by killing them. That seems hypocritical, fighting death with death. It just perpetuates the cycle of dying. Plus it doesn’t matter if people think that it is justice and that it is what the killer deserves because really we were not put on the earth to decide how people should be punished. I don’t mean to bring God into this, but everyone is going to get judged in the end. It is not our choice and we do not have the right to take another life regardless of how we try to justify it.

By catering to his wife’s concerns and empty stomach, Downe is convincing her that life in America is much more prosperous. Hunger is also the first physiological need on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. This tells us that people, such as Downe’s wife, can’t begin to think about satisfying other needs before basic food. By giving her reason to believe that she will have food on the table, Downe has boosted her confidence that life may be better in America.By catering to his wife’s concerns and empty stomach, Downe is convincing her that life in America is much more prosperous. Hunger is also the first physiological need on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. This tells us that people, such as Downe’s wife, can’t begin to think about satisfying other needs before basic food. By giving her reason to believe that she will have food on the table, Downe has boosted her confidence that life may be better in America.

One obvious rhetorical strategy he used is an anecdote/example. Chesterton begins his essay with a story about the inspiration he comes up with from lying in bed, one that he believes Michaelangelo must had also came up with.  Not knowing exactly what his claim is the readers are sort of lulled into this trap where they accept the evidence before them and then boom, the author comes down with a claim. Another strategy is to draw ridiculous comparison between “the strengthening of minor morals” and relaxing habits. “I have met Ibesenite pessimists who thought it wrong to take beer but right to take prussic acid.” Chesterton also notes toward the end of the essay that he is not expecting people to just lie in bed all day. Those with jobs that cannot be done in bed must take this as an occasional indulgence. By writing this he strengthen his ethos of being reasonable. The use of descriptive language when describing the inspiration of being able to indulge sometime versus the slightly mocking tone used to describe people who are putting to much effort into little rules also help enforce his view.

In A Modest Proposal, Jonathan Swift laments the ill-treatment of impoverished children. He reasons that children should be treated better than the common beggar because early neglect is what causes them to grow up undisciplined and unruly. He slowly convinces his audience of this purpose by starting out with a rather shocking point, and then slowly pacifies the audience by providing reasons for this. Afterwards, his claims suddenly seem a lot more reasonable than they initially were. In the passage, “I am assured by our merchants, that a boy or a girl before twelve years old, is not a commodity that can be sole, and even when they come to this age, they will not yield above three pounds, or three pounds and half a crown at most, on the exchange; which cannot turn to account either to the parents or kingdom, the charge of nutriments and rags having been at least four times that value,” Swift discusses the value of children that are between childhood and adolescence, and that they are harmless to be compassionate to.

The most important advice for me personally from this was to read everything closely first, then analyze it.  I think that this is important because I have a problem with trying to formulate my argument as I go.  This has proven to be a big problem because by the time I reach the end of all of the sources I still have no clue what I am going to write about, in fact I am usually more confused that I was to begin with.  I also liked the advice that they gave about writing and establishing a strong thesis.  I think that this is extremely important to everyone because for the most part the most common problem among writers is that they are unable to create a strong thesis that they are also able to support with strong evidence.  In the case of the synthesis essay I think that it is less a matter of what the writer feels strongest about, but more about what you can make the best argument for base on the sources given.

1. His hesitation for killing Claudius is due to his desire to attain the greatest satisfaction from his uncle’s death. Hamlet had the opportunity to kill his uncle while his uncle was in church. However, Hamlet chose not to do so because then his uncle’s sins would be forgiven. Hamlet, instead, wanted to kill his uncle when he is doing something savage and animal-like such as making love with Hamlet’s mother so when Claudius dies, he would go to hell. In addition, he wants to catch his uncle off-guard in his death just like how Hamlet’s father died.

2. Hamlet would want to fain madness to throw everyone else off balance.  He doesn’t trust anyone, so he doesn’t want to give himself away.  People wouldn’t be able to predict Hamlet moods.  Hamlet never is truly mentally mad, but grief stricken.  Ophelia is definitely mad.   She has gone mad because of her father’s murder and because of Hamlet’s cruelness towards her

3. Since Freud was wrong about a great number of things, I don’t believe that Hamlet and Gertrude had an Oedipal Complex going on, just that the movie interpreted it that way. I mean, his obsession with his mother’s sexual behavior I believe stems from the uneasiness that anyone would have seeing their parents with another significant other. No one here wants to have sex with the other. Hamlet probably just wants things to be the way they were.  I think the portrayal of Ophelia represents a very real young female of that era: timid, controlled, and delicate. In the book The Count of Monte Cristo, Edmond Dantes is enraged to find out that his former fiance married his best friend only a month after he supposedly “died”, staged by his best friend to obtain his fiance. It is later discovered that she was pregnant with Dantes’ child, and married out of desperation to avoid scandal and shame.

4. I think that if the story had played out differently and Hamlet died before he could kill Claudius, that Claudius would’ve committed suicide anyway because he would’ve killed the woman he loves and his nephew, and thus that would’ve had an additive effect on the already heaving guilt laying upon him. He would’ve had nothing to live for, and with Fortinbras closing in, no land to rule over, either.

5.At Hamlet’s final soliloquy in Act 4. Sc4, he finally decides that he must kill Claudius.  He had been struggling with the idea for a while, but settled upon it because it seemed the better of two evils (suicide or killing).  Throughout Hamlet, the theme of death is emphasized.  There is always the afterlife to consider.  I wonder if Hamlet desired to take his own life as well. However, his selfishness seems to be an essential element in the play. He always wanted the greatest pain for his uncle’s death as opposed to just killing his uncle.

Shelly claims is that poets are the engineers of the world. They shape how we feel, what we do, and has been the foundation of most historic events that took place. The arguments for this claim is that poetry brings about this change by affecting how the leaders and their thoughts. His main rhetorical strategy is metaphors and an eloquent syntax. There aren’t logical arguments or any appeals to his credibility. Shelly wants to convince us relying on rhetorical imagery such as,”It is impossible to read the compositions of the most celebrated writers of the present day without being startled with the electric life which burns within their words.” Shelly also makes the claim that even though the poetry itself is beautiful, the poets themselves are usually bitter and unhappy.

Wow this guy is ridiculous, but it is funny because I think that most high school students would be able to testify that the claim made by Anderson in this essay is completely and utterly true, and the strategies that he talks about are ones that countless students have put to use, and the most talented of them were actually able to pull it off as well as Anderson does.  The truth is in most cases, a book does not need to be completely read to be understood. Some people might call this method as arrogant and maybe even cheating. This is further from the benefit of writing about something we haven’t read. The reason why the claim can even be made that something we haven’t read can be written about is the fact that what was written wasn’t original and based on our knowledge of literature, we know what to expect. Therefore, all we need to make a decent review is some background knowledge about the author and a short summary with a few specific facts about the book.