We Are the Same

                                 





        After reading this personal essay, we felt joyous of Renie's belief of beauty. The fact that she was also teased for her appearance brought the idea of individual beauty into play. When Renie was made fun of at a young age for her teeth, she figured that this was the same thing the young schoolgirl was going through and praised her for her different appearance, calling her beautiful in her language. This  gave us a deep appreciation for Renie and this personal essay.

Renie used comparison and the stories of her childhood when she was working at hospital in Zimbabwe and meet a school girl who were treated like her the moment she was in 7^th grade. This makes the audience delight to know how people are the same even if they have different color and nationality.  Renie was teased before because of her teeth when she was laughing and one boy told her:” Seriously, no one wants to see your buck teeth” (147). Since then she was quiet and careful to never let anyone see her teeth. The same way how the girls brought the Tonga girl in front of her and started pointing at both Renie and the girl nose:” you are the same” (146)! Through her experience, Renie notices that no matter what, whether we share or not the culture, the language, and the skin, we are the same. As they both knew what is look like to be outcast, they learned to recognize the kindness of true friend and Renie decided to no longer let people to define how she felt about herself; and she hopes that the school girl too feels beautiful.

Storming the Gate: Talking in Color

      In Tiffany Hendrickson's personal essay "Storming the Gate: Talking in Color" (2013), she argues that the color of your skin should not have anything to do with the way that you speak. Hendrickson developed and supported the thesis by giving many examples where she would be around certain people and they would say that "she sounded black." She told stories about growing up speaking differently in order to help us understand what she went through. The intended audience for this is college students and maybe those who want to major in communication.
     After reading Hendrickson's personal essay, we could understand how some people may believe that the way you speak should reflect your appearance. We appreciated Hendrickson's counter argument as to why this should be debunked. This personal essay delighted us to see Hendrickson take away the norms of how a white girl "should talk", therefore creating a unique look at how we see people and the way they talk. It was also enlightening to learn something new. Code-switching, for example, was a term we never knew about, but is in fact very real and common.

     As a white girl, Hendrickson expressed how she has been discriminated based on her color and sound. She wrote this essay in order to acknowledge that no one should be judged because of the color and sound. She has been so emotionally disturbed because of linguistic gap; for example in her essay where she has always been told "you sound like a black girl.” Since she was attending a predominantly black school and living in a black community, Hendrickson exposes that a person's environment can affect the ability of talking. Even as a white girl, other whites never stop asking her if she was white. Because of anger and embarrassment, she decided to try “code-switching” after she realized that people associated with sound.

Context

    In Dorothy Allison's personal essay "Context" (1994), she defines that you have to know that everyone have different circumstances and different backgrounds so you have to be aware and learn other people situations. The Dorothy Allison develops and supports her thesis by giving a story on what happened to her. The purpose of her writing this is to let other people know that you have to be able to understand context in order to be able to understand someone else's situation. The intended audience for this personal essay were college students.
     After reading "Context", it was confusing to us as to what Allison did not want her lover to know. Allison's tone and mood made us feel suspicious about what was really going on, as if she wanted it to remain a secret. But then when Allison began to have flashbacks of her childhood, we started to have some "context" and understand what Allison and her lover were referring to. Once we got the idea of Allison's background and past experiences it shed a new light on what people percieve of others based on who they currently are, which made us have a deep appreciation of people's past and how it shapes them into who they are now. 

     Allison compared the social classes and worried about her lover’s reaction while taking her to visit her family. Allison expressed complex feelings in order to show the audience the difference in behavior and attitude among classes. Allison noticed her lover’s confusion: “I thought I knew what it would be like-your family, Greenville. You told me so many stories, but words…” (118). Allison had a hard time thinking of her family behavior and attitude which was different from her lover. When her stepfather lost his temper because he was horrified at the prices in the souvenir shop, he said, “Jew bastard will charge me if you break anything” (119). Any time Allison thinks about the language her family used in her lover’s presence she feels ashamed. Allison used her family memories and her personal experiences to define the context based on her back ground.

The Beat (Up) Generation

     In Abby Ellin's article "The Beat (Up) Generation" (2014), she claims that the older generation (Boomers and gen-Xers) doesn't like the way that the younger generation (Millennials) choose to do things in life. Abby Ellin talks about the different ways the Millennials do things that the Boomers and gen-Xers don't agree with at all. She used different pieces of information from different professors and psychologists in order to help explain why they think the Millennials are so much different from the Boomers and gen-Xers. The intended audience for this article are all the generations and for the bosses in the workplace.
     After reading this writing on cultural criticism, we thought that Ellin's incorporation of a fictional character as an example for the issues with the different generations was a great supporting idea to have to help better understand the reasons as to why there were different judgments on the work ethics of different generations and the reasoning behind it. We felt that Ellin's ability to pull in different perspectives on the new generation (millennials) was well played out and helped us have an open mind while reading, which was a valuable thing to have while reading this essay. The fact that this text was objective, included reliable studies, and informed us on the opinions of other people made us have a deeper understanding of the generation other than our own and gave us a new viewpoint on millennials that we never had before, therefore giving Ellin's writing the ability to teach us something delightfully new and eye-opening.
      The writer tries to show the collaboration between new and old generation in work place. The way Millennials understand things are different from the way older generations feel about work. Examples of where it says that Boomers and Millennials also have different takes on the notion of carrier. The Boomers and their forebears expected to stay in one job from college graduation until they received their retirement watch. Millennials, on the other hand, have no company loyalty. The writer shows also how in decades past, children were considered mature by the time they reached their teen unlike today young people prolong adolescence well into their 20s, which has created a demographic Arnett calls emerging adults. And also young people have been raised with technology answering their every beck and call. The developing brain also affects way Millennials digest information. Coates says that when learning, Boomers are happy to watch a PowerPoint presentation with broad overview while Millennials , on the other hand are interested only in the information needed to complete the task at hand. Gail Romeo, CEO of Collective changes says that Millennials are so much more open to change because they have constantly been in it. By presenting this information, Ellin shows the audience that even though generations are different, not one generation is better or worse than the other.