Synthesis

Synthesis it seems has been around me constantly for many years now, most prominently within my conventional schooling that took place during most of my younger life.  The sources that I have seen and that I have learned the most from are simply my high school teachers.  They have taught me that the best way to use synthesis is to gather a large amount of slightly connected mediums and piece them together to tell the story / get the point that you wish to get across.  An old History teacher that I had did this brilliantly, often combining books, movies, music, photographs, and all sorts of odd other mediums in order to teach us about the times he wanted to convey.  For my paper though, since I do not have the choice of what mediums I will use exactly, I instead will have to use both documents to bolster a single focal point.  I've chosen to write about the place of money within baseball and in order to support that I will have to use Joe Jackson's confession and "The Trading Desk" to display money's place within baseball, not only at both times individually, but also as a whole.  While it may be hard to find evidence in both articles to promote such a topic cohesively, since the documents do cover fairly different ideas, I find that being able to pull together two such sources in a way that they fit together seamlessly to convey a point will ultimately be much stronger than using just a single document as a source or backing the paper with two documents that share an extremely similar topic (since essentially they could probably just be compiled into a single document).

New Document Discussion

The article "The Trading Desk" by Micheal Lewis and the discussion I participated in pertaining to it taught my a lot more about baseball.  In the previous document almost no jargon was used and I didn't have to research anything to understand, at least on a basic level, what was happening in the court transcript.  However, in this document I had to look into how several processes, especially trading, worked within the Major League Baseball system.  While I'm not positive who longdm123 is, their comments about the article were extremely useful to me, helping me to learn about the comparison between baseball and other sports as pertaining to team salary caps, understanding what the importance of a pitcher is within baseball, and through his conversation with Joecathytesta, I learned a lot about baseball and player ages (which I later researched more thoroughly).  I was also rather surprised to find out that baseball team salaries have multiplied by more than one hundred times since the 1919 document was created.  When I first began reading "The Trading Desk", I assumed that since it was supposed to be connected to Joe Jackson's confession, that it was likely to pertain to the topic of cheating in baseball.  As I began to read, this assumption was backed by the entire first paragraph, which describes Mike Magnante and a list of almost ridiculous mistakes he had made during a season.  As I read further though it became evident that the article was less about cheating in baseball and more about the system of trading as adopted by baseball.

They Say / I Say -- response 1

Excercise 1-
a.  It has become a common concern that the Ohio ground water may contain Chemical X in dangerous amounts.

b.  The flaws of this novel is a widely discussed topic among its critics.

c.  My entire life I have heard that football is boring.

d.  It is a commonly held belief that male students often dominate in class room discussions.

e.  Most people belief that the film is actually about the problems of romantic relationships.

f.  Many people assume that using templates from a book would stifle one's creativity.

Blogger Assignment #1

The topic that I've chosen to cover about Joe Jackson is his confession and the trial surrounding the Black Sox Scandal.  I chose this angle to cover the event because honestly, sports never really interested me much.  I would much rather find out about the people that took part in the event rather than find out about its effects on baseball or any other related topics.  To initially find information I began with the links on the course's mind map, then by using the generic and heavily over used google search, and finally by asking my father what he knew about it (since unlike me he is ridiculously in love with sports).  I also did a search of the topic on the Ganser library web site but didn't find anything overly useful that I hadn't already come across.  The most useful resources I've found up to this point are an article done by ESPN (http://espn.go.com/classic/s/black_sox_moments.html) and a book that my father had called Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and The 1919 World Series.  My basic understanding of the topic so far is that eight players from the 1919 Chicago White Sox threw the world series in order to make money.  They originally had aroused suspicion of such actions because they were deemed to be one of the best teams in baseball's history and for them to lose so easily was not possible.  There are also many references to the event through out popular culture, including such media as the movie, "Field of Dreams".