Final Portfolio Up

http://portfoliosara.weebly.com/

Notes about Legal and Ethical Considerations for Writers

This section of our book mainly talks about how it is impossible for the government to afford to give complete freedom to its press. This is how people are protected from false accusations such as stating that they committed a crime, discrediting someone on their profession, or saying that someone has a terrible disease. This section also describes the four invasions of privacy. These are false-light invasion, publication of intimate life details, misappropriation of someones name to endorse a product, and physical intrusion into the persons private life.
The chapter includes the Copyright Law, which most of us are familiar with from years of essay writing in school, where we learned the difference between citing sources and copying another person. But the chapter goes on to include the rights of your publications. These include All Rights, which means you agree to give up the right to use the material at a later time, in any form. First Serial Rights means that the magazine or newspaper has the right to be the first to run your material and after that the rights are returned to you. Like First Serial Rights, Second Serial Rights focus on reprinting the article after it has already been published before. The last and not as well used one is Simultaneous Rights, which is when rights are given to more than one place at the same time. The chapter ends with a wrap up about making ethical decisions and that an important thing to remember is to consult your conscience and the policy of where you are publishing.

Midterm Portfolio

My midterm portfolio for my ENGL 180-001 class The Journalistic Essay.

http://portfoliosara.weebly.com/

The Forever War: "Leftovers of these Terrible Times"

While reading a chapter in The Forever War I was surprised about the amount of cruelty people can submit other human beings to and how the people he talks to just seem weary and how they are used to this type of life. In one part a man named Yusef talks about how his brother suddenly disappeared and how he and his mother anxiously waited weeks to hear anything about what happened to him. Then three weeks later he got a call from an official telling him to come and pick up the body of his executed brother. When Yusef got there the waiting official told him that he should be grateful because most families never receive a body. Yusef then had to thank the man for being so kind as to return the body of his dead body, but before he could get his brothers body he then had to pay one-hundred fifty dinars for the two bullets that killed him. The fact that living in a world where people mysteriously disappear and are found to have been executed weeks later can be normal for people is saddening to me. The author makes a comment about how people like Yusef are less like survivors and more like the leftovers of these terrible times.
More examples of this are later when the author talks about how torture was so common in Iraq that the videos of torture could be bought in the marketplace and how when he got frustrated with these people he remembers a time when he saw a group of men silently watching the torture of another men and how none of them seemed to be able to speak. When he mentioned this I started to think about the people who stereotype the Iraqi people as all of them being crazy and evil terrorists and I want to show them this book. I feel like it gives a horrible realization to how these people have lived their entire lives dealing with torture and pain and death. Now when a friend of mine who is in the army talks negatively about these people I want to ask her if she really has any understanding of their lives at all or if she is just going off of the way they are portrayed in the media. This book recently has shown me that there is a large majority of people who were given no media attention who are real casualties of this ongoing war that existed long before we were involved in their affairs.  

Bookclub: The Forever War

My book club group has been reading "The Forever War" by Dexter Filkins. When I first started reading this book I was surprised, the text seems to come out of a fiction book. The fact that this man is out in the middle of this war without training and without his own weapon is amazing to me. Could you imagine standing in the middle of an active war zone for research?

I have been enjoying reading this book because it gives a perspective on a story that is not known. Many people think they know all about the war in Iraq and some of the history about it but I like how this story gives a personal aspect to the people dealing with the war in their own towns and lives. At times when reading I still have to remind myself that this book is nonfiction because parts of it seems almost surreal and I think about how even though we are apart of war, we don't have an idea of what it is like living with the war on your doorstep.

Interview Questions

* What are you studying at school, why are you interested in that subject?
* How does being in the army affect you life as a college student?
* What are your parents thoughts on you being in the army while studying at school?
* What are your thoughts on the war in Iraq?
* How do you feel knowing that you are going to be deployed there?

People to Interview

Jackie Gatti- a commuter student who is in the army and being deployed to Iraq next year.
Charles Angell- a professor of English at BSU and my adviser
Michael Somers- director of library services at BSU