Writing My Essay

It took me awhile to decide what I what angle I wanted to come from with this essay. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to talk more about my response to the authors or how both authors expressed their views. I debated for awhile the two ideas and decided that both ideas weren’t too far apart so I just settled on using both suggestions.
I choose to concentrate on these two topics because I could explain them without difficulty and they were broad topics that I could write a lot about. Also, on my first assignment I wrote about these topics so I thought it would be easy to expand on them. My notes on Vincente’s text helped me a lot to expand on these thoughts. I constructed my essay by sitting down and looking over my notes and quotes that I highlighted and thought were important. I took my first essay and added more detail and quotes to expand on my thoughts and build a better understanding of the book. I added parts from the second half of the reading and talked about the conclusion. I wish I would have taken notes on “Cat’s Cradle” while I was reading it. It would have helped a lot so I didn’t have to reread chapters. It took a lot more time for me to write this paper because it would take me awhile to find passages that I wanted to include to improve my essay.
Overall, I think my essay turned out pretty decent. I’m sure many things could be made better, but in the end I put a lot of work into the paper and I’m proud of my achievements.

Technologic View's Through Writing

Different authors use different methods to show their views towards areas of their concerns. Technology in today’s culture is one of those concerns that are being addressed. It surrounds us every day and is getting more confusing and frustrating. Kim Vicente talks about his feelings towards technology in his book “The Human Factor”. His idea of, “the human factor”, is basically how technology is being made more and more difficult and how is “actually unusable by most human beings.” (17) Vicente expresses his thoughts by using disasters caused by scientist lack of calculating this “human factor”; for example, he talks about the Chernobyl reactor and how Leonid Toptunov wasn’t fully trained to understand the reactors behavior. Toptunov’s naiveté’s caused a terrible explosion causing many deaths including his own at the young age of 26. Vicente uses negative correlations to technology in his words, like calling cell phones, “electronic leashes” (13)

Another technique used to show author’s concerns towards technology is Kurt Vonnegut’s use of irony with the novel “Cat’s Cradle”. Vonnegut writing grabs your attention and I found it very entertaining and at times funny. He mocks the use of science by using a character as a scientist, Felix Hoenikker, one of the fathers of the atomic bomb. Felix also invents a solution called “ice-nine”, a formula that could end the world by freezing all water. Felix makes this to solve the problem of mud that soldier were tired of going through. There is irony in this because when Felix starts to make something that is meant to help, it actually is a solution to end the world.

Today everyone has grown to be so lazy because of technology. For example, we are getting worse at spelling because of spell check (what I am actually using right now). We use technology to find ways out of doing things the hard way. Just like in “Cat’s Cradle”, the soldiers were too lazy to march through the mud that they invented something so dangerous that would end the world in the wrong hands. There is nothing in today’s science that could end the world that I know of but I know that technology can increase disasters and deaths. Both books use disaster’s to show the side effects of science, Chernobyl’s explosion and the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Both books examine “the human factor” in technology but by using different techniques of writing to express their worries towards our generation.