Week 6

  This week's entry will be about my impressions on the library talk that we attended today.

If I had to criticize one thing about this presentation, it would be the fact the woman who was doing the presentation spent a large amount of time explaining to us how to do a keyword search on the library's website. Which is not a bad thing but I just thought she spent a lot of time on something that requires common sense more than anything. 

For example, if you want to find relevant sources for one of your essays and after typing a word in the search bar, you end up with three million search results, the keyword you have chosen is probably a little too general, and you might want to look for something more specific, more straight to the point.

I just feel like most people of our generation are computer-savvy or at least know how to search something on the Internet, since we all use it so much...

  On a more positive note, I think she did a great job of showing us the library's website and where exactly we had to go to find all the different resources. 

Overall, I think it would have been more helpful to actually go to the library and try to search something by ourselves. But I suppose this is my responsibility as a student to find out how things work without someone showing me everything step by step. 

PS: I don't mean to judge anyone. I know people are just doing their jobs. That woman was kind enough to talk to us about the library's website for an hour so I thank her for that.

Blog Entry N°3

  First of all, I would like to apologize that this blog goes through long periods of neglect... But I guess it's better late than never.

  In last week's class, we talked about argumentation. We especially focused on one type of argumentation called the Mark Antony speech.
This specific type of argumentation, made popular after the speech given by the character of the same name in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, uses a very effective method to convince people: the person speaking must present the arguments of his opponent before giving his own arguments.
He first has to prove his opponent wrong before he can convince the crowd that he is right.
In his famous speech, Mark Antony also insisted a lot on certain obvious statements ("Caesar was ambitious" or "Brutus was an honorable man" for example), all adding to the convincing effect of the speech.
In my opinion, this type of argumentation almost uses a mathematical approach. At least in the structure.