Blog # 7

After looking over my essay again and reading through pages 17-29 of my Little Seagull handbook, I found a few parts of my essay that needed some tweaking, and some paragraphs that needed more strengthening, as well as adding a new paragraph to help make my argument stronger. I decided to kick things off with working on my first body paragraph.

One of the things noted in this first long body paragraph was by someone in my peer editing group. They informed me that this paragraph in particular sounded like it contained too much summary and not enough text/important details. So I went through the paragraph and edited as needed to sound more clear with my argument and add more detail.

This is what I changed. I left out all of the train summary at the beginning and worked from there.

 “So in the case of Rhys Southan, he is basically just stating what the Effective Altruist’s standpoint on everything is, even if its not what he believes himself. While he doesn’t necessarily agree with them, he is still very intrigued by their words and how the movement expresses itself. ‘I wanted to learn more about the EA goal of doing as much good as you possibly can with your life.'(Pg 2, Paragraph 1 of Southan’s piece).”

One other change that I made was I included the part with the drowning child analogy. This was something I initially forgot to include into my essay that was very important in adding text and it was also expected of us to include it. I inserted this paragraph after my first body paragraph that I had just revised. So the analogy paragraph is new and wasn’t there before.

  “One thing that the effective altruists tend to thrive on is the act of trying to persuade people or their followers. They really want to get you thinking. The main way they do this is to test you through analogies. It gets you thinking in a different context, and helps you look through a different scope for a change. One analogy referenced in Southan’s text discusses of those “what would you do” sort of situations per say. ‘Suppose you saw a child drowning in a pond: would you jump in and rescue her, even if you hadn’t pushed her in? Even if it meant ruining your clothes? It would be highly controversial to say ‘no’ and yet most of us manage to ignore those dying of poverty and preventable disease all over the world, though we could easily help them.’ (Pg 2 Paragraph 5). This analogy sample is a very good description of testing one’s morality, but I feel as though its a bit unnecessary. Saving someone drowning is much easier than trying to same the millions in poverty around the world. So this is really just a matter of big vs. small scale issues.”