2. My best reason for why I should not have to take this course is that I scored quite highly on both my SAT and ACT in the English and reading sections and took honors english courses all four years of high school. I feel as though during my high school career I demonstrated that I have the skills to craft a well-written essay, article, or whatever else my future may require.
3. I can refute my own counter-argument by pointing out that regardless of standardized test scores and years of honors classes, there is always room for improvement when it comes to English and writing. You will always need to be able to write well and find ways to concisely express your thoughts. Taking this class will help you keep up those skills, while skipping it could easily harm you.
4. I think "to use writing as a way of thinking new thoughts" means that writing can be used to connect works in ways that they have never been connected before. For example, on page xxx the writer mentioned drawing a connection between the fate of African elephants and the biology explaining how humans experience love. Without writing, this connection may never have been made. Putting things down on paper allows us to see similarities that we may have passed over if we had simply been reading or absentmindedly listening to a lecture.
5. I think a quote that best exemplifies the rationale of the New Humanities is the following: "Instead of pounding home a single idea, they guide the reader through a journey of the mind. . . Instead of suppressing complexity, the writers here embrace it as a source of deeper understanding" (pg. xxxiii). I think that the main point of the New Humanities is get students thinking deeper than what is easily seen on the surface. In my opinion, the New Humanities is trying to challenge us to make connections and think in unconventional ways that we may never have been pushed to use before. To me, this quote best exemplifies that because it explains that they are here to guide the reader through their own mind, rather than drilling one "right way" of thinking into the readers' heads.
6. The concept of the "shared horizon" means that no person's brain is molded by merely one thing. A broad array of "horizons" join together to form the network of connections, that influence a person's worldview. No single aspect dominates; they work together. This is significant because it explains why people can be so easily influenced. Because our brains are not wired to devote everything we have to one certain thing, we have a multitude of options to explore. I think this is an explanation of humans' free will. We are not dominated by one horizon, as we have many. We get to choose what we want to focus on and when we want to focus on it. Our ability to utilize our gift of free will comes from this network of horizons, as nothing but our own mind controls us.
7. An unfamiliar term was prospective writing. It is the concept of writing without any particular endgame. Prospective writing is simply writing down details as you go, not necessarily knowing where they will take you. This concept was unfamiliar to me as all my life, I was writing to get to the end goal. I was never told to just write, as I always was given guidelines. My entire collection of work is comprised of these cookie-cutter "perfect" essays with a clear beginning, middle, and end, and an obvious goal I wanted to achieve or thesis I wanted to prove. I never once thought to just write, see where it would take me, and worry about connecting the details later.
8. The New Humanities Reader touched on a lot of very important topics. It showed how today's education is really lacking when it comes to English and the humanities. Our education system focuses on drilling it into our minds that there is one correct way to do things and that is always how you should do it. It rarely spends the time teaching students how to think and work creatively and use their minds to their full potential. However, this leads into another point made by the New Humanities; can creativity be taught? It is hard to place all the blame on the education system when it comes to why students are only looking for what is on the surface and only writing essays in that dreaded five paragraph format. While the school system emphasizes the importance of writing essays using that formula and being able to quickly pull out the main ideas of a written piece, I really do not know if there is any way to teach students to be creative. I think you can teach them to think harder and look deeper with books like the New Humanities, but I think that creativity is something that students have to discover themselves.
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