Incorporating other voices into an essay makes an essay stronger and helps the reader engage more and look closely at a text so they can form their own opinion about what they think about the writers work. We are usually taught to write a simple five paragraph essay our whole lives, it’s what we’re trained to do. However, an essay should be more than that. Taking what other people say and comparing it to our thoughts, is essential to how we understand not only ourselves, but others as well.
“Bringing together what we know and what we don’t know through analogy, metaphorical thinking strikes the spark that ignites discovery.” This line stood out to me in Geary’s Ted Talk, because metaphorical thinking to me means that you are coming up with an expression on your own, that conveys how you really feel about something. By creating metaphors and analogies everyday it helps us think of other ways to say or express our emotions. By coming up with metaphors on our own everyday we’re taking our actual thoughts and comparing them to something else that can relate to our emotions.
Coming up with metaphors and incorporating them into our own essay makes it stronger, because you’re creating your own sentence, or phrase. It’s important to not only look and add on to other people’s beliefs and ideas. Out of all the papers and transcripts wee read throughout the importance of metaphors Geary was definitely the least bias one. It’s important to incorporate your own opinions in a paper but it is also crucial for you to include other people’s voices as well. One of the best ways to do that when talking about different studies is to back up your own opinions with factual evidence, which Erard and Khullar did a great job with.
In Khullar’s article he talks a lot about how he thinks it’s not a good idea to use “military language” around ill patients. Now, even though I, as the reader may not agree with his beliefs, he backs it up with evidence and studies shown through his article. “Patients who viewed their disease as an “enemy” tend to have higher levels of depression and anxiety, and poorer quality of life than those who ascribe a more positive meaning. More recent work has found that patients encouraged to “fight” may feel that they have to suppress their emotional distress and maintain a positive attitude to avoid upsetting family members-and clinicians” (Khullar 4).
When getting a point across it’s important to make sure how you word it, because you want a line to stand out in your essay. “But it’s when we start testing our metaphors for their social and cognitive usability that design can become really powerful” (Erard 2). It’s very clear the point that Erard is trying to make here, that it’s important to have meaning behind a metaphor, when designing one. It’s the same with writing a paper, to design and form your own opinion, you have to be clear as to what your trying to explain to the reader
- I don’t know what else to add on to my paper for the body paragraphs, I’m struggling. What other points or evidence can I go off of?
- Is my paper getting off topic once I start writing my body paragraphs?
