Listening to “The Cost of Fast Fashion”, and then reading “How Depression-Era Women Made Dresses out of Chicken Feed”, made me easily contrast their methodology to their audiences. When I read the article, the writer of the post, Rebecca Onion used a lot of historical facts and photographic evidence to back up the information she was telling her readers. The tone of the article was very informational, linear, and straight forward with the facts. The article made it very easy to read and pay attention to. Rebecca Onion had consistency on the having the same two sources for the photographic resources, but also cited many scholarly books, which made this article very credible. The article felt like a crash-course on an idea of fashion and on an interesting take as to how certain trends came to be beck in the 1900s.

Whereas when listening to the podcast, because the speakers are friends, it was much more laid-back and a casual conversation. The way the ladies segway into the sources and back up their information is very smoothly, they include environmental sources, statistics, numbers, and credit researchers made. However, they don’t go into many details on what or who the sources are, but that was why the podcast just felt very conversational and easy-going. What I picked up from the podcast was two people trying to educate each other and the listeners but not to source the podcast as a form of proof or resource when speaking on the same subject to other people. The genre of the podcast is to inform each other, but also the listeners about subjects that is not normally talked about to a certain extent. It is meant to be very light-hearted and comical in a way, since they do not have any expertise in fashion in general.

In this episode of “Adam Ruins Everything,” Adam responds to the myth that the Suburbs is the American dream because it’s the best place to live. Adam explains how the ideal mowing of your lawn is not all it is cracked up to be. He goes on to explain ultimately that suburban planning actually led to segregation of neighborhoods but also in schools. The specific ways in which Conover’s research punctures that myth is by including statistics on how much the average American negatively effects the environment and wastes water overall. He also begins to talk about the history of the making of suburban homes and the fascination of green lawns and the appearances of homes. 

            This form of research writing is focused on undercutting commonly held assumptions to kind of put stereotypes and prejudices in their place.  Many people have a lot of ideas that were put in their heads but don’t really know why they believe it so much. Adam comes in to educate the “misinformed” and made to say it in a way that was not intimidating, but also confident enough that you know he is stating facts. I believe that Adam chose to speak in that way and to add humor to make it easy to understand and to keep the viewers watching. I wasn’t too informed on the history of suburban homes and the deliberate goal to segregate the neighborhoods, New York Times investigative reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones explained this in the episode. She also said that in current times, there is still a lot of segregation in schools and with homeowners just because of race and minorities. We knew with her credibility that she has made many articles and a lot of research concerning this subject, so to me I was so intrigued to listen to her talk more about.

“We Are All Confident Idiots” was published in the Pacific Standard online magazine by David Dunning. David Dunning is a professor and psychologist and is writing this article to psychology students and to those who need to be introduced to the concept of “incompetence” of humans with topics that are fake. The article was published on October 27, 2014 but continues to be read by many readers even years later. 

The psychologist discovered through analyzing Jimmy Kimmel’s experiment and making his own research with respondents, that incompetence actually gives people more confidence when they do not know the answer. Turns out that we humans find it difficult to differentiate what we know, and we do not, that is why we assume so much more than we actually do because we often forget everything we have learned. There is an underlying reason why we are so quick to answer questions we do not know the answer of, and that is fear of sounding stupid. We judge so many people of their idiocy that we do not want it flipped on us. Admitting an honest “I don’t know” may actually be intelligent because we are actually telling the truth. David Dunning uses experiments, surveys, and then provides the readers different stories of research such as interviews and quantitative. The sources he included was very effective and was able to make his argument stronger. It provided proof that self-confidence is very high to those incompetent but also to the misinformed. In this course, we will have to write plenty of times on topics we did not know about and this article provides the reassurance that it is very likely we will write about things we have little information about but try to make it sound like we do. It would be more effective however, to write only of what we already know and elaborate on those facts. 

Hello!

I’m Aldi. I’m from Philadelphia and I am a fan of writing, movies, and music. I make fun edits on my free time and currently major in Media & Communications and Spanish. You can read my blog with a click on the button above.