Chapter 3 of "My Word"

I definitely agree with Sarah Blum on her descriptions of the authentic and performance self. People who are more authentic do things for themselves. People who are more performance self tend to do things to prove to people how good or smart they are. I agree with Blum that the inspiration of authentic self people come from themselves. I believe they try to make themselves better people. Performance self people are inspired by other people and want to become better than them . I found it interesting that performance self people would do a lot to get the result they want . People would go as far as plastic surgery or even changing the color of their hair, like Madonna. I think of authentic self people to be more humble about their achievements while performance self people would probably brag about their accomplishments more.

I consider myself both an authentic self and a performance self. In sports I am an authentic self because I play for my own fun,exercise, and health. If I win its great, but if I don't...well at least I got some exercise out of it and I stay healthier. In school I am a performance self because I need to impress my teachers and the result is the only thing that matters and gets me ahead of others. You can try as hard as you can but fail because of the result wasn't what the teachers were looking for. In the long run I am studying for myself to become something in life, but the path to become an authentic self involves a lot of performance.

People who are performance self are probably more prone to plagiarism because they are more likely to go to farther extremes to get ahead of others. According to Sarah Blum, authentic self people are characterized by solitude. There is no point for them to teach because they are only doing thing for themselves. They don't care about the result as much as performance self people do.

Something Borrowed

Byrony Lavery was very wrong to copy from Dorothy Lewis's life, but I think this is a different type of plagiarism. I found it interesting that Dorothy Lewis was in a way proud that her story became part of Broadway because she would not be able to do what Lavery did. Lewis was still upset that Lavery did not give any credit at all. I think Lewis would have been happy if Lavery's play at least included something like "Inspired by the true story of Dorothy Lewis". Lewis would have been more than happy to give Lavery permission to use any part of her story to make such a great play. I think it made Lavery sound like an inexperienced writer when she said that she thought it was ok to use Dorothy Lewis's life story in her play. Plagiarism includes copying ideas as well, she should have known that. A lot of movies are based on true stories. If all those movies didn't include "based on the true story of...", it would make a lot of people angry because the moviemakers stole a part of their life and made their own story from it. In Lavery's case, I think it's as if she stole a part of Lewis's life. Of course without the things that happened in Lewis's life, a great play like "Frozen" would not have been created. I don't think Lewis ever had any intention on making the events of her life into a play. Lewis and Lavery should have worked together on this play.

I thought it was very interesting how Gladwell showed all the different songs that are similar. I decided to listen to a couple of them and I found some of the similarities that Gladwell was talking about. Of course it would make the original writer of a song mad if someone copied part of it and made more money off of it. Copying a whole guitar riff or base line and using it throughout the song would be wrong. I agree that copying something like Beethoven's 4 note "da da da duuuum" is ok because those notes could be played on different chords and they could be changed into different tonations.

What is an essay?

An essay in its noun form is a piece of writing used to express someone's opinion on a certain topic or their opinion. I think you can tell a lot about a person from the way they write their essays. This is why I think a lot of higher level universities require an essay to be part of the application process. Interviewing every single student applying for college would be a very long and annoying process. An essay is an some way a written form of an interview. I think more jobs should require some kind of essay to be part of the application. It angers me when I don't get a job over someone who is less suited for the job just because of the application he or she turns in. Essays are a great way to tell people apart.