Friends | Kristen Owens | English @ SUNY Geneseo

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Kristen Owens wrote a new post on the site Reader and Text 11 years, 9 months ago

As I was re-reading Moran’s Interdisciplinarity, I came across something that I found very interesting; according to how the Greeks organized subjects into a hierarchy, the lowest subjects included “the fine arts, […]
Kristen Owens wrote a new post on the site Reader and Text 11 years, 9 months ago

One of the many perks of being an English major is that most of the time, our finals are essays! Some people may say that that is worse, but I would rather write a thousands essays than take a final exam for a […]
Kristen Owens wrote a new post on the site Reader and Text 11 years, 9 months ago

Thanksgiving brought the usual: family, friends, food, and questions about your life from relatives you haven’t seen since the last big holiday. !–more–I was sitting next to my sister at the dinner table on […]
Kristen Owens wrote a new post on the site Reader and Text 11 years, 9 months ago

I recently took a civil service exam for a few different police agencies. I studied (for countless hours) the material that was supposedly going to be on the test- grammar, sentence structure, memorization, math, etc- the usual things you would suspect to be on a test that is similar to the set up of the SAT’s. Having studied for multiple hours a day for the test, I went in feeling pretty confident. As I opened my test booklet to the first set of instructions, clearly written in bold letters was: Disregard grammar for the following questions. I was shocked! I could not believe that on a civil service exam, they instructed us to forget what we had ever learned about grammar. I was so perplexed that it bothered me throughout the entire test, and being an English major, it was difficult to pick an answer that was not grammatically correct. My father is part of one of the law enforcement agencies that I took the test for, and he was also shocked to discover that it said to disregard grammar. Clearly an English major was not present when the test and instructions were being made!
Kristen Owens wrote a new post on the site Reader and Text 11 years, 10 months ago

http://www.buzzfeed.com/jenniferschaffer/things-english-majors-are-tired-of-hearing

One of my family members sent this link to me from Buzzfeed.com and thought I should share it on here; I personally like […]
Kristen Owens wrote a new post on the site Reader and Text 11 years, 10 months ago

Chapter 4 of Moran’s Interdisciplinarity really opened my eyes to a new idea. Upon reading, I discovered that we English majors do the exact same thing that other disciplines do; we tear apart other majors. […]
Kristen Owens wrote a new post on the site Reader and Text 11 years, 10 months ago

While reading Chapter 4 of Moran’s Interdisciplinarity (which basically said the same thing over and over again in the thirty pages), I noticed that the text kept bringing up the idea that although History and […]
Kristen Owens wrote a new post on the site Reader and Text 11 years, 11 months ago

It happened again. I was talking to one of my distant family members when they asked me what I was going to Suny Geneseo for, and when I replied that I was majoring in English, I received the same response that we all get: “Why? Do you not want a job in the future?” In my head I muttered the usual recurring thoughts that travel through my mind when I get this response. I nervously laughed and said “Yeah that’s why”. But as the conversation progressed, the family member continued to tell me that if I don’t switch my major soon, I will be working at McDonald’s for the rest of my life. This is when I decided I would finally defend my choice to major in English. I informed them that my major does not dictate where I will end up in the future. Someone who earns an engineering degree could easily end up working at McDonald’s. Your life path is determined by how much effort and passion you are willing to put into your life. I told them that I am majoring in English to enhance my writing abilities in order to be able to attend law school or take written exams to enter into the law enforcement field. Writing is a major aspect of both career choices, and my love for English will enable me to pursue either career by giving me the necessary tools to succeed. So, after my rant, they replied “Wow, I guess you do know what you want to do, and you won’t be jobless. You made a smart move.” Finally….finally someone listened to what we have been trying to tell people. Maybe the bad reputation that English receives will end soon (but I highly doubt it).
Kristen Owens wrote a new post on the site Reader and Text 11 years, 11 months ago

On a daily basis I get asked the question, “Why did you chose English out of all the possible majors?”, to which I simply have run out of responses for. I would ultimately give the usual “because it’s my favorite […]
Kristen Owens wrote a new post on the site Reader and Text 11 years, 11 months ago

As I was flipping back to find a particular page from Interdisciplinarity, one quote from a different page caught my eye, and honestly, made me mad. As stated by Graham Hough, “I do not believe that anyone should have their higher education in literature alone. What is disgustingly called “English” in universities should never have grown into a separate and isolated ‘subject’ as it has. It needs to be closely integrated with the study of other languages, with history and the history of ideas.” (Moran, 42).

Why did this make me so mad? Because it was a complete slam to my major! Hough referred to the major as “disgusting” and it irked me. Why did English get such a bad rap? What if going pre-med had this bad of a reputation? Could we go without doctors in our lives? No! So why is it okay to give a negative connotation to English? The world may never know, but I would love to find out why.

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