Chad Bonar

Textual Analysis

English 250

February 22, 2014

            The textual analysis I am doing is on a paper about part of the history of ASCE. ASCE stands for American Society of Civil Engineers it is one of the biggest groups for Civil Engineering and has a lot of cool history that you would not have thought of. To begin with the article explains who wrote it and what he did for a living. Allen Bud Beene was the Chair for the Texas Section of ASCE History(Beene). I think that the way they started with an explanation of what the article is about was pretty good in the case that they could keep their audiences attention.

            Once they finished explaining who it was made for and why they made the article they very sampling began by explaining the life of William John Smith who later changed his name to John William Smith. The way they started the article was simple so that the audience knew what was going on but it wasn’t really an attention grabber like most people want. I feel like, other than the begging which they could have added an interesting statement about John, that the rest of the format was good and that they ordered the paragraphs very well so that they went from topic to topic. All though it is a slow moving article in the end it has a lot of meaning for what he did, he was one of the main men who helped win the Alamo, and so the ASCE wanted to get his story out since he was also a Civil Engineer. I thought the way the author sets up for the main story they are trying to get off isn't that good because it makes you wonder if there is really going to be a big piece of history within the article.

            The style of the article is good but I think if they added more interesting statements about the history it would get the audience’s attention faster. The audience of the ASCE article was fellow Civil Engineers or anybody who is interested in History. That’s why I am writing about this article, because I am trying to inform people on the history and writing style of Civil Engineers. I think the reason that there isn’t much of an attention grabber is because Engineers usually are straight to the point, it is just how we are taught to write when going through schooling for Engineering. That’s why I was excited to write about the textual analysis for Civil Engineering because I don’t want to be straight forward with all of my writing I like being kind of mysterious with my writing and reading over articles written by Engineers is helping me think of how I could do a mix of the two styles of writing. I think all Engineering should try to do this with their writing because this article is a prime example of a bland piece of writing.

            The author was trying to get the history of a Civil Engineer across to the audience and to do this they told his life story. They had a lot of straight forward facts about him which is good for an article but there wasn’t anything to grab the attention of the audience. This could be a bad thing because if they don’t get the attention from the audience than the audience won’t read the whole article and then there will be no one to tell the history of this man. So over all I think this article was good but I really wish they would have thrown some interesting facts and/or statements about Mr. Smith. That way I would have been intrigued to read the article and not just push through so I could see what it was about which I am glad I did because it was very interesting.

Beene, Allen M. "Bud" "Civil Engineering History." ASCE (American Society of 

             Civil Engineering) Library. Journal of Professional Issues in Engineering 

             Education and Practice, Apr. 2001. Web. 22 Feb. 2014.

Chad Bonar

2-12-14

Visual Rhetorical Analysis

English 250

            When you think about what visuals Structural Civil Engineers use to communicate what are some things that pop into your head? For me the first thing that pops into my head is a blueprint. Blueprints are the guidelines to how you have to build something some examples of these would be dams, building, bridges, roads (highways, interstates, and city roads), etc… When companies are making blueprints there audience is usually the work crew that will be building whatever is on the blueprint. These blueprints have to be exactly what needs to be done because when the blueprint gets to the work cite there will be no questions asked they will build exactly what the blueprint says to do, so they have to be perfect before they get sent out and have to go through a long process to make sure they are correct.

            I have an example of a blueprint to show you that could have some problems in it. In this blueprint they have designed a roundabout intersection but when they were first design this what do you think were some of the problems they had to ask themselves? Hint: Take a look at the blueprint. Those red boxes you see in it are Semi-trucks that they put into the design to make sure that it was big enough for every vehicle type to be able to use it. Some other dangers they had to think about was most likely if drivers could see the other vehicles coming when trying to enter the roundabout. When doing blueprints like these they have to think of anything and everything that could go wrong and try to come up with a better plan that will fix the problems.

            There are resources out there that help everyone fix problems. For this blueprint a resource that really helped the Civil Engineers fix the size problem was Autodesk Vehicle Tracking 2014. This program pulls up there blueprint for 2-D to 3-D and lets them out vehicles in it to see if the fit. This program does wonders for Civil Engineers. Watch what else the program can do. So by using this program Civil Engineers save a lot of time and don’t have to do it all through math. “With all this in mind, we’re rolling out Autodesk Vehicle Tracking 2014.  It’s a comprehensive analysis and design solution for what the transportation techies call “vehicle swept path analysis.” It’s a perfect companion for civil engineers and designers using Autodesk AutoCAD, Autodesk AutoCAD Civil 3D, Autodesk AutoCAD Architecture, Autodesk AutoCAD Plant 3D, Autodesk AutoCAD Map 3D and Autodesk AutoCAD Utility Design”(Autodesk PR).

           Blueprints can be a very dangerous piece of equipment. If something goes wrong with a building or a bridge and it collapses who do you think is going to get into trouble the worker or the person that designed it. It more than likely always be the designer unless they have proof that it wasn’t made the way the blueprint said to make it. So there is never room for error in making blueprints because it could put millions of people’s life at stake. That’s why there is such a long process before a blueprint is finalized because they have to check every little piece of it to make sure it is structurally, mechanically, and electrically sound. So if you’re a company that is having a blueprint made and it is taking a while to get back to you don’t get angry because the more time they take on it the safer it will be because they put that more research into it to make sure it was sound for you.

            It takes a lot of guts for Civil Engineers to do what they do because they can mess one little thing up and millions of life’s are on the line. But they do have one of the purest ways to communicate to make sure nothing goes wrong with what they build. Blueprints are hard to read but most Civil Engineers use blueprints for years while in school and learn how to understand them just at a glance of the eye after a while. This is how every Civil Engineer communicates with each other so they become fluent in the language. Blueprints are the basic communication for Civil Engineers and most likely always will be.  

   

Autodesk PR. "From Parking Lots to Intersections, New Autodesk Vehicle Tracking 

               2014 Software Aims to Improve Our Transportation Environment." 'In 

               The Fold-Autodesk News and Opinions' Autodesk, 7 Nov. 2013. Web. 

               12 Feb. 2014.

            

Chad Bonar

2-10-2014

Rhetorical Analysis

            This last summer my brother, father, and I went on a camping trip we were sitting next to the river fishing and I looked over and saw that there was some tracks in the mud. It was about midnight at the time so without a light I couldn’t tell what kind of tracks they were. When I turned my flashlight on to them, they looked like they were raccoon tracks and were going to the east.

            When we were heading back to our cabin a few blocks up the road I heard some rustling from a distance. I go to investigate and when looking around I saw something running away from me towards a bathroom cell. So I go to the bathroom and first I see a trash can so I hit it with my fishing poles and nothing happens. So I look inside the trash can and nothing was there. So I look around and there is nowhere else he could have gone. Except for one place, when looking around I saw a small one foot diameter hole in the wall were he could get through so I proceed by creaking the door open and walk into the bathroom flashing my light around looking for him. There was just one small problem I can’t see him and it is an open room. So I turn around to go back out the door and I see the damn thing running in front of the door from the outside though. I grabbed my knife and throw it at the thing as he was running toward me. It flew perfectly and stuck him right in the skull. He fell instantly to the ground dead.

            He was definitely a Raccoon and was about 50-lbs. the thing ended up having rabies and would have hurt me. So I figured killing him was the best thing I could have done. My dad flipped shit when I showed him the Raccoon.  

**Just for the readers knowledge I never killed the Raccoon he just ran away. Just wanted to add some flavor to the paper**       

Chad Bonar

CE Article Summary

 1/22/14

            When Civil Engineers write it is usually in short specific sentences, and they communicate to each other through bibliographies and citations. Engineers make everything more complicated but it is really professional. I learned from the article that Civil Engineers write a lot of bibliographies and that 96.2%, the U.S. being at the top of thirty countries with 27%, of them are in the English language. The bibliographies are measured in quantitative and qualitative manners the results of the measure have grown drastically. Since 1997 they have almost tripled. Most of the same time period bibliographic articles have the same key words in them. Majority of Universities and Research centers use indicators such as number of articles and citations, impact factors, and number of authors per article to measure their research activity.  The main reason they do this is because research centers study articles and reviews.

            When doing this research they have to use a lot of different methods and materials such as the WOS (Web of Science) to do their research and articles. The WOS is what rates the impact factor and separates all of it by category and key words. All relevant information while doing analyses on the articles are sent to a bibliographic manager called EndNote for posterior treatment. What happens when they send it to EndNote? To answer that question, they separate everything by editor, title, author, addresses, source, times cited, keywords, language, and Web of Science Category. So they could do this work more smoothly they created an application that processed and identified the participating centers and where the center are located. With using this application there were 6638 that didn’t have and address to go with it, which is only 6.2% of the articles, so I would say the application helped them out a lot to get everything organized.  What does the application do other than check what country the article is from? I can answer that question for you. The application counts how many research centers, authors participated in article, and the citations for the article; after all of this it assigns corresponding impact factors for each of the articles, and so on.

            To measure the results of everything, they use bibliometric methods to measure scientific and engineering progress that measures them in respect to many disciplines of science. They also use these bibliometric methods as a common research instrument for systematic analysis. “Through this bibliometric analysis the following subjects have been analyzed: the evolution of the research activity in the “Engineering, Civil” category; the evolution of the most important research topics; the research activity carried out by the most productive countries and research centers; and the internationalization and impact of the journals in this category.”

            The way Civil Engineers publicize has been evolving a lot, even up to this day. In the year 2011 there were 11,836 publications almost tripling the amount in 1997. This growth is superior and pretty much the same for all the related categories of Engineering ranging anywhere from two to three times more publications in 2011 than in 1997. From 1997 to 2011 a lot of things have grown not all drastically but still grown but the percentage of articles with international collaboration has grown a lot from 11% to 21% in the 14 year span of time. The number of research center involved in each article on the other hand has only grown from 1.5 to 1.8 in the 14 years.

            Engineering and science progress has been growing drastically since the 90’s and it doesn’t look like it is going to stop any time soon. The scientist keep discovering more and more about the world and technology around us that I don’t think we will ever stop evolving. Sooner or later we are going to have hoover cars floating around everywhere and I can’t wait to see what evolution has in store for us.

Cañas-Guerrero, Ignacio, Fernando R. Mazarrón, Ana Pou-Merina, Cruz Calleja-
            Perucho, and María F. Suarez - Tejero. "Engineering Structures.
            "Analysis of Research Activity in the Field “Engineering, Civil” 
            through Bibliometric Methods" 56 (2013): 2273-286. Web. 

When Civil Engineers use visual aids they use blueprints especially the structural part of Civil Engineering. They communicate the blueprints, by using signs that are specified in a key. Like in the picture above they made a blue print for an intersection, and put semis in it, which are the red things in the pictures, to see if they would be able to fit in the intersection. This was mad by a Engineer for the other engineers on that project so they would know what is going on.

Chad Bonar

1/31/14

Reflection

            When writing the summary it was somewhat similar to the rest of the assignment we have done in the class like thought pieces and portrait of a writer. When writing a summary you shorten the readings into your own words but don’t actually add anything and/or make it your own paper. This compares to the thought piece because when we are writing a thought piece we summarize our thoughts and what happened in the reading so we have to go through a lot of the same processes for the two assignments. When I was writing my Portrait of a writer I found myself summarizing myself into a paper which was weird because I have never really had to do that before, sadly though I couldn’t think of much to write so I must be a pretty bland person, so we had to do some of the same steps as the other too yet again.

            When writing all of these papers I wish I had something to help my brainstorming, because in all three of these assignments I always came to a dead stop in my writing before I met the requirements and couldn’t think of anything else to add. I have never really had this problem when writing except for when the papers are about myself and/or deep thinking processes, I have never been good at that. I have been trying to let my mind be free so I can just let the words come out on their own. It would make everything so much easier on everybody if we could just do that. 

         So like I mentioned before all of these paper have a lot in common and all help us build a more structure writing experience so that in the future we are prepared for what is asked of us. Everything you will write had some summarizing in it some way or another and this summary came a lot easier to me.

 

Chad Bonar

1/22/14

How would you find out how writing works in your field?

(Who? What?  Why? Where? How?)

      Well to start off with, finding out how my career field writes can be easy so, I would look up some old Civil Engineers reports form on the cite and just see how they write. I could also job shadow/internship and see it happen in my own eyes which I have done before. When a Civil Engineer, actually Engineers in general, writes we write short but very explicit notes/directions. We have to write like this so that we can keep up with everything else that is going on because Engineers have a lot more to worry about than writing.