Procrastinating...ugh...

Well...lately I've been having trouble with my internet connection in my room. Oddly enough this makes me want to procrastinate more...however, one thing that it did do is sort of screw me over for yesterday. Before I typed my goals and audience for this assignment I did write a paragraph introducing this assignment...apparently it never got published and saved as a draft so I published it like now. Anyhow, today I guess was a little better. I don't have many pressing assignments and so I didn't start anything immediately. After getting back from my classes and other prior engagements I relaxed with my roommates for a little, than attempted to study for a Media Arts exam tomorrow. However, this did not go so well and soon I lost all energy and ended up laying down for about 20 min half asleep half awake until dinner. After dinner...with little to no energy still, I tried to take a nap to hopefully gain back some energy, but it hardly did me any good. I've been studying since about 7 o clock on and off. Trying to get everything done so I can drink and enjoy my night with my roommates and some friends. Hopefully tomorrow will prove a bit better, though the outcome looks unlikely as i foresee a slight hangover. Regardless, I have a few assignments for friday I would like to get done before I have to go to my class at night and take the exam. So fingers crossed and hopefully all this panic will motivate me tomorrow morning

Audience and Goals for Procrastinating

Audience: Well...aside from our teacher, pretty much it's me here. I mean unless someone somehow crosses my blog and finds my methods (if any arise and work) helpful.

Goals: Well...to keep a journal of my day to day progress in the open so that I'm forced to actually change my bad habit. Here goes nothing.

Procrastinating...getting over it.

UGH...so lazy. Sadly not a good way to take my first steps towards solving the problem. Procrastinating about solving procrastination feels almost comically ironic in this situation. Welllll at least I got it done right? So that should count for something, cause you knowww...you got to crawl before you walk, right? I know at some point in my life I wasn't like this...classical conditioning sucks. So I guess all it takes is classical conditioning to reverse it. Since high school I've had a chronic problem with bad procrastination...not doing assignments till lunch time when the class I have is next. I think the freedom of college sort of nudged it a bit further on and last semester just destroyed me. However, I finally got a bit motivated and have been trying to stay on top of my homework, but after a while I would only do some of the homework that I thought was easy or more entertaining to me and get them done with...than I'd be left with the harder stuff that I didn't want to do in the first place. I still get them done before hand...but not as early as I would actually prefer. So I think I need to start there, and hopefully the rest of my tasks and chores that I keep putting off will eventually follow.

Productivity Pointers

1. Managing time: The best way to stay productive is to manage your time in an efficient manner. Now I'm not saying to do work at any and all times you have a break, but do as much as you can within the limits of one day. The best thing to do is to plan out a schedule after assessing your assignments for the day or week or what have you. Fit in work times of an hour or so with breaks in between. Take your time in completing assignments rather than waiting till the very last minute. Even for those people who work best while under pressure (due to waiting till the day before or day of a huge assignment) the best thing to do would be to do the assignment in advance and if necessary review and revise it the day of or day before to get that extra motivation in the revision. Time management is key to keeping yourself in a good balance of work and play, cause remember all work and no play makes jack a dull boy. And all play and no work gets jack an F.

2. Be organized: Without organization, assignments can easily get lost in the clutter of the day. Many people have different ways of dealing with organization, so I suggest finding a method that works best for you. These techniques can range from writing up schedules, having calendars, setting alarms for reminders, asking friends for help, keeping your work space organized and putting things away neatly, or remembering them (if you tend to lose and forget things easy i would highly suggest avoiding this one). Being organized will lead to ease in completing and doing assignments. Notice how this tip blends with my other tip. By keeping good track and organization of your assignment, you will also be better able to manage your time when you have a clearer view of what is to be done in what amount of time. Staying on top of the work is the name of the game.

Hope these helped...though these are my tips, I often have trouble sticking to them myself. So remember to stay motivated in any and all work that you do. Feel pride in what you do...just because it's class and school work does not mean it all has to be boring or stupid. You are here for a reason, remember that.

-Kevin-

Marketing Ideas

Marketing in short is the entirety of processes involved in the transactions of goods from the producer to the consumer. These processes include advertising, shipping, storing, and selling.

In the matter of the class blog, these are our top ideas for marketing. 1) Post Fliers around campus, on the bulletin boards, doors, walls, hallways, cars, etc. 2) Send Out an Email to the entire student body. 3) Information Desk for people to come up and inquire about the blog. 4) Raffle or Contest sponsored by our class and the blog.

Post Fliers

There are numerous ways we can go about doing this idea. First we can go around campus and post them on every bulletin board in all buildings. We can also attach them outside the buildings on doors and windows as we have seen around campus. We can also go to the various parking lots and both parking structures and place fliers on people’s cars. Not only on campus, but we can also post fliers at various locations that college students hang out at. We want to try to reach the maximum number of people that we can. BE REPETITIOUS. We can’t just post the fliers once, but to capture people’s attentions we need to do this step consistently (at least once a week). Also, we can get somebody to dress up in a ridiculous costume and stand out front of Zimmerman or around the Duck Pond and hand out fliers to people to at least catch their attention. These fliers should not be basic, but bright and outrageous with art, pictures, jokes, or anything to capture their attention and entice them to at least look at the blog while browsing through the internet.

Send Out Emails

Our plan is to send out a mass email advertising and informing people about the blog. Hopefully we can coordinate this with whoever is in charge of the UNM email system. I know I have gotten many emails from outside the UNM staff or the UNM system, so it is possible. This way we can get to everybody who lives on and off campus and attends UNM. The internet is viewed by everybody, so this way we can guarantee reaching our entire audience.

Information Desk

Many people around campus set up desks and kiosks in various locations around campus. We can do some inside the sub, outside the sub, in dsh, out front of Zimmerman, inside the duck pond, on the outer regions of the duck pond, etc. We could take turns of two people teams sitting at the desk at a time to entice and inform fellow students who walk by. This is probably the best way of informing our audience of the blog and its purpose. The information desk is a good way of marketing to our audience because it allows them to ask questions directly to the people who run the blog. This allows for one on one conversation between us and our audience. It is also interacting with the people who are going to visit the blog. This way they will have a better and clearer understanding of what the blog is for and how it will help.

Raffle or Contest

Alongside the desk, or having its own desk, we can hold some type of contest or raffle (sponsored by the blog) to entice people to at least come to the desk. We can captivate our audience with a fun game with prizes, and since everything will have the blogs name on it and we’ll be mentioning it numerous times, they will hopefully want to actually visit the blog. We can have small prizes such as candy, cups, pencils, pens, notebooks, mini staplers (highly suggested) or like $5 itunes cards (as a top prize cause it could get expensive), etc. We’ll have music playing during this to bring people to the desk and hopefully they have a good time and enjoy it enough to visit the website. Alongside the Raffle, if we can keep track of who visits the website or gather their input about the website, we can continue to offer small prizes or something. That way we’ll know if people are actually going to and using the website, rather than just looking at it and than closing it instantly.

These are our top four ideas for marketing our blog. Our main point is to try to help UNM students. We believe that these are the best ways to go about advertising a class blog, cause many UNM students are lax about finding help. We need to be repetitious, but also exciting and fun because nobody wants to just get simple help, we need to make it entertaining for them to capture their attention in some way. Young people have short attention spans, without those shiny colors this may be a lost cause.

-Kevin and Justin-

Goals and Audience for Marketing Ideas

Goals: To find the best way to market the class blog to our audience (UNM students).

Audience: The class and our group members.

How To Recognize My Common Problems

Some of my biggest problems in writing essays is writing with complicated sentences and not providing support for my paper. These tend to go hand in hand because without the support or factual evidence proving my ideas, I make my sentences big and grandiose in order to convince my reader of my points. It is rather easy to recognize these problems and correct them for future writing.

One huge indicator of writing a complicated unnecessary sentence is when I or any other writers search the thesaurus for a better word, or a bigger word that can cover numerous other words. Here the writer is attempting to sound smarter by using a bigger and more diverse vocabulary. However, in searching for this “magic” word, we will often lose the meaning in the sentence, or distort it slightly so it is no longer the same. Thesauruses provide us synonyms of words that are close to our original word, but are not the same. If we did not know the word to begin with, and it is not in our vocabulary, than we probably should not use it. Only use words that we know the meaning of and apply in our daily speech. If we are unsure of a word, or think that it will make the paper sound better, do not use it.

Often time’s complicated sentences are correlated with fallacious arguments. We often argue in circles and attempt to sound persuasive with little or no support. Here we often repeat the same or similar sentences in numerous different ways because we have little or nothing else to say or prove. To ensure simpler sentences, we must write to prove a point and ensure the reader understands it. Reading essays is not supposed to be a psychological trick question seeing if the reader can figure out what the writer intended. Rather, it is supposed to convey an important point or message that a reader can easily understand without having to reread a sentence, paragraph, or the whole paper over numerous times. Be clear and concise.

Finally a huge indicator of complicated sentences will be a huge essay with little or no support. Without support, the writer will attempt to be persuasive enough to convince you that his or her point is correct without providing the factual evidence. This persuasion will often result in misdirection or complications to confuse the reader into believing the point is correct. However, we cannot believe a person’s statements or assessments without factual proof. With more evidence, our points will be clearer and more concise so that we will not need to “impress” the reader.

There are no definite ways of defining complicated sentences or pointing them out. However, these are some of the most common causes of overly complicated sentences. In writing essays we must all remember to be clear and get to the point. Why argue around what we wish to state? Do not put our main point or statement at the end. Put it at the beginning and go from there proving why we believe our statement is correct. This should help eliminate the need for confusing sentences.

-Kevin-