"The Undergraduate Writing Major: What Is It? What Should It Be?" by Deborah Balzhiser and Susan H. McLeod

    This article explained in depth how the writing major is changing and progressing, and questioning which direction it should go. While English majors have previously been, for the most part, limited to only the areas of Literature and Creative writing, the CCCC has noted how recently many universities have begun to offer other majors that focus more on rhetoric and composition, or professional writing. The article also explained how when many incoming freshman to college aren't very familiar with he terms "rhetoric" and "composition", but are a lot more used to just the word "writing". I know this was exactly the case for me. In high school, though I took the class AP Language and Composition, and one of our main goals was to use an array of "rhetorical devices" in our essays, I finished that class not really knowing what either of those words meant. Only until now, because of this class, do I have an actual understanding of rhetoric and composition.
    I also liked the quote, "As a relatively new discipline in the university, composition/rhetoric is still defining itself as a field; it is not surprising, then, that our major is also still defining itself." I felt this completely addressed how new the major is, and how its definition is still being created.

"Copy, Paste, Remix: Profile Codes on MySpace" and "From The Non-Designer's Web Book"

    The "Copy, Paste, Remix: Profile Codes on MySpace" article by Dan Perkel and Danah Boyd delved into the "remixing" or "appropriation" of Myspace pages, and the majority of users that are teens. Their view is that how HTML codes are used, which is mostly without and understanding, and just in the process of copying and pasting, is probably detrimental to the future of social websites. I was a little confused during the article about what Perkel and Boyd's standpoints were. They showed that they obtained a lot of research and interviews with actual teenage Myspace users, but what did they conclude about all of this information? They never clearly stated their opinion of whether or not this "remixing" is something that should be stopped, or what they think it will lead to. It seemed that they were more just identifying what is going on, and haven't figured out yet what the outcome is going to be.
    Then reading the excerpts from the Non-Designer's Web Book", I saw how the ideas were closely related. It suggested that using HTML and web pages isn't a bad thing, even at a young age, but that users should understand what they are doing; how an HTML works instead of just copying and pasting without any knowledge of it. They also mention 4 principles that should be included when making a web page: alignment, proximity, repetition, and contrast.I feel that in the creation of our class publication we should use these principles to make our web design look clean and professional.