Dear Mr. Graff,
Hi Mr. Graff! How are you doing today? I am writing this letter to you because I am the big fan of yours. I read your book They Say I Say, and it is fabulous. Especially the article named Hidden Intellectualism, I read it so many times, but it seems that I do not agree with all of your ideas and opinions. In the article, you argued that people commonly associate "book smarts" with intellectualism and the personal interests such as cars, sports or fashion with anti-intellectualism; but actually "street smart" still has the chance of being intellectualism. I don't agree with this point.
First of all, I think the basic facts of the intellectualism are knowledge, pure-reason, and rationalism. In addition to that, I think those things can be found only in the books and the process of study. Without the process of study and read no one is going to be able to get knowledge, especially there is no other way to let them become intellectualism.
On the other hand, from my own view, I think "street smart" is not useful. It may seems to be like they are smart in several area, but I believe that they are not going to be smart when they choose to use their smart in the area of study. There might be some special examples of "street smart" who can finally can be transformed, but I think those examples do not have a great amount.
For sure that I can not say things such as sport and fashion are not interesting, and also they are important as they are existing in our daily lives. Maybe you can find intellectualism in them for a few times, but it is also true that nothing can become intellectualism without any knowledge that came from the books or any study. So then how can you say "street smart" can still become intellectualism in someways? In my own opinion, Intellectualism can only be found through study, the regular, normal process of study. In the normal process of study, people can gain the knowledge from different areas based on the categories of the book they chose. After the process of gaining the knowledge we need, our own brain choose the knowledge that is needed and storage them. Then finally the knowledge we gained from studying became the thing that we know as intellectualism.
Nevertheless, I still agree with some of your ideas or the opinions, such as "We associate the educated life, the life of the mind, too narrowly and exclusively with subjects and texts that we consider inherently weighty and academic." Sometimes we still need to gain some knowledge from the resources rather than just books, it is still useful that we gain knowledge from all areas.
At the end, these are all of my personal opinions about your article. I really love to read it, it is very interesting, Thank you for your time reading my letter.
Sincerely,
Dan Yang Wang
09/10/12
This format looks so weird, I wrote it in the Microsoft Word.
ReplyDeleteJenny, your letter and response to the article was well organized and thought out. I admire how you were one of the few students to outright say that you disagreed with the author. I think that you disagreed in a respectful and intellectual manner. I suggest that when you are writing to be mindful of your word choices and try to proof read your work the best you can. When we begin revisions you will notice that a lot of the mistakes we make in our writing are preventable. Good work so far and if you have any questions feel free to ask.
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