Exploration Five From Thomas Kurek

Thomas Kurek
English 1110.01 at 1:30, MW
10/9/18

Exploration Five

1.  One observation that I made in my active reading was how irrational our decision making process truly is.  It's easy to see ourselves as rational, logical, and methodical in the decision making process.  It's a view that doesn't holdup to scrutiny.  The evaluation process involves four things:  Judgements, reasons, criteria, and evidence.  The one thing that shouldn't be used often in the evaluation process is emotion.  Emotion is great in certain situations but can also become a hinderance in the evaluation process which directly corresponds with decision making.  The gut feeling can sometimes override evidence and mess with everything.

     Another observation that I made in my active reading was about how writing a review can lead to self discovery on an issue.  By doing inquiry-based projects, an honest and accurate conclusion can be drawn about a specific topic.  This is because writing it forces the writer to focus on accurately fulfilling the four important concepts of evaluation and put any judgements aside.  This leads to honest thoughts and conclusions to things that the writer would never have even approached prior.

2.  I use reviews in my life to determine whether or not a product is something worth me buying.  Ever since I got my Winnie the Pooh piggy bank when I was five, I've been reluctant to take away "Pooh's honey" for something frivolous and pointless.  I once bought a spy laser set because I thought it was cool.  It was fun for the first couple months, but it wasn't good enough for me.  I thought that I wasted that thirty dollars, and thus started watching reviews of popular products on YouTube.  The Ninjago Lightning Dragon Lego set really intrigued me, but the big price tag made me reluctant to commit to it.  When I went onto YouTube, and common people like me loved the product.  They gave all of the pros and cons of the product without sugar coating it just for sales.  This encouraged me to buy the set, something that I still have to this day.  I now use YouTube to assess some other potential purchases, but the final decision is my own.

Exploration Five Caleb Sullivan

An observation that I made about review writing from chapter five is the importance of evidence. If you don't have evidence or experience with whatever you are writing a review about, the review is worthless. The audience reading the review want to hear your story and experience with the item or event you are reviewing.

Should you write a review whenever you are offered to do so? OR should you wait until you feel like you know enough information from different outlooks and sides of the reviewed item? I believe its up to the reviewer. If you had an experience with it, write a review, but if you feel like the review you would write would not help people then don't waste your time writing it. The consumers don't want to waste time reading a bad review either.

Reviews have definitely helped me make a decision whether or not to buy something, or participate in an activity. Whether it is amazon, app store, or yelp reviews, I rely on those to help me decide what the outcome of my decision will be.

An example of using a review recently, was on what tri-pod to buy for my DSLR Cannon camera. I wanted to find one for a reasonable price that would also stay strong and not break easily. I read different reviews, looked at the star rating and made my best decision based on customer experiences. I chose a good one and still use it to this day.

MeFOTO RoadTrip travel tri-pod

Exploration 5 by Morgan Beaschler

One observation that I made during my active reading was that some motives for writing reviews is to help people make informed decisions. I never really realized how often I look at a review to decide something. Reviews are everywhere, they are on clothing websites, there are reviews about food, reviews on hotels movies etc. These reviews can help people decide if they are interested in a product or not. Another thing I noticed in my reading is that we have no problem expressing our judgment about something but do not have enough evidence to support it. We often times judge something on our beliefs. We should be aware of our beliefs and keep an open mind before we write a review.

This is what the "scary" nun looks like in the movie The Nun

One life example that has influenced a decision I made was when I saw the reviews for the movie The Nun. Some of the reviews were bad saying that it was not scary. One review I found by Jeffery Anderson said that, "Sadly, this fifth chapter in The Conjuring franchise is, despite a temptingly promising locale/premise, nowhere near as scary, inspired, or coherent as its predecessors".  I was really excited to see this movie until I saw the reviews. Then a friend who went and saw it said it wasn’t that great. So hearing these things I did not go see the movie. If I did go to the movie maybe I would of liked it but because of the reviews I decided to not go.

Exploration 5 Ethan Trenka

One of my observations in chapter five was keeping an open mind when doing a review of something.  In today's world especially many reviews are subjective to one's own opinions.  There might be some bias coming from him on why he o she liked or disliked something.  Keeping an open mind allows us to write what we think of a product by using facts to support our statement.  We should not allow our feelings to get in the way of facts.  The second point that was made in chapter five was that reviews are like arguments.  We want people to see things the way we see it.  To accomplish this we must use certain criteria to make solid points.  We must the use evidence to support our points.

I read reviews for products all the time.  Especially if it is something expensive, because I would hate to spend money on something that sucks.  An example of this is when I was into playing air soft.  There are hundreds of companies that make hundreds of different types of guns to buy.  For a high quality gun the price range is around $300-$400.  So I wanted to make sure what I was buying was going to last.  There are also different types of guns, spring, gas, and electric.  They all have their pros and cons.  I watched many YouTube videos and read up on a bunch of different brands, until I made my final decision.  I based it off of the build quality, the speed at which it shoots, and what type it is.  People made good arguments for why the Krytac M-4 was the best.  for the price it had the best FPS, it was made out of metal, and had a Hi-Cap magazine.  It was also electric which meant more BB's and cheaper and easier to maintain.  Reviews are helpful when they are written by actual consumers of the product.  The companies own reviews are always biased and usually untrue. this is the Krytac M-4 Trident Mk2 in blue

Exploration 5 Cameron Snyder

One observation I noticed was that it is tough to keep an open mind when analyzing or reviewing something. Many of us are quick to judge something before we actually know what it is about. Sometimes we let our feelings get in the way of the facts behind something. I like the point the author makes that we would rather try to prove our point rather than listen to the perspectives of others. It is important to be able to suspend your judgement so you can get a more fair an unbiased view. Another observation I noticed was that is very easy for us to come up with answers or opinions like yes or no, but it can be challenging to come up with a reason why. I thought this was interesting because sometimes this happens to me as well. I think something, but not really have a reason for it. It is just what I think but I don’t really have a reason behind it or know how to describe it.

I use reviews all the time, for all kinds of things from movies or TV shows to food and other products and items, especially ones that I buy online. I would read them to see other people’s opinions, and maybe use it to base on whether or not I will buy something. If something has good reviews, than you will be more apt to buy it, compared to something will low ratings or reviews. The same concept goes for basically anything. I recently bought a pair of headphones from Amazon. I read many reviews of multiple headphones before I bought a pair. I read lots of reviews to find a good pair of headphones for a reasonable price. After reading many reviews I decided on a pair and bought them. I used a lot of reviews and ratings to influence my decision on which pair of headphones to buy.

Reviews are very helpful when buying items, especially online when pictures may be deceiving.

Exploration Five by Kaitlyn Pheiffer

During reading the review portion of The Curious Writer, I learned a lot of good information about writing a good review. One of the observations I made was how often it reminded us the suspend our judgement before evaluating what we want to review. I do agree with this and believe this is important in writing a review because we want to come in as if we have a blank slate. We don't want out outside judgements or opinions affecting how we write our review before we've even experienced the product, place, or event we choose to review. My second observation was including evidence to make the review stronger. In reviews, we get to explain our opinion on something we experienced. While that opinion can be either good or bad, we do need to explain what happened to make us think that. We need to create almost a story and provide detail as to why we believe what we believe. It also makes for a stronger review, one that people will most likely read and trust.
I hate going shopping at the mall, or any store really. I prefer to do my clothes shopping online from the comfort of my own home. This does have it's negative sides however, like knowing how the clothes fit, or knowing if cheap material is used. In this case, I always look at reviews to justify my decision and choose one item over the other. This did happen in one case with a shirt I wanted to buy from a website I wasn't sure if I trusted yet. I read some reviews and a majority of them said the shirt was cheaply made and the material wore down after the second or third time being washed. In the end I decided not to buy this product because my resources provided me with information that swayed my opinion on the clothes. It helped me in the end not to waste my money on an item that wasn't worth it.

Review of a dress

Exploration Five

Part One:

One observation that I had was in the beginning of the chapter where it says you don’t simply write a review for no reason, it begins as a inquiry based project. I think this Is true because usually you have some motive to writing a review whether it be you really had a great experience with something or you really didn’t enjoy it. This motive is more complex than just a fact thought, a review needs to be backed up by personal experience otherwise the credibility of the review is diminished. 

Another observation I made while reading the carious writer was that reviews are extremely biased. People have different experiences with different things and one person may love a certain movie or food and another person may completely hate it. This becomes prevalent when writing a review because it really comes down to personal taste to some extent. I believe that you can trust reviews but you have to be careful to also let yourself experience certain things.

Part Two: 

I often use reviews in my personal life because whenever I go on vacation with my family and we are looking for somewhere new to eat I will go on yelp and search for the best rated places near us. Often times we will find a restaurant that we think we might like but when we see a lot of negative reviews it pushes us away from that place and we end up choosing somewhere that has better reviews.

A movie critic