What is your grammar goal?

My grammar goal is to be able to feel confident with my writing. I would like to be able to write and feel confident that it will make sense even if I don't proof read it. I would like to be able to communicate my ideas thoroughly. I would like to expand my vocabulary so that I can be more descriptive in my writing. I would also like to be able to master the use of semi-colons, dashes and commas. I feel that if I get good at these few things I will be able to communicate in almost in scenario.

Values Essay

The Day I Learn What Marriage is

On a normal weekend afternoon, after getting back from home, I saw a post on facebook titled “Marriage is not for you”, Immediately after reading the title I thought “finally someone who doesn’t want to get married like me!” but I was wrong. The article was about how all the things you do in marriage are not for your benefit but for your marriage’s benefit. That article made me keep thinking of all the reasons why I didn’t wanted to get married and I tried to convince myself that it was not too bad to be married, sadly enough I failed to convince myself!

After some time of meditation I started asking married people about what their insights were about marriage. There was someone in particular that caught my attention with his answers. His three main ideas about marriage were: first, marriage is hard but helps you to become better, second, marry when you feel prepared to and third, get rid of your fear and trust in the Lord.

I was sitting in the couch watching tv when I called my first companion from my mission (he has been married for 2 years now and have 1 child). I was feeling a little bit pressured with the whole idea of marriage and I just wanted to talk about it with someone. When he answered the phone I started to express how I felt and threw a bunch of questions at him. After a couple minutes I was basically interviewing him!

“Weren’t you afraid of getting married? Didn’t you think about money and all extra expenses?” I asked.

“I thought about all of it and of course I was afraid too but fear is something heavenly father sent us here to overcome. You cannot keep God’s commandments with a fearful heart. You can either trust the lord and hold on to the iron rod or you can try to walk the path alone, doubting God’s will. I have never lacked or lost anything since I married but all the opposite, I have gained a lot of things I wouldn’t gain without my wife,” He responded very calmly and with a surety I have rarely seen in someone when talking about marriage.

I stood in silence of a couple seconds and asked, “Have you ever regret marrying? Do you feel it is harder?”

He gently smiled and looked at my directly in the eyes and said, “I haven’t ever regretted getting married not even once but I gotta say: it's been hard. You have more responsibilities when you marry. God expects much more from you when you are married too. When you marry your day does not end when you get off of work. You get back home and you have to help your wife (who has been up before you so that you could have breakfast in the morning and won’t go to sleep until your child fall asleep).  You gotta provide for your family and even have time to play with your kids. Marriage is not easy but it is worth it.”

I didn’t know what to say. I was speechless! I was trying to balance my time between work and homework and I wasn’t doing very good and this man was perfectly fine managing his time between school, work, children, homework, wife and much more! At that moment I realized that he had grown much more spiritually than I have but I still had an excuse: He looked tired. Who in the world enjoys his time and who could possibly be happy when he is tired? So I asked, “Has marriage made you happier?”

He then told me that marriage is not a fairy tail and that marriage has its ups and downs. But, when you look back, he says, you are thankful that you went through all those ups and downs. He told me he has been through the happiest and saddest moments of his life during his married time but that he wouldn’t change a thing. He told me that, “he was prepared when he married,” and that he had the desire to do so. “Never marry someone if you don’t feel prepared, ask the Lord for comfort and guidance and when you feel prepare take that step,” was his advice. He also said that when you marry is because you have the desire to be with that person, you have a desire to grow together and help each other. He said that getting married was the best decision he could’ve taken because he was prepared. “I have loved my wife since the very first day we met. She has been my support and motivation for all these years and I wouldn’t change how things happened for anything (not even for a couple extra sleeping hours).” Throughout the conversation I could see how his life has been modeled by his beliefs and how his actions and lifestyle shaped his values.

I was pretty impressed with his answers, I could see the sincerity in his eyes. I asked the last questions I had, “What have you gained since you marry (besides weight)?”.

He laughed and told me that the most important thing he gained was an eternal companion but that also he had gained knowledge and understanding. He told me he gained a special love for their parents because he now could see how good they were as parents, how patient and loving they were. He also told me he had gained a bigger testimony of God and of his love for us. He had come to understand a little bit better how big the sacrifice of God’s only begotten son was. “Now that I am a parent I feel a deep love and devotion to my child, I feel an obligation of never letting him down and to guide him and because of this love that I have for my child I know that God will never let me down under any circumstances, it is because of the love that I have for my child that I have gained a bigger and true testimony of God’s love. Trust in him and trust that if you marry he will show you greater things, things you cannot gain any other way. Trust in him and I assure you will be blessed,” he concluded.

This was the end of our conversation, it was getting late and we still had other things to do. I enjoyed this conversation and learned much from it. I saw a different man from the one that I knew a few years ago. I saw values being shaped through trials and good choices.

If I were to give myself a grade it would be a B. Based on the evidence that I have worked hard to finish my papers on time and that I try to participate during class or in my team and that I tried really hard to learn (even when I have such a difficult time writing in English). I am not the best English writer but I try really hard to improve.

Flood the earth

As I listened to this talk I remembered how the Book of Mormon can change the life of people. I remember a boy, he was around 16 years old and he came to church just because someone gave him a Book of Mormon. There would be a lot more members if we were just brave enough to invite people to hear about the gospel and about the many blessings the lord promise in the Book of Mormon. The Book of Mormon is such an important thing and every time we share it with someone we call upon that person the blessings of heaven.

Rhetorical Analysis

Proclamation

In 1995 The Church of Jesus Crist of latter-day Saints published a document titled “The Family: A Proclamation to the World”. The purpose of this document as told by the LDS prophets is to "warn and forewarn" the world to the dangers of deviating from its standards. In it modern LDS prophets successfully convey their message by using a formal, alarming and a steady or authoritarian tone. The document is full of words that transmit different deep emotions and was used as part of Gordon B. Hinckley’s message at the general relief society meeting.

The title of the document is written as something serious and alarming. The word is defined in some dictionaries as “A major statement made in front of an audience or the authoritative word on some subject is a proclamation. It's usually used in an official or government context.” When the reader sees the word proclamation it makes him feel that it has to be something serious and immediately gets the reader attention and its appeal. In the title we also see the word “Family” which will also create an emotional appeal to readers that are family oriented.

Shortly after the title of the document we see its authors “The first presidency and Council of the Twelve Apostles.” This has two effects on the reader; Credibility is built when the reader knows who the author is and also it creates an emotional appeal because it reinforces the importance and urgency of the document that was settled with the title.

With so many changes that have happened in our society recently, it is obvious that anything that talks about any subjects like homosexuality are going to create some kind of emotional appeal. The main idea of the first paragraph of the proclamation of the family is about gender. It talks about how each one of us had a gender even before being born and how it is an essential characteristic. This paragraphs creates an emotional appeal because it is the introduction of a now broad subject, homosexuality. In the recent years people have been sharing their insights on homosexuality and people either on favor or against have a strong opinion about it. The reader will either feel empathy or a need to debate when he reads the first paragraph. It will also create a need to read more because at this point the reader can assume that the rest of the document will contain more details on the subject.

One of the most powerful persuasive method is using history facts. When you give your word to someone that you are going to do something (kind of like a contract) it is very easy to feel a need to act according to your agreement. The third paragraph of the proclamation of the family uses this tool where it says that each one of us accepted Heavenly Father’s plan. This plan consists according to the proclamation of the family of “obtaining a physical body and grain earthly experience to progress toward perfection and ultimately realize our divine destiny.” Furthermore, the proclamation of the family also explains that part of the plan is to do sacred ordinances in the temple. This paragraph creates a need to know more in the reader and engages the reader.

                Society now days is very liberal. People talk more and more about rights but less and less about obligation. Because of this people more and more protest against responsibilities and law duties. In the paragraph six the proclamation to the family addresses parents and their responsibilities. Talking about someone else’s responsibility could really create a negative effect on the reader but it all depends on who the author is and its ethos. Since the author of the document is the twelve apostles it basically leaves no room for the reader to come up with “excuses” to turn away from what the document assures are parent responsibilities.  This way instead of creating a negative emotional effect it creates a feeling of burden and responsibility.

Donald Trumpo!

Donald Trump Policies

            Donald Trump, the current Republican Party nominee, has had a very successful campaign. With his controversial proposed policies, he had drawn the attention of the whole nation, but how beneficial and realistic are his policies? Some of his policies proposals include changing the birthright citizenship in the United States, banning/deporting illegal immigrants and building a wall. In this paper we will discuss how illegal immigrants help or affect the economy of the U.S, we will discuss if there is really a need for a border wall, and finally we will discuss how Donald Trump’s plan of reducing illegal immigrant population could only work if he opens the doors of the country to legal immigrants.

1.      Immigration policy

Donald Trump’s immigration policy includes mainly 3 topics. Birthright citizenship, the US-MX border, and immigrant deportation. We will specify what is Trump’s stand in each one of these topics and judge how beneficial or realistic they are.

1.1  Birthright citizenship

One of the first things that Donald Trump proposed was to stop giving citizenship to babies from illegal immigrant parents. “I don’t think they have American citizenship and if you speak to some very, very good lawyers – and I know some will disagree, but many of them agree with me—and you’re going to find they do not have American citizenship” was Donald’s opinion during an interview with Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly.

1.2  Claim that illegals bring crime with them.

One of the reasons why Donald trump wants to admonish birthright citizenship if because “The Mexican Government is forcing their most unwanted people into the United States. They are, in many cases, criminals, drug dealers, rapists, etc.….”, he stated during in a written statement.

This declaration brought controversy among Mexican-Americans. Donald clarified that “On the other hand, many fabulous people come in from Mexico and our country is better for it. But these people are here legally, and are severely hurt by those coming in illegally….”

After these declarations a study was made to test whether illegal immigrants were responsible for higher levels of violence and drug-related crime. The study concluded that there was no relation between violence and illegal immigrants but it does state that there is a small yet significant relation between drug-related crimes and illegal immigrants (David Green 9). Which means that Donald Trump’s claim about fewer illegal immigrant safer country is not completely correct nor completely wrong.

1.3  U.S – MX Border wall

One of the main plans of Donald trump to achieve preventing illegal immigrants from entering the country is building a wall. This plan was very judged since it involved Mexico paying the cost of this wall. According to experts the wall could be as much as $25 billion dollars without including the cost of land acquisition and maintenance. There are a couple issues with this wall to be addressed. First, the wall would require constantly patrolling to watch for people jumping over. Second, according to Robert Warren a lot of the people entering the country illegally enter using tourist’s visas and overstay (Warren 92-93[d1] ). For now, no one knows how effective would be this wall; what we know is that if built it would not stop even half of the illegal immigrants from crossing the border.

1.4  Mass deportation

Another way that Donald plans to use to decrease illegal immigrant population is by mass deporting. This was another interesting topic since some said that this would be very expensive and that the country wouldn’t be willing to pay the money required to deport all illegal immigrants. Mass deporting illegal immigrants is not only expensive; according to Raul Hinojosa Ojeda, an immigration expert, deporting every illegal immigrant would harm the economy lowering the GDP by about 1.46% annually, according to Raul this could make the country loose $2.3 trillion dollars in 10 years (Hinojosa[d2] , 188).This makes Donald’s plan of mass deporting rather unrealistic.

2        Economic policy.

Trump’s economy policy plan has a lot to do with his immigration policy plan since one of the things he wants to do is give the job positions that are currently filled by illegal immigrants to Americans. To do this Trump would need to deport illegal immigrants or make it harder for them to get employed. We will discuss what are the consequences of deporting immigrants and how Donald could make this plan work.

Donald stated that he would give more jobs to Americans by deporting illegal immigrants and stopping them from entering the country, he argues that illegal immigrants have a negative impact on the US economy because they don’t pay taxes and receive benefits from the US government. His plan is to give jobs that are currently filled by illegal immigrants to Americans. But there are a few things to consider. 

            According to a research by Arizona State University and the University of Utah most of the illegal immigrants pay state, federal and local taxes but are not eligible for benefits. According the same study, the social security administration gets $7 billion dollars of taxes in forms that cannot be matched to the right social security number and Medicare receives over $1.5 billion dollars annually.   (Becerra et al. 121).

Also, reducing illegal immigrant population have a negative effect in the US economy. According to Andri Chassamboulli and Giovanny Peri the decrease of illegal immigrants on labor markets would “reduce job-creation of firms and increase unemployment of unskilled native workers. They will also reduce income per native.” (Chassamboulli and Peri 24).

One of the main reason of why reducing illegal immigrant population affects the US economy is because illegal immigrants often work for much lower pay rates than Americans, this causes the firm to generate higher surplus and thus pushes the firm to create more job opportunities for other people.

With all of this in mind Donald’s plan of job creation will fail if he maintains his plans of reducing illegal immigrants unless he decreases the illegal immigrant population but increase the number of legal immigrants. As Chassamboulli and Peri said “To the contrary, policies that decrease the number of illegal immigrants but increase the total number of immigrants (such as legalization) will improve job creation, decrease native unemployment and increase income per native.” (Chassamboulli and Peri 24) In this case Donald’s plan of reducing illegal immigrant population would work.

In conclusion Donald Trump’s policies might work if he develops them in the right way. In this paper we discussed how Donald Trump deporting plan would bring GDP down and how the united states need immigrants to keep its economy running well. We also discussed how a building a wall to stop immigrant from coming would not be very effective since most of the immigrants cross the border with their tourist’s visas. We also reviewed Donald’s statement about how immigrants bring crime to the United States and how that is a false statement. As a conclusion we can say that building a wall and stopping immigrants or deporting them won’t make the country a safer place but indeed it would help the economy better if and only if he brings legal immigrants at the same time he gets the number of illegal immigrants down. If Donald Trump does not bring legal immigrants to the country and he deports illegal ones the country economy will go down until the total number of immigrants raises.

Our final conclusion is that Donald Trump could help the economy by adding policies that make it harder for illegal immigrants to get/find jobs to decrease the illegal immigration population to then bring more legal immigrants to the country. Measures like building a wall, removing child birth citizenship or mass deporting we found unnecessary.

Cited work:

Green, David. "The Trump Hypothesis: Testing Immigrant Populations as a Determinant of Violent and Drug-Related Crime in the United States." Social Science Quarterly (2016).

Warren, Robert, and Donald Kerwin. "Beyond DAPA and DACA: Revisiting Legislative Reform in Light of Long-Term Trends in Unauthorized Immigration to the United States." Journal on Migration and Human Security JMHS 3.1 (2015): 80-108.

Hinojosa-Ojeda, Raul. "The Economic Benefits of Comprehensive Immigration Reform." Cato Journal ser. 32.1 (2012): 1-26. 

Becerra, David, David K. Androff, Cecilia Ayon, and Jason T. Castillo. "Fear vs. Facts: Examining the Economic Impact of Undocumented Immigrants in the U.S." Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare ser. 39.4 (2012).

Chassamboulli, Andri, and Giovanni Peri. "The Labor Market Effects of Reducing the Number of Illegal Immigrants." Review of Economic Dynamics 18.4 (2015): 792-821.

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 [d1] Stephen Loiaconi, Experts: Trump's border wall could be costly, ineffective,Sinclair Broadcast Group (August 18, 2015).

 [d2]http://knowyourvisa.com/pdf/the_economic_benefits_of_cir.pdf

Nachos and Tacos!

It's being 2 years since I am out of my country and I am starting to miss a few things. Some days when I have to go to the store I lay down for 5 minutes to think of how close stores are in Mexico. If your mom wants some tortillas you just have to walk 1 block to get them ( I wish I could to that here ). But that is not what I miss the most. I miss those delicious tacos I used to eat every Saturday night with my friends. The best thing about those tacos was that they were so cheap that you would first get full rather than spending all of your miserable 10 dollars that you had in your pocket. There was sometimes though, when we didn't even had to eat tacos and that is when you had to eat nachos! We would go to the store to buy a huge bag of tortilla chips and some salsa and eat for hours!