Srikar's WRA-110 Website

Article:

   The main idea of this article is about plagarism and the measures being taken to catch and penalize students who are accused of plagarism.This article uses primarily first hand accounts to explain to the audience how easy it is to find plagarized excerpts in a writing. The author then goes on to explain various statistics which show the number of students who confess to have committed various plagarisms and a few brief examples of graduate-level students who have been dismissed from their universities due to plagarizing their work.

   Based on the content of the article, this article seems to be directed mainly towards a general audience who are reading for fun. This article could also be directed towards students who have plagarized before as a sort of warning. A summary of the author's warning could be taken from the last two sentences: "Be diligent. Because someone's watching."

   Personally, I try my best to avoid intentionally plagarizing but I have run into trouble before. I agree that you have to give credit to the proper author if you are stating their ideas but I disabgree with the extremely strict penalties for first-time offenders, especially if it was unintentional. This may just be my opinion because I have never written any popular articles or had any of my work copied.

Essay:

   The main idea--"In this paper, I am going to talk about engineering as a whole, and how it affects humans"--is stated clearly in the introduction paragraph. The author then goes on to explain what the main ideas of each of his paragraphs will be. His thesis statement is clearly supported with both first-hand accounts and information picked up from other articles. Whenever other external sources are used, the author uses citations which reference the "Works cited" page.

   From the content of the essay, it can be clearly seen that the targeted audience is incoming college Freshmen. This essay is basically a persuasive essay which presents information and the advantages of what a mechanical engineer will have to do. It also gives a clear description of the progression of a mechanical engineering major throughout college such as which classes they will have to take. This essay appears to have been revised many times and the improvement from the first draft shows. The author is able to lengthen his paragraphs while at the same time removing filler material.

   I cannot really relate to this essay because my major is not mechanical engineering and I have also never considered mechanical engineering when I was selecting my major. One thing I can relate to though is looking for the enormous amount of job opportunities. As the author states, "The skills that mechanical engineers acquire through their college education have the widest area of application of all engineers and lead to the greatest diversity of employment opportunities." This is the same case for computer engineers who have to cover topics in computer science and electrical engineering.