Shape poems

I chose to arrange my poem in the shape of an American Flag because it is a very recognizable symbol of America. The poem is all about what America is and why the country is not what it should be. I figured that the best symbol of America could be the American flag. Well, maybe not the best symbol, but definitely the easiest to make out of words.

I wrote my extra credit poem as a short little love song. The lack of details on what was expected encouraged me to experiment more than I usually would. I used an unnatural pattern, and did not worry to much about the syllables. Of course, I tried to make each rhyming line have close to thee same number, but I liked the words that I was able to use when it was less regimented. Also, I was writing and thought that I could easily change it so that the voice was actually a tree. This is the reason that I choose the tree shape.

Corrections to the Draft

I enjoyed posting my paper and receiving feed back from so many different people. The major feed back that I received was my udder lack of any sort of actual conclusion. The conclusion is always the part that gives me the most trouble, so I usually leave it and review the rest of my paper before actually writing the conclusion. This strategy works well unless I forget to go back and actually write it. After the feedback was posted I thought of a nice way to tie it all together. The whole conclusion paragraph is brand new. I think it did a really nice job summarizing why the articles were a part of the essay, maybe not doing a good job of summarizing the articles.
The other major factor that I changed was the spelling, punctuation and other basic house cleaning for the essay. There was not that much I had to do for this task, I just looked at it again and some of the reviewers mentioned that some might have gotten through the cracks. My father was especially helpful in pointing out exactly what was wrong.
I tried to restructure it a little but was not sure if it really needed it so I left it basically the same as the draft. In the third paragraph I discovered that I used claims to much so I cut a few sentences with claims in them and I changed a few of the words to something other than claims.

Draft

Democratization and Trade

As a student on a political science track I chose to research democratization and trade. All three articles were connected in that they explored the relationship between the two, but all were different articles entirely. Each explored the topic in different amounts of detail and depth.
The first article I researched dealt with democratization and trade liberalization. Daniel Yunichi Kono tackles the issue of whether or not democratization is actually the best answer for trade issues. He used a lot of graphs and mathematic ideas. The main basis of his argument is the thesis by Mayer (1984) that the determination of trade policy is the median voter. If the median voter has a greater proportion of capital to labor then the nation should have more liberal trade policies with labor rich countries. This can help explain why several aristocratic European countries built huge overseas empires in the 19th century; they felt the need to develop labor and resource areas as well as markets for their own capital intensive goods. Democratization has the opposite effect. Giving the vote to more people lowers the wealth of the median voter in a country. This lowering of the capital to labor ratio would lead to more liberalized trade with richer countries who export capital goods. On the flip side is that newly democratized countries will increase trade barriers with countries that are not as rich. This response to democratization can severely restrict trade between neighboring countries in developing areas in the world. Kono compares such a model as being more like a central hub with spokes coming out of it rather than a trading web, with trade being limited between the spokes. His general thesis was that simply spreading democratization is not enough to ensure trade health. It is certainly a large step but should not be the only consideration.
It was interesting to see the hub and spoke model of the first article mentioned indirectly in the second article by Amos A. Jordan and Jane Khaana. The main topic was about the emergence of Natural Economic Territories (NETs) in the Pacific. It was not nearly as abstract or number intensive as the first article. It was mainly an overview of what an NET is and which one of the top nine has the greatest chance of success. An NET is a geographically close association of areas in the Pacific that are not politically aligned but are working together to increase trade and wealth. It is a little hard to grasp what the true definition is since several different models exist and some have extremely ironic connections. This includes the fact that the most successful NETs are associations of border provinces that are breaking away from the policies of their respective central governments, with the blessings of those same central governments. The example I mentioned at the start of the paragraph is the Indonesia-Malaysia-Singapore Growth Triangle. Singapore is a large city with heavy capital reserve where as the Johor region of Malaysia and the Riau Islands of Indonesia are both very poor. The text reads, “Given that the strongest links in this NET are between Singapore-Johor and Singapore-Riau, some argue that it is not a triangle but a corridor managed by Singapore, …” This is the hub and spoke model without using the name. It was nice to see a real life example instead of just seeing a mathematic thesis. The main thesis was that greater decentralization led to greater trade in the Pacific.
The last article was interesting as it came to close to the same conclusion, but from a different direction. Janet Dine claims that greater globalization of trade was actually de-democratic. She claimed to prove that greater democratization in individual countries led to liberalized trade policies. Then she went on to say that these liberal trade policies were de-democratic since it allowed multi-national corporations to run wild. She claims that free trade issues are just politicians’ ways of claiming profit over morals. She wrote as if multi-national corporations were the worst things to ever happen to the human race and that they are off springs of basic institutional corruption. As it was printed in the Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies it was mainly concerned that those same multi-national corporations are using the lack of international laws to use unfair labor practices and other unethical practices in there attempts to single mindedly pursue profits. Instead of free trade, she promotes the Fair Trade movement and others like it as alternatives. The Fair Trade movement was in its beginning stages when the article was written so she clearly admitted that it was not close to really being effective, but she did claim it was better than free trade. So her thesis ended up being that liberalized trade agreements hurt democratization, instead of democratization and liberalization hurting trade.
It was interesting to see how different each article was on the same basic topic and keywords.