Blog 1

My name is Andrew Cipperley. My hometown is a small town named Ogallala and it is located on the western side of the state.  I am a senior history major and I particularly enjoy learning about the American Revolution and WWII.  Many people wonder and ask me what I plan on doing for work since I am a history major.  Well at this point there is no definite answer but I often tell people I plan on going to law school just to get them off of my back for a bit. Outside of school my life is a bit more interesting and would probably be a better topic of discussion than my thoughts about some event in history.  In my free time I enjoy exploring different wilderness areas.  Around Lincoln one of my favorite place is Wilderness Park.  I enjoy walking around and finding new places there because it is such a large area.  It’s great for getting some simple exercise and getting a bit of fresh air and that is why I go there a few times a week.  Outside of hiking around I also enjoy shooting guns, skateboarding, reading, and watching sports.  My favorite cricket team is Sri Lanka’s national team. They were the first cricket team I watched on television and they won.  So that’s just an off the wall fact for you about myself.

When I think about the reasons why I write there are many reasons that come to my mind.  I think that I enjoy writing because it is a skill is important to pass on what knowledge we have.  If you only pass your knowledge down by spreading it vocally, eventually it will get twisted, lost in translation, or lost completely at some point.  With writing, your knowledge is right there in front of whoever wants to read and learn about what you have to say.  There aren’t many ways to interpret a message that is written out in ink right in front of a person.  You can’t twist the words that much and you get out of the text whatever the author wanted you to get from the text.  So I guess when someone asks me why I write, I can say I write to pass the knowledge I have to the next person.

From what I have always thought and what I gathered from the assigned reading, community is a very vague term for what groups you tend to be associated with.  It makes mention that students at a university are a community and that is absolutely true.  There is a bond between every student that attends UNL because we have that common ground that we are students at the university.  Other than being in a community of students I also belong to a community of Christians.  Writing and language is very important in the different communities that I am involved with.  For my Christianity community I had to write multiple papers about my faith when I became a full-fledged member of my church.  Writing also helps keep things simple around the church too.  Our congregation is a fairly old group of people that aren’t necessarily up to date with technology such as email so whenever we need to pass a message to them we just leave notes in their mailboxes at the church.  This has helped bring older members in my church’s community closer to some of the younger members.  Clearly that is very important for a community.