Informative Essay: The NPR Link

When we synthesize, we are trying to put together material from two or more sources to help us to develop new outlook or to emphasize a new context to help us to determine what we are trying to say. Our mission as a writer is to gather as much information as we can on our topic then gather all the information that is going to help us to support what we are writing about (The Norton Field Guide to Writing). “When you synthesize, you group similar bits of information together, looking for patterns or themes or trends and trying to identify the key points” (457) Enclosed are some guidelines for doing so: (The Norton Field Guide to Writing) Read all the sources with an open mind. Take notes and write a brief summary. Pay attention to your first

Similar to a cactus’ bloom in the heat of the desert, through adversity humanity prospers and processes. Society, as a whole, has experienced, at least once, hardships in their lifetime, and through these trying situations people acquire compassion. Being familiar with challenges, people more readily accepts the distress of others and offer required assistance during times of difficulty. Although adversity is seen as the creator of contempt and hatred because of its negative effects on mentality, adversity fosters compassion through the creation of empathy, morality, and association in a person with others in a calamity.

A having seen many so many different situations through many different eyes is a very understanding person. When ever he is put into a new body he doesn’t judge the things they do or have done he only tries to help. A has empathy, or an understanding of another’s feelings, for people. Ultimately empathy is the ability to walk in someone else's shoes, A does this already. Everybody has egocentric bias**, which is when you do not feel empathy for a person. If you do not go through what happened to that person you may not understand why they feel a way they do. The more you understand what someone has been through the more empathy you have toward them. A having seen all of these things through others eyes and just how it affects them is able to understand them more and help them in the way they need to be helped. If everyday average people were put in someone else’s body, even if it were just for a few days, they would most likely be a more understanding person. Empathy does have a genetic side as well, therefore not everyone would have the same reaction to it. There is a part of the brain that causes us to block out that egocentric bias called the right supramarginal gyrus**. Some people are more sensitive to this part of the brain than others. A study, conducted by Dr Aron, a research professor at Stony Brook, showed that people who are highly sensitive are more highly attuned to what is around them***. When a person puts themselves in someone else’s shoes most of the time they have a sense of what they are feeling because they have felt it

“And yet, it may be that these are the conditions that finally give birth to empathy, the mother of compression. We cannot deny the existence of the helpless as their presence grows. It is impossible to insulate ourselves against what is at our very doorstep. I don’t believe that one is born compassionate. Compassion is

Empathy is an innate trait that all humans have and it is the one that we most readily feel, while compassion is a feeling that must be acquired. Ascher astutely points out that “empathy is the mother of compassion” (par.13). In this noteworthy parallel, Ascher compares empathy to a nurturing mother and compassion to the fruit of her labor. Like a mother who has an inherent instinct to protect and teach her young, so too does one have an innate understanding and sensitivity to the feelings and experiences of another, and it is only from these life experiences that the birth of a new awareness is brought forth in the form of compassion. Similar to a mother’s tutelage, Ascher describes compassion as a “learned” behavior that allows one to consciously act upon the distress of others by actively alleviating it. According to Ascher, “Compassion is not a character trait like a sunny disposition. It must be learned, and it is learned by having adversity at our window…” (par.13). In other words, true compassion can only be learned when one is faced with it every day of ones life and that once it becomes “familiar”, only then it can become identifiable and conjure empathy.

Sympathy has a very relative hold in the lives of people. It is not something humans teach; sympathy has been here since the beginning. We develop it from our own failure and use it to understand when or when not to use mercy when someone else fails. The Iroquois constitution states that their leaders should “be

2. Tiger became noticed by the world at the ripe old age of two yrs.

One common misconception while considering empathetic influence is how it compares with sympathy. The two are a dichotomy, and must be differentiated. To sympathize is to feel sorry for someone, therefore making the victim suffer even more. Empathy empowers the victim, allowing company to play a role in how humans naturally interact with one another to bond and heal. With the

Sympathy is a strength because it allows us to we feel bad for something, but at the same time it does not

Recently, I was reading an article that is called “The Funny Thing About Adversity” which is written by David DeSteno who is a psychology professor at Northeastern University. DeSteno’s purpose is to convince the reader that experiencing hardship makes a person sympathetic or unsympathetic depending on the case of hardship that person has experienced, and being a compassionate does not occur by chance. DeSteno makes two primary claims: one is by illustrating that if an individual has lived through unpleasant events, that person will be familiar with the difficult situations involved, which would lead a person to be sympathetic. The second claim is that it is incorrect to believe if someone has experienced the same struggle that you experienced, he might not lend a hand due to the fact that there is a glitch in the human’s mind that makes people forget about their own past hardships.

We all experience empathy at some point in our lives, it feels nice to know that there is someone that you can call on and that you know they can help you get through any hardship. Whether that be family, friends, or anyone that you are in close relations with. In Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird and Daryl Cameron’s article Empathy Is Actually a Choice, they show great examples of empathy and why people show each other compassion and feel this emotion that believe it or not most people don’t experience. This essay is to show how these articles are related and a good example of how people should act in today’s society.

2. According to the Reproductive Rights Blog, the $114.5 million teen pregnancy prevention project signed into law by President Obama in December 2009 establishes a major turning point in U.S. sex education policy, according to a new analysis published in the Winter 2010 issue of the Guttmacher Policy Review. The project replaces many of the most firm and ineffective abstinence-only programs, which by law were required to have nonmarital abstinence promotion as their “exclusive purpose” and were prohibited from discussing the benefits of contraception.

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Public education in the United States is perhaps one of the most critical issues we face as a nation. Once pronouncing the United States as a “nation at risk”, the educational institution began to implement one reform strategy after another. In efforts to improve schooling for K-12 students, education reform has fiddled with class size, revised graduation requirements, and created standardized testing just to name a few. Unfortunately, traditional public schools are still failing to provide students with a quality education. This is disheartening as we learn that the United States lags behind in math and science compared to our international counterparts. It is safe to say that educational reform has spent billions of dollars over the

Sympathy is a word countless hear, but few accurately understand. It is often confused with empathy, and many times true sympathy is occasional. Countless