[Sophia Manalo]: Midterm Portfolio – #2 Plain Language

The Project

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Brooklyn is peaceful in the summer of 1912. Though, Williamsburg, Brooklyn is gloomy. Brooklyn was peaceful on Sunday afternoons.

The sun was shining on Francie Nolan’s house. Francie looked at the sun. She says a poem she recited in school.

“This is the forest primeval. The murmuring

pines and the hemlocks,

Bearded with moss, and in garments green,

indistinct in the twilight,

Stand like Druids of eld.”’

The tree in Francie’s yard was not a pine or hemlock. The tree’s leaves look line green umbrellas. People call it the tree the Tree of Heaven. The tree always gorws, regardless of where the seed falls. The tree even grows in cement.

Sunday afternoon you take a walk to a nice neighborhood. You see these trees and know you are in a tenement district. The tree knows. because it was there first. The tree likes poor people.

This is the type of tree in Francie’s yard. It reached her third-floor fire escape. An 11-yr old girl sitting on the escape could think she lives in a tree house. This is what Francie imagined every Saturday afternoon.

Saturday is a great day in Brooklyn. People like saturday because they were paid. It was like a holiday. People go out and buy things with their money. They eat well. They get drunk. They make love. They are joyful because tomorrow is their free day. They could sleep until the latest mass.

On Sunday, people go to the eleven o’clock mass. They are respected for this. They stay out so late at night that is morning when they get home. So instead they go to mass early. After, they go back to sleep without guilt.

On Sunday, Francie goes to the junkie first. Francie and her brother, Neely, collect junk like rags, paper, metal, and rubber. They keep it in a locked box under their bed. Francie walks home from school looking for tin foul from cigarette boxes or gum wrappers. The junkie does not take not melted foil. Kids try to make it heavier. Neely finds a bottle. Francie melts the top for lead. The junkie does not take a complete top. This would get the junkie in trouble with the bottle companies. Melted seltzer tops are worth a nickel.

Francie and Neely go into the cellar in the evening. They put their trash on a shelf. Francie’s mom was janitor. They took her trash from work. Paper is not worth a lot. Only a penny. Rags are two cents a pound. Iron is four cents a pound. Copper was the most. Copper was ten cents a pound. Sometimes Francie finds a boiler and takes the top off.

Saturdat morning at nine AM kids are on Manhattan Ave. They go to Scholes Street. They carry their junk in their arms. Some kids have wagons made from wood soap boxes. Some kids pushed baby strollers.

Francie and Neely use a fabric bag. They each grab an end and drag it up the street. The street names are pretty. The streets are actually ugly though. On the way to Carnies, the junkie, I see other kids coming. They yell at each other.

‘Rag picker! Rag picker!’

Francie was upset by this name. It was annoying because they were also rag pickers. Francie was ashamed.

Carney ran his junk business in a stable. Francie sees that both doors are open. Francie imagines that the scale is welcoming her. Francie sees Carney. Carney has orange hair and a rugged mustache. Caney likes girls better than boys. Carney gives girls ectra pennies if they let him pinch their cheeks.

Neely lets Francie het her cheeks pinched. Carney looks at the junk Fancie brings. Carney puts stuff on the scale. Caney weighs the junk. Carney gives her an offer. Francie knows she cannot negotiate the offer. She nods yes. Carney sorts the junk by material. Caney reaches in his pocket. Carney gives Francie the coins she earned. Francie says thank you. Francie smiles so Carney gives her another penny.

Carney changes his attitude toward boys. ‘Get the lead out!’ He timed the laugh. ‘And I don’t mean junk.’ The children laughed.

Francie goes to her brother outside. Francie says ‘He gave me sixteen cents and a punching penny.’

‘Thats your penny’ Neely says.

Francie puts the penny in her pocket. She gives the other money to her brother. Neely is ten. Francie is eleven. Because he is a boy, he handles the money. ‘Eight cents for the bank.’ That is the rule. Half of the money made is saved. Francie gets four cents. Neel gets four cents.

Francie puts the money in a handkerchief. She sees five pennies. She is happy that she can trade it for a nickel.

Neely goes into Cheap Charlie’s a candy store. It is next to Carney’s store. It is a boys store only. But this was not stated anywhere. Francie does not go in.

The boys look scrappy. The boys are age eight to fourteen. They will grow up to look the same. The only difference is that they would smoke cigarettes.

The boys look at one another. Some of the boys have their summer haircut. They all wear hats because the have bad haircuts.

Cheap charlie the store is expensive. The owner is also not named Charlie. He was just given this nickname. Charlie lets you pick something for a penny. There were a lot of prizes. Francie watches Neely pick a prize. He got the number twenty-six. ‘Prize of candy?’ Charlie asks. ‘Candy’ Neely says.

It is always the same. Francie never sees anyone win anything worth more than a penny. Francie still wants the prizes are if they were old. One day when she had fifty cents she will win all the prizes. The skates were overpriced. Neely would have to come when this happens. Girls are not allowed in Charlie’s.

Question 4: Smallest Number of Coins Calculator

You are writing a program that asks a user for an amount of money. A program is a set of written instructions that a computer follows. It will ask for it to be in dollars and cents.

The program calculates the smallest number of coins that are equal to the user input.

An input is any a collection of data from a user. Your program should look exactly like this after you run the program:

Project Description 

In this project, I was tasked to re-write an assignment in plain language, and I chose to re-wrote my computer science assignment. I thought this would be interesting because it had a lot of technical language that everyone may not know. 

Documentation 

For my re-writing of a project description in plain language, I chose to do an assignment for my CS-1114 course. I chose this assignment, because I feel like some of the words are vocabulary that you would see in coding, which is probably not known by everyone.

In this assignment, I had to search up the term input because I was not sure how to say it in more simple terms. I think that this was really interesting because I was not even sure myself how to say it, when it is something I know quite well. While writing this, I tried to keep the sentence short and also to chunk them by idea. I did this by making three separate sections: one for the overview of the function of the program, one for a more detailed explanation, and one for what the output should be.

Reflection Questions

• What is the theme of the work?
  • The theme of the work is making the language of this coding assignment plain. I tried to focus on keeping the instructions clear and concise. Additionally, words that I thought were specialized I defined so that a these instructions could be understood by a wider population. For the translation of ‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’ the theme is also the same, focusing on readability and comprehension in my language choice.
• How is that theme particularly expressed through the modality of the week?
  • This theme is particularly expressed through the modality of this week, plain language, by focusing on keeping the word choice simple, the sentence structure active, and also defining the things that were not commonly used words. I believe that the idea of simplicity and clarity was represented through this theme using these techniques.
• Which elements of the work are beautifully/wonderfully/perfectly expressed through the modality?
  • I think the elements of the work that are expressed perfectly through the modality is the intention and instruction of the assignment. I believe that the modality makes things very easy to understand. I believe that the plain language translation is actually a better way to communicate the directions of the assignment. For the story, I think that the storyline is clearly expressed and is easy to follow, which I think can be confusing in the origingal.
• Which elements are lost or inexpressible through the modality of the week?
  • I think elements that were lost are none. Because the assignment instructions I chose to translate are not very descriptive and have a lot of adjectives, not much/no information at all is lost. I think that in the stiyr an element that is lost is the descriptions of people and scenes, just because plain language does not focus as much on that, as these details are not necessary.
• Who does this project exclude? Who would not be able to interact with this work? Who is this modality not accessible for?
  • This project would exclude people who cannot see this to read, unless they had a screen reader to read aloud the text. Additionally, because this plain language translation is in English only, it could only be understood by english speakers, thus leaving out any other person who speaks another language. Other than that, I believe that this plain language translations is great for all English speakers who have about a second to fourth grade reading level.
• Now that you’ve identified who is excluded, what is one way you could remix this piece to include another population? (You don’t have to make this part, but think about it and write about it).
  • I could remix this piece to include another population by making it for other languages. This would make it more accessible for a larger population, since now people who may have cognitive disabilities around the world could be able to understand the instructions of my computer science assignment.

Additional Modality (if applicable) 

What modality did you apply? 

How did you decide on this modality?

What does the beholder gain from this additional modality? Why? 

Does the beholder lose anything from this modality? What? 

Show documentation of this modality, and describe it if it’s not accessible on a screen (ie, if it’s tactile if it’s a scent)