Jake Neff
Critical Essay
English 102
October 20, 13
Living with Others Views
. One of the toughest things to come to grips with in life is examining the things we believe or live our lives by. When you’re disusing certain beliefs with another person do you ever feel you have a lack of knowledge or understanding in what you’re trying to convince to the other person to apprehend? Almost everyone has felt that. Most of us have grown up believing what we believe cause that’s what our parents told us or that’s what you heard for most of your childhood life, but then you grow up, you start thinking with you’re own ideas and begin hearing other opinions and philosophies. It gets kind of confusing and over whelming when this happens and then you don’t even know what to think.

David Foster Wallace, an American novelist, brings up a good point about how we think that can relate to this uncertainty,
Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. (3).
Wallace is speaking to the 2005 Kenyon’s senior graduates and is speaking about what to be mainly expecting in a white-collar college degree career. What he’s saying is we shouldn’t run our mouths off and just say things from our own experience or what we’ve grown up hearing, but rather giving some reason and significance in what you’re saying. I feel like a lot of people including me act or say before they think and that always ends in something being worse.
But Then again, who really has the time to stop and just study something we’ve heard so many times and know all the basics about. To a lot of people it really does sound like a waste of time and pointless. Stephen L. Carter, Author of The Insufficiency of honestly has something to say about that.
But the unhappy truth is that few of us actually have the time for constant reflection on our views- on public or private morality. Examine them we must, however, or we will never know whether we might be wrong. (233)
This is a pretty basic little sentence but it really packs some truth. We should all just take the time to go a little more in depth in our beliefs. I mean what if you are wrong or what if you dint really agree what you’re reading, it’s just a thought.

Okay so say we have our facts straight, we know what were talking about and we got a good understanding of it, but how do you present it? Glenna Gerard explains about dialogue vs. discussion and she discusses the difference between the two and how to use them.
Dialogue encourages an opening up about problems, issues, or topics. Because it expands what is being communicated by opening up many different perspectives... [T]his is in contrast to discussion or debate that is about narrowing down the conversation to one and result. It is trying to come to closure so that everyone knows what to do (23).
When you’re using discussion you’re trying to find one point, one end outcome for the problem, which leaves out any other thoughts or beliefs and just has a debate feel to it. However, when you use dialogue you’re doing almost the opposite, you’re using multiple perspectives and answers which leaves room for thoughts and beliefs and the conversation feels a lot