Prompt 3: Blog Post #3

I try to annotate in places where the author gives support for a huge part of their argument. For example, in Leslie Jamison’s essay “Devil’s Bait”, she writes about how she is struggling to understand the idea behind Morgellons disease, because she wants so badly to feel empathy for them, but she believes she can’t without having had Morgellons herself. However, she goes on to meet someone named Kendra, who changes the way she thinks about empathy. I annotated here because the entire essay is about Jamison’s definition of empathy, and it changes throughout the essay. So whenever she talks about empathy and describes her definition of it, I annotated so I could keep track of her thought process. I didn’t really annotate any questions in this piece, but I did imply some questions. For example, when she was trying to change the why she thought of Morgellons disease, she wasn’t speaking, only nodding, because she didn’t know what to say. She feels as though she can’t feel empathy for someone who has this fake disease. So I was wondering why she was doing this, because even if you don’t believe in the same thing as someone else, you can still feel empathy for them. At the end of Jamison’s essay, she writes about how she can feel empathy for someone, even if she doesn’t believe the cause of their pain. I annotated here and said “everyone has a different way of thinking” because we don’t all think the same, yet we are still able to feel empathy for one another.