Week Four Journal Entry

It was interesting to see how some of our nation’s first political and social leaders viewed the creation of our great country and the world in general. I found Ben Franklin’s The Way to Wealth to be a familiar topic of interest. For years growing up my siblings and I were lectured by our parents about the value of money. We were also heavily advised to avoid getting into too much debt. But, did we listen? Of course not, but we probably would not have learned the great lessons of money management had we not found ourselves indebted to credit card companies, car financiers, and other various creditors and then had to climb out of that pit on our own. The final test was being able to discover that all of the things our parents had said about saving money for a rainy day were true.

One of the most fascinating things that I discovered was the difference in prose and composition of the written documents from the English descendent authors like Hamilton, Madison, and Franklin and those of the Frenchmen de Crevecoeur and de Tocqueville. The flow of the works for the English writers seems always interrupted with too many extra descriptive phrases, whereas the Frenchmen’s works flow smoothly where each sentence gets right down to the point and transitions very well into the next sentence.