Essay 3
Daily Ritual of Aromas
Raw, strong coffee beans, fresh air from an open window, or of course the ever dreaded smell of sweat. Everyday we awake and start our day with one smell or another. It could be the alerting aroma of black coffee, or the putrid stench of halitosis. For most of my life experience with smell, it has seemed somewhat useless. What would be the difference if I didn't have my sense of smell? It might actually be a good thing. My smelly roommate may not bother me as much, right? Smell plays a huge role in our day to day lives and Defines many aspects of our life. Smell also is one of the senses that I feel is strongly under credited. The reason I say this is because smell does many things that I personally didn’t know about before I started researching. Smell is the prop ninja working diligently behind the scenes bringing out the best of our other senses.
Smell is truly a very versatile word. When I first sat down and began to personally define smell in my own words I had a great deal of trouble. What did smell really do for me? For this I remembered back to our workshop on taste. I can now say that taste is the sensation we get when any sort of material, sustenance, object, etc., enters our mouth and or touches our tongue. If one is sick, to the point where they can not breath through there nose, they can not taste. This is the prime example of how the sense of smell affects other senses.
After noting that it affected another sense, I thought about comparing the sense of smell to some of the other senses. One of them that I would like to share is sight. When you see a beautiful flower of some sort we tend to smell it, and let our nostrils soak up the scintillating aroma. This makes the flower more real to us, because we are using more than one sense to define the flower.
The way to under stand taste and smells work style, is most easily put in a paragraph I had found on a site. It says: “Smell and taste belong to our chemical sensing system (chemosensation). The complicated process of smelling and tasting begins when molecules released by the substances around us stimulate special nerve cells in the nose, mouth, or throat. These cells transmit messages to the brain, where specific smells or tastes are identified (Smell and Taste)”.
Besides strengthening the other senses smell also looks out for them. A person’s sense of smell can save them from many perilous fates. In one way it protects are taste buds. If we didn’t have a sense of smell, when we choose to eat something we would most likely go for something that is visually appealing. But as we all have experienced at one time or another that is not the case. A plate of food could look like the most beautiful work of art, strait out of a painting, yet it could taste like the painting itself would. Our sense of smell protects us from eating foods that may be harmful to our body. If something smells like moldy gym socks that came out of a dumpster in the strip district of Pittsburgh, chances are its not too healthy or safe for you to eat. In short, smell helps protect the body from bodily harm.
The sense of smell is most notorious in my eyes for how it affects our opinions. If something has a pleasant odor, than it is more likely to be approached and kept around. On the other hand, if something has a rotten stench, I myself would keep my distance and tend to not be around it as much as possible. Take sushi for example. If sushi was to be judged by its smell alone, many people would probably enjoy it, but pairing it with a visual image and the definition of what sushi is, people tend to shun it. To refer to my statement about the sense of smell protecting the body from harm, it can also make it miss out on a possible good experience by persuading the other senses.
Smelling my possibly one of the best mood swingers available to man kind. For instance, when I'm in my dorm room doing some class assignment, I tend to get stressed out, and sometimes it makes me very upset. After I am done, I then get up and leave my musty atmosphere that smells like my roommates dirty laundry and go outside for some fresh air. The air revitalizes me because the scent of it can only be described as clean and fresh. The scent relaxes my brain and gives me peace of mind. On the contrary, smell can really piss me off sometimes. I could be in the best mood ever and suddenly an odor that could only be described as a Manhattan fish market during mid-day of the hottest day of the year. It can go as far as making you nauseated, give you a headache, and make you sick.
One thing that is defines your sense of smell, is that unlike all the other senses, it is used all the time. Smelling is something you do both subconsciously and consciously. If a smell is something you are well acquainted to you are subconsciously smelling it, but it does not make a big enough of an impact on you that you don't notice. If a smell is one that you have great favor or disdain for, you will consciously notice it because it is what I call an extreme smell. An extreme smell is a smell that is noticed immediately. The cologne I throw on in the morning and garbage dumpster behind the dining hall are both extreme smells (and both respectfully on a different end of the spectrum.)
In an over all summary of smell, my definition is very expansive, yet very specific. Smell helps strengthen our other senses. As stated smell helps us taste the food we eat. It works with other senses to make objects have depth; associating an odor with a visual image. Smell can change moods making one anything from happy to sad, or angry to ecstatic; the spectrum is immense. Smell can affect your Health. Some smells can be toxic to the body causing any illness from nausea to migraines. Smell can form opinions of certain subjects for you; if a food smells bad, you assume it must taste bad, or it’s unhealthy as well.
Works Cited
Smell & Taste. American Academy of Otolaryngology — Head and Neck Surgery. 08 Apr 2009 <http://www.entnet.org/HealthInformation/smellTaste.cfm>.
“Smell & Taste Disorders.” ear, nose, & throat associates of corpus Christi.ear, nose, & throat associates of corpus christi.12 Apr 2009<http://www.entassociates.com/smell&taste.htm>.
Post and Pre writing (Revision statement)
Before I started my Revision I looked over the notes given to me by my peer editor. I had a fairly low score and was able to understand everything that I did wrong and agreed full heartedly with her advice. My first goal was o make sure my formatting was properly done in MLA style. I then saw that I had no In-text citations and started to research a few points. I then went on to write these post and pre writing goals to complete the other huge section of missing points. Now I hope to correct all these points and make an enjoyable, readable paper.
As I finish writing I can say It is a much better essay compared to the first draft. I added in a bunch of content and fixed up my introduction. I then moved on to correct my grammar and a few sentence structure issues. After that I felt as if I had done a huge improvement and wrote down a few things to improve on in my third revision. The first is to make sure I stay on task of my genre. I believe I could change a few things to make it more defined. The next thing would be to add more sourcing an a little more information. With those things done I believe my paper would flow better over all making it a strong essay.
