Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Writing toward your public, well educated audience
I’d like you to take one of the strategies we discussed today and try it out, cultivating an appropriate approach for your public, well educated audience. Working from your responses to the invention exercises that you completed over the weekend, write a paragraph in which you open up a discussion about the issue you’ll be writing about. It could be the beginning of an introduction to your essay, or it might be a body paragraph. Regardless, I want you to begin writing, developing your focus for this paper, keeping your audience in mind.
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Child obesity has become a highly debated topic with many new programs accessible to children in order to provide them with healthier eating options and physical exercise. One point that has often been over shadowed by the increased weight of man children is the emotional and personal benefits of physical exercise, specifically team sports. Children benefit in many ways from organized sports; they are able to learn the importance of teamwork, gain self-confidence by strengthening their abilities in an activity.
ReplyDelete(after talking to you, Prof. Bateman, I know I need to find a stronger focus and will begin research to figure out exactly which angle I will take. Therefore, this above paragraph is a bit irrelevant to what the main focus of my paper will be).
One thing that is hard to correlate with the view of animal shelters as saviors of the broken and beaten down animals - the ones that no one seemed to care about - is those shelters that are kill shelters. Kill shelters are practical - they hold as many animals as they can, and when they can't hold any more, they euthanize those that they feel are less likely to be adopted. The requirements for that are animals that are old, or have been there for a long time, or don't get along with children or other pets. Not so on point with the angelic view initially thought of.
ReplyDeleteMany undergraduate students are involved in Greek life on their campus. In my experience, many of the people who are not involved in Greek life have an aversion to the people who are. They hold stereotypes that are derived from movies like Legally Blonde and Animal House. These films depict sorority women as ditzy and fraternity men as party animals. Both are only concerned with appearances. As a member of a sorority, I have been asked many questions in the past based on movie perceptions. One person has asked me if everything in my sorority house is pink, while another asked if I party every night. When one member of my sorority announced to her friends that she was going to go through formal recruitment, they sat her down and asked her why she would want to be associated with “alcoholics” and “sluts.” While a number of scholars have studied the negative outcomes of participating in these organizations, there are also positives which are not often reported on. These are important aspects to consider when developing an unbiased opinion of these groups of people.
ReplyDeleteWhile many people originally go through formal recruitment to be selected and gain a channel to attend selective parties, there are also people who Rush for completely different reasons. Throughout the course of my experience in Greek life, I have come across many members who originally chose to Rush to “meet new people” and build a network of close friends. Many people who left home for college find that they are without the close circle of friends they had in high school. After going through Rush, many of these people find that they hold membership with other women or men who hold similar ideals, facilitating relationship building. After getting to know each other, a support system develops based on common experiences.
The most common “solution” for alleviating poverty is education. People think that if everyone has a high school diploma and a college degree, poverty will sink into the background. However, we forget that regardless of the level of education achieved by a collective population, we are still going to need people to clean our bathrooms, run our gas stations, and flip our burgers. Unattractive, minimum wage jobs are unfortunate necessities, but necessities nonetheless. Instead of forcing extra schooling and a mountain of debt onto those who do not excel in the academic world (or who simply do not want to follow an academic route), we need to improve the quality of life associated with minimum wage jobs. We need to make it possible for people to reasonably live on the salaries they obtain from these less desirable careers.
ReplyDeleteDictionary.com defines diversity as variety or a point of difference. Under this definition 5 white men do not form a diverse group and 5 white, heterosexual, Catholic men certainly do not form a diverse group. But is it fair for society to view these men as objects without any points of difference? If one of these men is a farmer from Kansas, one of them is a lawyer from New York City, one of them is a professional athlete from Washington, one of them is an actor from Los Angeles, and one of them is a homeless man from Denver, then do these represent a diverse group? Even if all of them are business men from Nebraska, but they grew up in different households with different family structures, aren’t these 5 white men all incredibly different?
ReplyDeleteDeath is all over popular culture: in the headlines that we skim every day, the movies that we go to see on the big screen, the books that we read, and the shows that we make time to watch every night. But how often have you experienced people leaping to apply these ideas on a personal level? How many times have you watched a person die on a hospital bed in a film and imagined a loved one in the fictional character’s place? Or maybe even, yourself? The very idea makes us cringe. Perhaps you have personal experience with losing someone close to you, but whether you have or not, our society has been taught to feel this way.
ReplyDeletePeople seem to focus on manifestations of war and conflict as the defining features of human activity. In other words, we remember acts of hatred and forget acts of kindness. But despite our fascination with the negative, people are inherently kind. People engage in random acts of kindness (def: "a purportedly selfless act performed by a person or persons wishing to either assist or cheer up an individual. There will generally be no reason other than to make people smile, or be happier. Either spontaneous or planned in advance, random acts of kindness are encouraged by various communities.”) all the time.
ReplyDelete