TOW #7- The Special Education Problems We Aren't Solving

This article makes so much sense that it hurts.  Laura Klein is a teacher from New York City, in a school where "more than 30 percent of the students are classified as special education" (Paragraph 1).  In her article, "The Special Education Problems We Aren't Solving," Klein uses real-life examples and rhetorical questions to get her audience to start the conversation about special education and to do something about the horrible standards it is based on.  As she is a special education teacher herself, Klein uses examples of students that have been in her classroom to show her audience that there truly is a problem out there with special education.  She uses fake names to protect the actual students, but it is not the name of the student that matters, but the fact that these things actually happened to a child in the United States' educational program.  After introducing the type of student she had, she starts to explain the problems with her situation.  Klein writes, "Eve has an Individual Education Plan... it is quite evident that Eve is perfectly capable of attaining high marks in her classes. Yet, the I.E.P. says that she can be promoted by meeting only 40 percent of the standards, and so this is what she strives for (or rather, settles for).  Not only does this alarm the audience, but it also shows how drastically something needs to be done.  The audience shouldn't just wait around and let this happen to students, they should start the conversation within society to do something to help these kids that deserve so much more.  Near the end of  Klein's text, she asks her audience a strong, rhetorical question to further pound this issue into their heads.  She does this exceptionally well by connecting Eve's story to the rest of the students in special education.  Klein first states, "Set your standards low, and people won’t fail to meet them" (32), and then asks, "But why don’t we demand more?" (32).  This makes her message clear, that she wants the general public to do something about this.  The use of the rhetorical question allows for her audience to start generating ideas among themselves, preparing a base of ideas that could help make change in the future.  Klein does an excellent job in her article at making her message both clear and powerful.






http://www.wnyc.org/story/301679-the-special-education-problems-we-arent-solving/

TOW #6- How to Get Better at Running for President

 In recent months, the United States presidential race has completely taken over the world of news.  Many pin the success of Hillary Clinton on her experience in the field, and Stuart Stevens from the New York Times agrees.  However, his article, "How to Get Better at Running for President", goes a bit further by persuading the audience that successful candidates are the ones that accept their mistakes and show improvement through their career.  Stevens uses similes that connect to his audience of American citizens as well as recent examples of presidential nominees to show the logistics of Stevens' opinion.  Throughout the article, Stevens compares politics to sports by saying  that "Candidates are like sports teams: They are either improving or getting worse... watch your favorite candidate for signs of improvement, and if you don't see it, your'e probably pulling for a loser" (18).  It would be safe to say that most Americans today can connect to some type of sport.  Stevens uses this in his article to make politics, something not many are involved in, seem like something that the audience is familiar with.  This connection helps Stevens point out key elements of his argument.  When he compares candidates to sports teams, it helps Stevens show his audience that politics is always changing, and the "teams" are always either bettering themselves, or getting worse.  He attributes this to the fact that "to be successful, that confidence must be be matched with a realistic self-criticism" (16).  Stevens builds on this idea with the use of an example from Republican Mitt Romney.  He says that Romney "focused on moments he felt he could have done better" (17) making him one of the best candidates for president.  By using this recent presidential nominee as an example, Stevens shows the reality of his argument.  In order to get better at running for president, you need to have experience and try to better yourself.

















http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/opinion/sunday/how-to-get-better-at-running-for-president.html

TOW #5- Visual Text

In this visual text warning of the side effects of smoking, Health Canada uses contrast, coherence, and blunt phrases to try and stop the audience from smoking.  The audience of this advertisement is very broad, being any one that smokes, knows of smoking, or knows of someone that smoke.  The advertisement features a teenage girl, so that part of the audience would be the most impacted by the image as it would connect mostly with them.  The image of the girl was clearing edited, but the contrast between what seems to be a perfectly normal face and the gross edits make the side effects of smoking stand out in the image.  By emphasizing the side effects, the audience can clearly see that smoking has a negative effect on your image and health.  The coherence of the advertisement also helps the audience to clearly and quickly gain the information from the image.  The words are large and all in order, so that the audience does not need to spend time searching for any explanations.  Although the visual is organized, it does not seem very well-done.  It could be more stylistically appealing, so that it would catch the audience's attention more.  The bluntness of the phrases, "When you smoke it shows" and "Cigarettes are addictive and harmful" helps the audience gain the information quickly without having to look through mounds of words or data.  This advertisement is very to the point, so the audience can understand that smoking is bad just from looking at this for a couple of seconds.  However, most of the population knows that smoking is bad, but there are still people that do it.  This advertisement provides information, but it may not be compelling enough to stop someone from smoking all together.

TOW #4- IRB Post "The Professor and the Madman" by Simon Winchester

Simon Winchester uses elements of great suspense and imagery to show the readers of  The Professor and the Mad Man that the making of The Oxford English Dictionary was no simple feat so that his audience of history lovers could appreciate the story behind the useful resource.  Winchester starts his story by introducing all of the main characters through details of their daily lives.  In the preface, Winchester described a shooting a small town of England, something that was extremely rare in the area.  Slowly, as the story progresses, Winchester brings all of the characters together to show how they all played a role in the making on the dictionary.  This adds extreme suspense to the story, because the audience is trying to make the connections between characters as the story goes on, but Winchester doesn't let us know the connections until later in the book.  After telling a civil war story and how Doctor Minor had to brand an Irishman in the war, Winchester explains why Minor despises the Irish which was mentioned as a prime detail in the introduction of the story.  He says, "...he was fearful that Irishmen would abuse him shamefully, as he put it, and this was because he had been ordered to inflict so cruel a punishment on one of their number in the United States (Winchester 64).  Although Winchester effectively makes the story more interesting by adding suspense, the suspense does not have a large effect on his purpose.  It seems the story is merely a bunch of fictional stories one after another, instead of a coherent story about one topic.  The story is definitely not what I imagined it to be before hand, but it seems that Winchester will have the story come full-circle closer to the end of the novel.