Evaluating Editorials: Exercise

Evaluating Editorials

Read the opinion pieces number 1 and 2; on a word document answer the following question for each one:

1.  Make a talley of the words or phrases that represent facts in the piece and those that are the opinions.

2.  Which are there more of?

3. What is the opinion of the writer that he or she is trying to persuade the reader to believe?

4. A. What is the opposite opinion of the writer, the one he disagrees with?

    B. Is this mentioned in the essay and does the writer try to discredit this opinion? Or is it implied?  Explain.

5. How does the writer try to convince the reader?

 A. Does the writer use appeals to reason?  Explain.

 B. Does the writer use appeals to emotions?  Explain.

6.  What background details does the writer include?

7. A. Did you learn something from reading this commentary?

    B. Did you change your mind because of reading it or did you come away unconvinced?  Explain.

8.  How well-written is this commentary, whether you agree with it or not?  Explain.

9. Though the last two editorials are not written on the same topic, which editorial is better? Why? Answer this only once.

 

 1) STREET GANGS: THE ‘800 POUND GORILLA’

Street Gangs: The ‘800 Pound Gorilla’ During my recent research on street gangs, one item was made clear. They are the primary source for drug distribution. The list of crimes conducted by these street gangs on a daily basis is: Drug trafficking, murder, bribery, extortion, robbery, carjacking, prostitution, human trafficking, and money laundering. Some gangs concentrate on some of these crimes but all of them have drug trafficking as their number one activity. Street gangs are the primary vehicle for drug trafficking. This makes them truly a menace to our society. Yet, we ignore them for the most part. We tend to be “blind” to their destruction and terror. There are 1.4 million street gang members (2011) and we act like they don’t exist. According to the US Department of Labor there are more than 2.1 million men and women locked up (incarcerated). The majority are there for drug related crimes. Approximately 650,000 persons are released from our jails/prisons each year but at least 52% will return within three years for parole violation or a criminal act. It is a social disgrace to have that many human beings incarcerated and then they get into a “revolving door”. The cost of housing each prisoner in a state prison can be as high as $45,000 per year. Wait – it gets worse! It is so disappointing that when we persuade a company to hire some of our youngsters for on the job training they cannot pass a drug test. During the Katrina rebuilding we would warn them that they will be getting drug tested in a couple of months so get yourself clean. For many it was too late, they were hooked and couldn’t shake it. To many drug dealing is a very big “business” and right now, in America, business is too damn good. The gang leaders don’t have a recruiting program; they “draft”. One day my aunt in Los Angeles asked her grandson if he were in the Crips. His reply was, “Grandma, I have no choice it is Crips or die”. And these young members have quotas to fill. They must push the dope and get as many hooked as possible. The Peoria, Illinois Chamber of Commerce once did a job study for Black youth (18 – 30). The number one employer was the City government; number two was the local utility company and number three was the illegal drug activity. Peoria has a population of approximately 100,000 persons. No place of any size is immune from drug trafficking. I could not find credible estimates of how large the illegal drug business is in America but with certainly it is at least $250 billion per year. I bet we would be surprised where some of it ends up. My brothers and sisters we have an extreme problem that needs urgent fixing. I would like to see Black elected officials become more active about addressing this problem. It is my firm belief that withdrawal programs are not the end solution. We need to come together and do something radically progressive. Nothing that has been tried in the past has improved this “illness”. The time has come for bold, Americana style action. The first thing we should do is legalize drugs. Treat it like liquor and cigarettes, tax the mess out of it, regulate it wisely. The demand for illegally transported drugs will soon dry up and the use of street gangs will become endangered. We could close many prisons and reduce enforcement officers along with parole and probation officers. The next thing we need to do is to write new legislation. Organized street gangs should be described as racketeering enterprises. Amend the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act to include street gangs with certain severe prosecution of their leadership. Everyone knows who the leaders are and where they live. A good example of this is how authorities are currently going after the street gang MS – 13. According to the Associated Press, “The Obama administration declared the ultra-violent street gang MS – 13 to be an international criminal group ….The aim is to freeze it out of the U.S. financial system and seize what are estimated to be millions of dollars in criminal profits from drug… and other crimes committed in this country”. Let’s form a taskforce like the old “Untouchables”. Forfeit their assets, bust up their leadership and strongly police our banking system that plays along with some of the vast money laundering that is taking place. If we follow the money and clean up the inside corruption that is taking place we will begin to turn the tide. Imagine our nation becoming a populous of people living productive lives once again. Right now we are just seeing our cultures and neighborhoods slide into oblivion. It is not something so great that we cannot manage. Some common sense, a lot of courage and a taste of vision could change it around. God bless us. Mr. Alford is the co-founder, President/CEO of the National Black Chamber of Commerce®. Website: www.nationalbcc.org. Email:halford@nationalbcc.org

Writing Editorials: Exercise

An editorial is defined as a statement of opinion by a magazine or newspaper editor or a television or radio station.
(noun)

An example of an editorial is an article written by the editor of a newspaper detailing his opinion on something.

The definition of editorial is something related to the content in a newspaper or magazine or something written by an editor.

(adjective)

Our next short unit will be on writing an editorial.  This is where you will get to express your opinion.  But, as with most things in life, there are rules. To get you started, I thought it might be fun to listen to a few soap box editiorials by David Mitchell. See profile below. 

PROFILE

David Mitchell is an actor, writer and comedian. Star of the BBC television sketch show That Mitchell and Webb Look, and the Channel 4 sitcom Peep Show, he is also a regular participant on TV panel shows. He writes comment articles for the Guardian and Observer on subjects as diverse as sport and politics, and presents Soap Box, a video series wherein he sounds off about stuff.

There is less than 16 minutes total for all 4 clips. Choose three of the following and compose one well-written sentence that sums up Mitchell's thesis for each of the editorials.. Include textual material.

1) On giving compliments  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yakx7XC6eg0

2) Naming your child  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xblh12XgQ4o

3) On America  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om7O0MFkmpw

4. Carb free diets http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttMrSCnQnnk

Crime Vocabulary

A guide to crime in the AP Stylebook

People are arrested on suspicion of committing a crime. In some states, the district attorney decides whether enough evidence exists to charge a suspect with a crime. If someone is arrested on a charge of murder, be sure the district attorney has charged the suspect. Otherwise, you'll be talking about libel to the suspect’s lawyer. This is a distinction from the AP Stylebook, which suggests the wording “arrested on a charge of.” This may be legal in some states, but not all. “Arrested on suspicion of” avoids the issue of whether someone has been charged with a crime.

Assault: Technically, an assault is the threat of violence, such as pointing a gun at someone or yelling “I’m gonna kill you!”

Assault and battery: When someone is actually touched by the assaulter or his agent (stick,knife, gun, etc.), battery has occurred.

Burglary: Entering a building (but not necessarily breaking in) with the intent to commit a crime is burglary. Even if the criminal is scared out of the house before swiping the jewels, the crook has committed burglary. However, if you mistake someone else’s house for your own – perhaps you are too drunk or tired to tell the difference – you have not committed burglary.

Larceny (legal term for stealing and theft): This is the wrongful taking of property.

Robbery: Used in a legal sense, it is the use of violence or threat in committing larceny. “Giveme your money or I'll shoot” is a threat to a bank teller. If I brandish a gun when I take your wallet, I am using the threat of violence. If I throw you against a wall when I take your wallet, I am using violence. Used in commonly accepted broader sense, it means to plunder, which means a house can be robbed when a person is not present. You rob a person or house, but you steal the jewels or money.

Theft: Larceny without threat or violence is theft.

Homicide: This is the legal term for slaying or killing.

Murder: Malicious, premeditated homicide is murder. Unless police say premeditation was involved, don’t say a victim was murdered until someone is convicted in court. Instead, say the victim was killed or slain.

Manslaughter: This is homicide without malice or premeditation.

Assassin: A politically motivated killer is an assassin.

Killer: This is a generic term for anyone who kills with a motive of any kind.

Murderer: Someone who is convicted of murder in a court of law.

Food & People: Breaking Bread Expose Exericse

Breaking Bread Everywhere, Plentifully or Pitifully
Imagine gathering all the food you plan to eat today. Now take a picture of it.
In an unusual project, Peter Menzel and Faith D’Alusio, a photographer and writer, traveled the world collecting photos and stories about what people eat in a day. They documented the meager meals of a Masai goat herder during a drought, the fast-food diet of an American long-haul trucker and a veritable feast of lamb kebabs and other foods set out by an Iranian bread baker.
The photos, first compiled in the book “What I Eat: Around the World in 80 Diets,” have been selected for an unusual exhibit at the Museum of Science in Boston. The result is an anthropological exploration of the culture of eating that is by turns mouthwatering, repulsive and surprising.
A mountain farmer in Ecuador offers tantalizing cheese empanadas along with roasted potatoes, barley soup and plantains. Meanwhile, a 21-year-old Mall of America worker in Minnesota is photographed with chicken fries from Burger King, tacos from Taco Bell and large cups of Dr Pepper and Mountain Dew.
Flanked by a herd of sheep, a fit-looking Spanish shepherd poses with his dog near a table filled with cans of beer, which he drinks with breakfast and dinner, as well as lamb, cured pork belly, fish and fruit. Several bottles of water and Gatorade dominate the photograph of a 20-year-old American soldier headed to Iraq.
“It isn’t so much to point out problems as it is to open eyes,” Ms. D’Alusio said. “We’ve been focused on food for a while because everybody has to eat. It’s a common denominator.”
David Rabkin, director of current science and technology at the Museum of Science, said the photo exhibit had been a hit with visitors and would continue at least through early next year.
“Food is a hot topic — people are interested in it and its many dimensions, from its health impact, to the experience of great food, to the bigger picture of our global food system and issues of social justice,” Mr. Rabkin said in an e-mail. “Food is personal. It’s a great topic for our museum because it’s so compelling to so many of our visitors and so rich in terms of the educational directions in which we can go with them.”
Each photograph is accompanied by a calorie count of the food displayed, but the authors warn that it’s not necessarily representative of the person’s average daily consumption. Still, the pictures do give a glimpse into how both hunger and excess coexist on the planet. The listed calories range from 800 to 12,300, beginning with a gaunt Kenyan herder and ending with an overweight British woman who claims to regularly binge on junk food.
Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University, who wrote the book’s foreword, said the photographs were only a snapshot of how individuals from different cultures choose to eat. As a result, she notes, the reader can’t draw broad conclusions about the diet of the individual or culture pictured, but the photographs are still revealing.
“In some places the food looks extremely familiar, and other places it doesn’t,” Dr. Nestle said. “Clearly, everybody does not eat like us. There’s a college student in China eating Kentucky Fried Chicken, and there she is looking quite proud about it. It does make you worry about the influx of American fast food into these cultures, yet there seems to be much holding on to the traditional foods.”
Mr. Menzel and Ms. D’Alusio had documented food habits in two previous books. “Hungry Planet: What the World Eats” is made up of photographs of the weekly food purchases of families around the world. “Man Eating Bugs” documents entomophagy, the eating of insects, still common in parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Another project, “Material World,” has photographs of families with all of their belongings, highlighting their most precious possession. “We present information to people rather than drawing conclusions,” Mr. Menzel said. “We’re trying to educate readers by show and tell.”

2) Your class assignment: this is due by midnight
Objective: to understand what ordinary details of our daily lives say about who we are, where we’re from and what we care about?

a) On a word document list 10 things you remember eating yesterday.

b) Next, respond to the following:
1) What do you think these lists say about who you are, where you live and what you care about? 2) If, one hundred years from now, a historian or anthropologist was to come upon your lists, what might he or she conclude about you, your life and where you’re from? What questions might he or she have?

c) Now write out a personal response to the following. These should be sent along.

1. What photographs interested or surprised you most? Why?
2. What questions did those photos raise for you?
3. What can these photos tell you about the lives of the people pictured?
4. What do you think they can’t tell you?
5. What does the photographer for the food series, Peter Menzel, mean when he says, “We present information to people rather than drawing conclusions … we’re trying to educate readers by show and tell”? How does this apply to these photos?

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By TARA PARKER-POPE, Editor

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Ekphrastic Poetry Exercise

 

Marchal Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircaseand X.J. Kennedy's poem, which follows, by the same title is to illustrate how ekphasis is used in poetry.

Nude Descending a Staircase

Toe upon toe, a snowing flesh,
A gold of lemon, root and rind,
She sifts in sunlight down the stairs
With nothing on. Nor on her mind.

We spy beneath the banister
A constant thresh of thigh on thigh--
Her lips imprint the swinging air
That parts to let her parts go by.

One-woman waterall, she wears
Her slow descent like a long cape
And pausing, on the final stair
Collects her motions into shape.

As stated previously ekphrasis, which was created by the ancient Greeks, uses one art form to respond to another, so as to envision the thing described as if it were physically present. In some cases, the subject never really existed, making the ekphrastic description a demonstration of both the creative imagination and the skill of the writer.  Last night was the latest third period could turn in the responses to Murray's The Stranger in the Photo.  (this was because the class lost 25 minutes on Friday.) This was the exemplar for how you would write your own response to the photo you were asked to bring into class today. If you did not complete the assignment, please check it out, so you know what is expected in the following assignment.

YOUR ASSIGNMENT: Everyone needs a picture of him or herself that is at least five-years old. You were asked to bring it in today.
Using the essay by Donald Murray as a general model, look at your photo. Take time to study facial expression, the body postion and gestures. What is the context? Project yourself back to that moment. Where were in your life? What were your expectations- for the moment for the long run? Maybe your long run was only a month away. Compare this to where you are now. This is not a goal oriented essay, as in what would I like to be when I grow up. Ask yourself honestly, who you were then? To make it interesting, use vivid imagery and other figurative language devices such as metaphors or similes. Make the reader connect with this photo, much as Murray did. Careful with the tone. Murray offers no regrets, rather he creates a world into which the reader may step. This should be about 400 words. Grading:  language conventions / sense / beautifully and articulately expressed.

When you have finished, create a caption.

Donald Murray's "Stranger in the Photo is Me" exercise

Please read this essay by Donald Murray and respond to the following based upon the reading and send as anattachment. These fully, fleshed-out respones are due by midnight. Read the questions before the essay.

1. What textual and contextual elements indicate this column's particular audience?


2. Identify what you believe to be Murray's central argument.

3. How does Murray's comment on our "ability to stop time in the way" mesh with the inclusion of the photograph? How does the comment deepen our understanding of his argument?
4. Examine the photograph. How does the presence of the photograph itself contribute to Murray's effort to communicate? How, if at all, would the absence of the photograph change the essay's argument?
5. Speculate how would the absence of a caption alter your reading of or response to the essay?
6. Respond: how would replacing the existing caption with each of the following captions affect your reading?
a. "Paratrooper Donald M. Murray, 1944"
b. "The Stranger in England, 1944"
c. "A soldier in rakish disregard..."

The Stranger in the Photo Is Me by Donald M. Murray

I was never one to make a big deal over snapshots; I never spent long evenings with the family photograph album. Let’s get on with the living. To heck with yesterday, what are we going to do tomorrow? But with the accumulation of yesterdays and the possibility of shrinking tomorrows, I find myself returning, as I suspect many over 60s do, for a second glance and a third at family photos that
snatch a moment from time.

In looking at mine, I become aware that it is so recent in the stretch of man’s history that we have been able to stop time in this way and hold still for reflection. Vermeer is one of my favorite painters because of that sense of suspended time, with both clock and calendar held so wonderfully, so terribly
still.

The people in the snapshots are all strangers. My parents young, caught before I arrived or as they were when I saw them as towering grown-ups. They seemed so old then and so young now. And I am,to me, the strangest of all.

There is a photograph of me on a tricycle before the duplex on Grand View Avenue in Wollaston I hardly remember; in another I am dressed in a seersucker sailor suit when I was 5 and lived in a Cincinnati hotel. I cannot remember the suit but even now, studying the snapshot, I am drunk on the memory of its peculiar odor and time is erased.

In the snapshots I pass from chubby to skinny and, unfortunately, ended up a chub. Looking at the grown-ups in the snapshots I should have known. In other snapshots, I am cowboy, pilot, Indian chief; I loved to dress up to become what I was not, and suspect I still am a wearer of masks and costumes.

It would be socially appropriate to report on this day that I contemplate all those who are gone, but the truth is that my eyes are drawn back to pictures of my stranger self.And the picture that haunts me the most is one not in costume but in the uniform I proudly earned in World War II. I believe it was taken in England from the design of the barracks behind me. I have taken off the ugly steel-framed GI glasses, a touch of dishonesty for the girl who waited at home.
My overseas cap with its airborne insignia is tugged down over my right eye, my right shoulder in the jump jacket is lower because I have my left hand in my pocket in rakish disregard for the regulation that a soldier in that war could never, ever stick a hand in a pocket.

The pockets that are empty in the photograph will soon bulge with hand grenades, extra ammunition,food, and many of the gross of condoms we were issued before a combat jump. This GI item was more a matter of industrial merchandising than soldierly dreaming—or frontline reality.The soldier smiles as if he knew his innocence and is both eager for its loss and nostalgic for those few years of naiveté behind him.

I try once more to enter the photograph and become what I was that day when autumn sunlight dappled the barracks wall and I was so eager to experience the combat my father wanted so much for me. He had never made it to the trenches over there in his war. When that photograph was taken, my father still had dreams of merchandising glory, of a store with an awning that read Murray & Son. I had not yet become the person who had to nod yes at MGh when my father asked if he had cancer, to make the decision against extraordinary means after his last heart attack. When this photo was taken, he had not yet grown old, his collars large, his step hesitant, his shoes unshined.

Mother was still alive, and her mother who really raised me had not died as I was to learn in a letter I received at the front. The girl who wrote every day and for whom the photo was taken had not yet become my wife, and we had not yet been the first in our families to divorce two years later.I had not yet seen my first dead soldier, had not yet felt the earth beneath me become a trampoline as the shells of a rolling barrage marched across our position.

I had no idea my life would become as wonderful or as terrible as it has been; that I would remarry,have three daughters and outlive one. I could not have imagined that I actually would be able to become a writer and eat—even overeat. I simply cannot re-create my snapshot innocence.I had not had an easy or happy childhood, I had done well at work but not at school; I was not Mr. Pollyanna, but life has been worse and far better than I could have imagined.

Over 60 we are fascinated by the mystery of our life, why roads were taken and not taken, and our children encourage this as they develop a sense of family history. A daughter discovers a letter from the soldier in the photograph in England and another written less than a year later, on V-E day. She is surprised at how much I have aged. I am not.I would not wish for a child or grandchild of mine to undergo the blood test of war my father so hoped I would face as he had not. In photos taken not so many years later I have a streak of white hair. It is probably genetic but I imagine it is the shadow of a bullet that barely passed me by, and I find I cannot enter the snapshot of the smiling soldier who is still stranger to me, still innocent of the heroic harm man can deliver to man.

—The Boston Globe, August 27, 1991

Photojournalism Project Graphic Organizer

Photojournalism project   graphic organizer                          Name____________________________________

Note:  For each of your ten photo, 1) describe your photo 2) name the type of shot 3) explain one aspect of good photo composition with your picture.

Explain your project’s theme or narrative structure
Photo 1
Photo 2
Photo 3
Photo 4
Photo 5
Photo 6
Photo 7
Photo 8
Photo 9
Photo 10