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In Ta-Nehisi Coates’ article “The Case for Reparations”, he discusses the role race has played and will continue to play in our country’s society and culture unless we . This article is so influential because not only is it covering a controversial and majorly debated about, but because of the position she takes within her article. The first thing the reader sees when they go to read the article is the tagline, “Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.” , which immediately tells the reader what Coates thinks about the topic he is discussing without having making it into a thesis. Coates then includes a Bible quote and a quote from philosopher John Locke, as a way to to show the reader where his ideals when writng this article came from and combating the fact many readers may take issue with what he is writing.

However it is also through Coates’ use of research, starting with his point of entry story about the life of Clyde Ross that helps his article stand out. From his use of pictures, to links to other pieces of writing, to his interactive census map Coates incorporates many forms of research into his writing besides the standard listing or quoting of facts/statistics. Another aspect which Coates gets the reader to think about what he is talking about in his article is the tone in which he ties in his own writing with the research he has done. Making sure that they each are evenly present in the article and flow together as he moves from writing about a specific part of history into a more generalized subject. Yet he also writes as to make the reader who may oppose what or how he is writing about this subject not only look at the research and question history, but themselves and what they stand for. Which is something I might want to do when writing my essay about millennials’ shift relying on technology to fulfill their emotional and social needs. So that readers of my essay won’t just walk away from it feeling as if they learned or want to learn more about the topic of my writing, but have them question themselves and how they may relate to what I am writing about.

Recently I read Anne Helen Peterson’s BuzzFeed article “Jennifer Lawrence And The History Of Cool Girls”. Whose tagline of  is what first interested me in the humorously biting piece. However it was the descriptive and relevant examples and references to modern media and pop culture, like the quote from GoneGirl and Jennifer Lawrence’s most memorable media moments, along side moments from past influential events or women in Hollywood’s history. Another thing that sucked me into the article was how Peterson organized her piece. First starting with the most contemporary example, then going back to the start of “The Cool Girl” persona’s history then working her way through time circling back to the JLaw example she discussed in the beginning of her piece. Yet the most interesting piece to me was how she highlighted important blocks of text from her article by pairing them with pictures or formatted them so they stood out from the rest of the text. I think that the way Peterson formatted her piece so that it was a solid analysis of the history of her topic but not strenuous to read and the fact that it kept an heir of relevance throughout the piece that allowed it constantly make a connection to its readers is why the users of Longform appreciated the article.

For those of you who don’t know Medium.com is an online publishing platform, created by the founder of Twitter, that allows anyone who wants to contribute to post a piece of their work,  onto its site. And on January 13th of the year 2014 litter mob member and conservationist writer Elizabeth Royte published her piece “The Remains of The Night” on Medium. In the piece she talks about her experience, as someone who picks up litter in her neighborhood park and discusses the backstory that comes with it. Throughout the piece she also interjected in pictures with their own factual captions,  along with pictures that contained blocks of Royte’s own text as a way to not only break up the blocks of text in an organized  and easy to read fashion, but to highlight the importance of how what she is doing in her own microcosm experience and how it relates to the macro cosmic issue of littering and all the social taboos that occur in public parks. But Royte’s decisions when formatting her essay allowed her to incorporate statistical data into her piece, and to place each tidbit of knowledge in the perfect place so that it corresponded with which one of Royte’s experiences that area of her essay was going over while helping to transition to the next one of Royte’s points or experiences. This in turn added a logical appeal to her work without distracting the reader from the main story whilst it gave the essay an easy to follow structure, as well.

The format Royte chose to use on Medium gives the reader a visual aspect to look at during the 17 minute read, which not only keeps them entertained and interested in the topic of her piece, but informs the reader not just about her and the story she is telling but the bigger picture that her essay relates to. It shows that Royte is not just focusing on what she thinks or believes about the topic but gives the reader enough information about the topic so that they may form their own opinion. Royte also chooses a topic that most people wouldn’t have gone with to follow her point of entry, which was how she is part of a task force to clean up her neighborhood park. This adds a level of excitement and intrigue to her piece that she probably wouldn’t have accomplished if she just made her essay strictly about littering in public parks and not all the other seedy and strange behavior that takes place in public places and why it takes place there. This aspect of Rotye’s essay worked well with the format she used on medium because she didn’t start with the statement of a definitive thesis or direction of to where this essay was particularly heading, and avoided being stuck in a box of what her essay has to be about and gave her the chance to explore the more interesting options of where to take her essay. But it was a combination of Medium.com’s formatting abilities along with Rotye’s choices that made this essay as engaging as it was.

In Jay Rosen’s article, “When starting from zero…”, he speaks of how the best way to break into journalism without prior experience is to pick a topic relevantly popular in society and know everything there is to know about that topic. Rosen’s article also tells the reader the steps to take in order to become a savant in whatever niche of news you decide to write about, while also discussing the advantages and struggles of following this new trend. This is why Rosen’s article fully encompasses how anyone in the audience can become part of the journalistic field in today’s society if they truly feel strongly about something and want to put the effort and time into it.

Rosen’s article spoke to me because at this moment I am currently involved in a collaborative project with other people, where we plan to create a niche piece on theater and its many many aspects. So far our group has already covered Rosen’s first basic step of being social and getting the audience’s help because we as a group do not know everything there is to know about the extremely subjective and interpretive world of theater. We went out, obtained interviews, traded email correspondences, and talked to be people who showed were a part of or showed interest into what we were writing about, to make sure that when we create our piece we are as close to the actual truth about theater, and everything about it, as possible.

Now my group and I find ourselves going through the next of Rosen’s basics, as we are trying to take the information we have and make it both comprehensively knowledgeable while also effortlessly simple for the audience to navigate. This step has proving to be harder than expected, but not because of the topic itself. Working on a collaborative piece you have to constantly make sure you and the rest of the people working with you on the piece not only agree on the way each other’s parts of the piece are set up and delivered to the audience, but that when the parts are put together that they flow seamlessly across the board as to not confuse your audience and so that the collaborative piece is just that collaborative and not just a group of different people throwing in their opinion or style without any consideration or connection to the others.

However there is still one major step in creating a niche piece and that is to actually generate it. For my group this means that everyone’s work has completed, read, edited, checked for mistakes or errors, critically criticized, and reread to the point where each person in the group sees each part as something that will add originality and knowledge to the piece while also connect to the other pieces and helping to forge the synergistic energy of the piece. Because like Rosen said early on in his article the best way to start a successful journalistic work is having “narrow comprehensiveness” in whatever societal niche you, or in my case you and 5 other people decide they have something important to say or to write about.

In This American Life’s podcast “Giant Pools of Money” they use prerecorded events, such as an award show or community event as background noise to enhance the settings and deliver exposition, while also pulling the reader into the situation the podcasters are examining. Prerecorded interviews from different people to contrast views, which in turn shape the readers opinions of the topics and people mentioned in the piece. The podcast even going as far as to switch to a whole new prerecorded research section, supplied by NPR, for the first main segment of the podcast. Each piece of sound recording helped bring the listener into the research interview process that took place and is being discussed on the podcast. Examples from podcast are linked here: https://drive.google.com/folder/d/0B4IWWO4FSY4zalQ5T2p6WjAwWWs/edit

In Stacy Schiff’s article “Know It All” she discusses the topic of Wikipedia, compares it to other encyclopedias, and how Wikipedia  has impacted the modern world of researching, obtaining and learning new information. She explains how the creator of Wikipedia Jimmy Wales, created the site  to generate a free encyclopedia that anyone around the world can access and read. However, Schiff also states how Wikipedia is “more immune to human nature than any other utopian project” due to the fact that anyone can edit a page on Wikipedia. However most traditional encyclopedias make sure each of the pages on a topic is factual, neutral, and  that the information it represents comes from a reliably knowledgeable source. But since Wikipedia is not as selective with the way it obtains information for the site it decides to include on its pages as more prestigious or scholarly encyclopedias, people have to be more cautious with taking the information on Wikipedia for fact, but those who do misinterpret information on Wikipedia may fall victim to supporting false knowledge, ignorance, and bias. This new problem has greatly impacted the younger generation as they have become accustomed to relying on the Internet when looking for the truth, but not necessarily checking to make sure it is correct. Leading to more widespread misinformation and a world of people whose confidence of their knowledge is built on fabrications instead of  legitimate knowledge. And since my peers and I are part of this younger generation, I would prefer not to live in the world where broadcasted gossip is taking as factual evidence. Because once you get enough people to believe in something it becomes accepted as a truth. Causing there to be no way for society to separate what is fact from fiction or right from wrong sending the world into chaos and rendering everyone into confident idiots. Which is why highly visited sites like Wikipedia are so important in the world of technology and information today.

 

In 2014 David Dunning wrote the article “We Are All Just Confident Idiots” to explain how society and humanity as a whole has now mistaking ignorance for intelligence or expertise. Dunning starts out by incorporating Jimmy Kimmel’s TV segment “Lie Witness News” as an example to grab the readers’ attention. He then explains why this connects to the increasing level of false intelligence happening in society as he continuous to include more quotes from Kimmel’s show to further analysis the reasoning behind why people would rather make up an uneducated guess of an answer rather than admitting that they have no idea about a subject. Dunning then incorporates a more scholastic examples as he analyzes the results seen in an experiments where questions were asked more about scientific and governmental knowledge. He the uses multiple quotes from reliable sources such as American aphorist, William Feather and the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, to add further ethos to his article and thoroughly support his idea. Dunning then returns to discussing his take on human ignorance and the problems it presents in our society. Dunning later refers specifically, even going as far as to summarizing, shortening it to an acceptable amount that would bore the reader or take away from Dunning’s article’s point as a whole. After that Dunning makes a quick reference back to the Jimmy Kimmel segment from the beginning, before diving into his thought that ignorant isn’t someone blatantly not knowing any information but having their mind filled with misleading or wrong information as a foundation for their thought process. Next Dunning breaks down and analyzes his own argument and the many reasons for the rampant ignorance of society, while also interspersing more and more quotes and examples from reliable sources to constantly support every new idea he introduces in his article. Lastly Dunning finishes his article with one final reference to Jimmy Kimmel’s show bringing his article full circle.

In Hayley Krischer’s Hairpin article “Hysteria and Teenage Girls” she brings into focus the reason as to why adolescent females are prone to great moments of hysterics, especially in the presence of prominently good looking male music icons. Krischer then creates timeline of the theories as to why teenage girls act the way they do. While also explaining how the image of music’s teen heart throbs change over time with society. Coming to the conclusion that the real reason teenage girls react in the way they do towards their favorite boyband or popstar is because it gives them a voice and letting them communicate to everyone around them how much the music has impacted us. Krischner opens up her article with a conversational tone as she descriptively recalls the story of friend’s teenage niece’s meltdown and the chaos that followed, allowing the reader feel as if they were sitting beside her in the Smash Burger and pulling them in to the article. Krischer then begs the question of why girls act this way in order to smoothly segue the reader into the rest of her article, in which offers multiple answers to the question in a more informative tone through chronologically listing society’s take on female hysteria. However, Krischer is still able to keep her audience’s attention due to the outrageously strange but true examples  and the logic behind them. Krischer also uses song lyrics by past male music legends such as Elvis and Frank Sinatra and comparing them to today’s male artist to contrast how music for teenage girls has changed while connect to both the older generation and younger generation. She then switches back over to a more personal as a way to portray her message that the music you listen to in your teen years prompting the reader to reevaluate the music they listen to or may have listened to in those years.

 

 

 

 

In McSweeney’s Essays “Internet-Age Writing Syllabus” and “College Writing Assignments with Real-World Application” he satirizes our culture’s new innate need to publicly post short and literary vacant blurbs about our lives by creating a hypothetical syllabus and list of assignments to go along with it. Each one of his essays though, thoroughly exemplifies what happens when this new cultural movement becomes a scholastic reality. However, McSweeney portrays this idea with a witty yet serious tone, which just makes his essay even humorous, yet ironically even more depressing at the same time because not only do we see the absurdity in it but also realizes how it truly represents our society. One ideal McSweeney stated that I thought would actually be an innovative way research/writing classes should be run is the system of attendance where students are not required to spend class time physically sitting in a classroom or lecture hall but being logged on to website where students can share ideas with and critique their writing, but also allowing their professor the ability to see when and how long the student spent on the assignments all from the comfort of their couch. Another idea McSweeney had that should be incorporated into writing classes curriculum is the idea of teaching students how to write a post, blog or other short form writing piece in way that effectively deliver the point they want to get across in this age of social media and shrinking attention spans. McSweeney’s essay also has less far-fetched assignments that could be implemented into a research/writing course as well.  One in particular is the assignment where the student, who has a B.A. in Literature, writes a cover letter to a bank manager deserves to be hired over someone with a degree relevant to the job, such as business or finance. An assignment like this could be beneficial in advancing a student’s persuasive writing, while also preparing them for the harsh reality that there might not be an available job in the field they are qualified for and may have to take one in the field they aren’t qualified for.