TOW #4 Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell IRB

      Why do some people succeed far more than others? How are the Beatles so amazing? How did Bill Gates get so rich? Why are Asians so good at math? What makes a star athlete? The average person often questions these mysteries of life, but he probably won't ever completely answer that list of spontaneous yet extremely thought provoking questions. Many people assume that successes are innately talented and when they have a fiery ambition, that's where the success is born. Malcolm Gladwell, a renown bestselling non-fiction writer whose books explore psychology and sociology, explains that this is not the case. In Outliers, Gladwell, using a powerful appeal to logos and interesting narratives, effectively argues that the story of success is created from what surrounds a person, his family, his environment, or even his date of birth, simply put, luck, in order to allow readers to see success in a new perspective.

       The largest piece in Outliers was the appeal to logos: facts, quotes, observations, and statistics. Using his credibility as an established author on this topic, Gladwell analyzes the factual information he acquired into his hypothesis. He uses charts and tables all in a structure that is pleasing to the eye. It adds simplicity to the ocean of information and allows the reader to take Gladwell's argument seriously.

       Outliers is a non fiction book about sociology and the makings of success, not the everyday read for the average skimmer. What allows this book to connect to the general public is its use of narratives. The book itself starts out with a narrative about an "outlier" town called Roseto, not only was the narrative interesting, but it introduced the reader to the essence of Outliers. Gladwell also gives narratives, in a story-telling fashion, of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, the Beatles, and J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the scientists of the Manhattan Project. These narratives make the book seem like a series of biographies, making reading, at face value, a boring book about human behavior much more interesting.

     Both the appeal to logos and the effective use of narratives give Outliers a powerful argument that persuades the audience into pondering about this new idea of success. It gives readers the information they need and the stories they desire, making this non-fiction book about success truly successful.

TOW #3 Visual Text Analysis

    The World Wildlife Fund is always coming up with interesting and powerful advertisements, and this is just one of the many. The entire advertisement is an image of an open, green, perfect-for-golfing field and a golfer in his finishing motion. Everything seems normal at a glance, but a closer look shows that the golfer is not swinging a golf club but an axe. 

        At once I understood what this meant. Golf courses require flat surfaces, and for that reason many trees are chopped down for a single course. The purpose of the advertisement is very specific though. The WWF is not trying to say that golf is a habitat-destroying sport and should be totally banned. On the bottom of the advertisement it says, "Building a single golf course puts thousands of trees at stake. However in Southern Turkey, they are planning to build several courses simultaneously. Take action. Help us stop them." The WWF's true purpose is to persuade the general public to help them stop the simultaneous building of golf courses in Southern Turkey, which they achieve effectively

       With the trademark logo of the panda in the bottom left hand corner, the image establishes an automatic ethos without much explaining. The audience knows that the panda symbolizes the WWF and that the advertisement is going to have to do with the environment. People will take the advertisement seriously through that credibility, and the WWF will be able to deliver its message more powerfully.

     The WWF also uses a very effective metaphor by saying in font slightly bigger than it's message, "The par: 200,000 trees." In golf, the par signifies the number of strokes an expert golfer is expected to take on an entire course. How many is the par on this hole? A whole 200,000 trees. The WWF is comparing the standard of the golf course to the number of trees that the golf course took down. Through this, the WWF can indirectly lay out its logos and connect the whole thing back to golf.

     This advertisement has quite a bit of irony as well. To many people, myself included, golf is a sport where one can become a part of nature. The golf course is a sacred seclusion within a chaotic society that seems untouched by human hands. As a golfer myself, I love the natural part about golf; ironically, a golf course is created artificially and requires the destruction of true nature. This irony makes the message even more powerful and can bring people to the WWF's purpose to bring a stop to the simultaneously building of golf courses in Southern Turkey.

IRB Introduction: Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

For my first IRB, I chose Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. My father told me about it and that I should read it. I never had the motivation to read it, but once again, APELC is making me do new things. I had a vague idea that it would be interesting, but after reading the short hook on Amazon, I think I'm going to like this book a lot. It explains what makes successful people successful and what makes them the "outliers"; but honestly, I'm really excited to read the part about what makes Asians so smart. 

TOW #2 Ray Rice, Ray Lewis, and the Absurdity of the NFL and its Law Breakers by Phil Mushnick

"Shocking Video!!!" These are the words New York Post sportswriter Phil Mushnick exclaimed in his most recent column, "Ray Rice, Ray Lewis and the Absurdity of NFL Law Breakers". By those words, any football fan or person who watches the news knows that Mushnick is referring to the recently exposed video of Ray Rice, the Baltimore Raven's renown runningback, brutally punching his at-the-time fiance. However, what's interesting about this article is that it doesn't hover over the topic of Ray Rice, a highly debated and discussed topic at this moment, but it focuses on the NFL and society's reactions to these "troublemakers". Mushnick effectively conveyed the idea to his audience, those who follow the NFL, that the NFL and society celebrates and praises its "troublemakers" to the extend that the NFL is becoming a less and less dignified organization.

Now, if Mushnick based his claim purely on Ray Rice's situation, it would be baseless because the NFL is not praising Ray Rice; in fact, the Ravens just cut him and the NFL put an indefinite suspension on him. However, for Mushnick, Rice was just the inspiration, and introduction, to his position. Mushnick seamlessly transitions into the "forgotten" past of the NFL and reminds his audience of Ray Lewis', Raven's MVP linebacker that retired last year, very similar situation. In 2000, Lewis was charged of murder of two men through stabbing. He served one year under probation and was fined 250,000. 

What Mushnick thinks is absurd is that Lewis is now an ESPN commentator and that the Ravens have put a statue of Lewis in front of their stadium. It was as if the whole world forgot about his past. Also, when Lewis was talking about the Rice situation, Mushnick responded by saying, "So Ray Lewis, now with ESPN and with six children from four women, appears on national TV to provide his sage opinion on matters of social responsibility and comportment by NFL players." Mushnick lets his audience deduce that the world is somewhat backwards when those, "who should be disqualified are jumped to the front of the “qualified” line".

What makes Mushnick's delivery even more effective is his great tone and spread of sarcasm. As a sportswriter, he is ought to know much about football and the NFL, and as he speaks, its easy to hear the passion. I would compare his tone to the tone that someone has when something ridiculous happens to him and he doesn't know how to respond to it, a combination of occasional bursts of anger and occasional laughs of disbelief. This contributes to his pathos, for his audience can understand the passion that people who follow football have and how sometimes, the things the NFL does can drive one crazy.

the Raven's two "troublemakers"

http://nypost.com/2014/09/11/ray-rice-just-latest-in-parade-of-nfl-law-breakers/

TOW #1 How To Say Nothing In 500 Words by Paul Roberts

This very entry may be an example of it, but I will try my best to refrain from it. The average student, myself included, uses a conglomeration of useless words that put, "a little meat on the bones" (Roberts 55) of the essay he writes. The author of "How to Say Nothing in 500 Words", Paul Roberts, an accomplished English linguist and textbook writer, shows how ranting on and on about nonsense actually is a harmful tactic in essay writing and teaches the reader how to abstain from it.

He directs his talk to students, generally those of higher education, since students are constantly writing essays as assignments, and it isn't rare to see an assignment with an enormous minimum word count. Even though Roberts wrote this in 1958, the basic habits of an essay-writing-student has not changed in the last 60 years. Personally, instead of saying, "I'm writing a TOW right now," I can easily expand this statement into, "Currently, at this moment, a Text of the Week is something that I am writing." Instantly, I more than doubled the amount of words I used and got much closer to the required word count, however large it may be. Roberts wants this habit to stop: it makes it harder for the reader, these kind of essays are almost always weak in content, and the essay will be extremely dull.

Roberts opens with an anecdote that portrays what saying nothing in 500 words looks like in real life, the average student that has to write a 500 word essay in three days about college football, a topic that does not interest him at all. He regurgitates what little information he knows about college football and expands what little he has to say into 500 words using hollow filler words.

This anecdote reminded me so much of myself, and I thought, "What could I do to stop this unattractive habit?" As this thought lingered in my head, he immediately supplied me with techniques to become a better writer that doesn't rely on the acquired ability to elongate meaningless sentences.

His strategy to connect the reader to the story he created allows an instant attraction to the text and a higher possibility of delivering his purpose successfully, a purpose that now I carry. After reading "How to Say Nothing in 500 Words" I made a sacred promise to myself that I will discontinue my nasty habit and follow the guidelines Roberts advised. I hope this is something that will be shown in all my work from here on out, not only in APELC, but within every message I deliver.

"meat on the bone"