TOW #28- "TOW Reflection"

I'd first like to start off just by quickly saying that although it was painful, and highly dreaded by myself this process of writing and producing these "TOWs", the method was highly successful and I can truly say it helped me grow as a writer and build up my ability to analyze rhetoric and such.

The most distinctive negative trait that my posts had early on in the year was the summarization of the text and the authors overall purpose rather than the specific rhetorical devices and how they helped the author to achieve his or her purpose. I had quite a few posts where for a few paragraphs at a time it was consistently a textual summary that provided no real analysis or insight into the text. It is strongly evident that this has changed as I progressed through the first, second, and third marking period as I have learned to do less of a summary and more of a quick, brief summation so that the majority of the TOW can be solid analysis of the rhetoric.

To what I believe I have mastered I have to say from a philosophical standpoint I am yet to master anything. I mean Malcolm Gladwell tells us that it takes ten thousand hours to be a true master of something right? I have without a doubt improved my writing abilities and capabilities to break down a wide variety of texts I would have otherwise not been able to. But, I still feel I am yet to be a master of analysis and understanding an author's rhetoric and its application to their purpose. I can continue to improve by broadening my reading vocabulary through reading a variety of passages, texts, and stories. I think that was of the biggest help to me because before AP English I never strayed from my normal sports readings which is now only a piece of what I read and enjoy on a daily basis. I also believe that the constant, non-stop repetition of completing the TOWs made it easier for me come time for the AP exam to write the analysis essay and be able to easily knock out three in a row. It builds up your tolerance for what your mind and body can endure with writing and reading, and doing a TOW every single week really pushes you to your limits and that builds your endurance up which is a huge benefit.

TOW #27-"If you play video games, you're going to want these glasses" (Written)

Samuel Lingle, of The Daily Dot, goes on to write an article that promotes and in a large sense tries to sell you a specific product. Lingle tries to persuade the reader that gaming glasses are a necessity and a company by the name of NoScope is the best place to buy them from.

Mr. Lingle employs the method proving or stating that you need the product if you want to be a true, hardcore gamer. He mentions the great health risks that they prevent such as eye strain and fatigue after staring at a monitor for a large chunk of time during the day. The other method used as a form of persuasion for the audience to want to buy NoScope's gaming glasses in specific, is to compare them to the competitors and prove that theirs are better. Lingle stacked them up side to side, and even gave some honesty that GUNNAR OPTIKS are well-known and very high quality, but the price point of NoScope's glasses was the main emphasis and selling point. "A pair of NoScope specs will only set you back $25." When stated like this it is almost like any other typical day purchase at the mall of some sort of apparel, because twenty-five dollars to most isn't that outrageous and it's definitely something they'd consider purchasing.

I did notice however that Lingle managed to use one bad literary device which is that of a logical fallacy. This logical fallacy is tough to catch out but it is the, because of this, therefore that, type of fallacy. Lingle states that when the inevitable esports boom comes, NoScope glasses will rise in a paralleled way. This isn't true and doesn't make sense because numbers and statistics have already shown that a rise in esports popularity is inevitable but the popularity of NoScope's glasses is unknown and is unrelated to such. Their success relies on their own contribution only and that if they do a good job making, marketing, and selling their own product than of course they will do well.

Overall, despite the one small logical fallacy to close out the article, I felt it was well written and did a good job with it's persuasion. Being a gamer myself, who spends endless amounts of time behind a computer, getting monitor tans on the daily, I was intrigued and even paid their website a visit. It is something that I have recognized happening when I spend a long time on the computer and it's something that I am now interested in purchasing.

(http://www.dailydot.com/esports/noscope-gunnar-gaming-glasses/)

TOW #26-"A dead body lies in the street" (Visual)

I found this image on a popular entertainment website known as Mashable. The image was located in an article called "Best Photos of 2014". I felt for all the glory and greatness that has gone on in the past year, it has certainly not been perfect across the world.

The image highlights a scene in Ukraine where there have been loads of problems going on in the recent months. The focus of the image is on the man who is shown dead on the ground of a public street, just lying there with a small cloth over his body. You can't see who he is or what he looks like or what might have happened to him, all you can see is that he is dead and appears to look like a normal civilian. He's not someone working a dangerous job or out fighting in a battlefield, he's wearing nice looking dress shoes and a pair of slacks or jeans. This highlights the innocence of the man and shows he did nothing wrong or deserving of his death.

After the main focus of the image, your eyes can't help but notice the man in the background. This man, does not look guilty at all for committing the crime as the man on the ground looks like he's been sitting there rotting for awhile. The key thing to notice is that this man is depicted living his normal day in his average life who doesn't seem to even notice or be shocked about the man dead in the middle of the street. By the way he's dealing with the situation, it's as if he sees something like that everyday or it just isn't rare to see. That is where the true meaning to the picture is. The fact that something so horrific and gory shouldn't be someone's everyday life happening as a normal occurrence. He does a great job invoking a sense of sympathy and almost a bit of rage in the sense that you feel bad for the innocent civilian and you feel like there shouldn't be a society that functions like this but you can't do anything about it. Does a great job of putting things in perspective on how our world isn't very perfect after all.

All in all I felt the photographer perfectly captured the proper feeling of the photo the sadness not for the death of the man in the street but for the fact that the man in the background is just walking past him like it's something normal to see.

(http://www.rumblerum.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/51.-A-dead-body-lies-in-the-street-near-the-Mariupol-police-station-in-Ukraine-May-9-2014..jpg)

TOW #25-"Don't Let Statistics Ruin Baseball" (Written)

Steve Kettmann of The New York Times talks about the nostalgic appreciation for baseball on a physical more straight forward level rather than the more in depth analytical way of appreciating America's most beloved sport. Kettmann argues that fans nowadays focus too much on abstract statistics that in reality don't mean much when he comes down to the heart of the game.

When presenting his argument, Kettmann uses well-known experts to establish credibility with his argument. The first source he brings up is San Francisco Giants manager, Bruce Bochy. Bochy agrees with the importance of actually watching and comprehending the game rather than the number crunching that modern day fans favor. Bochy being the manager of the current World Series champion team shows that his word has value in it as his ability to win a championship must mean something.

The next and probably the more important rhetorical device that Kettmann uses is analogies. The first, Kettmann presents rather early and he does so, so that people who wouldn't typical understand baseball can understand why he feels the way he does. He claims, "When it comes to watching a matchup of, say, the Mets pitcher Matt Harvey and Giancarlo Stanton of the Miami Marlins, statistical analysis is about as helpful in deepening an appreciation of the human drama unfolding before us as it would be for a Pavarotti aria." This allows the more intellectual fellow, which is what the NYT audience base mostly consists of, to understand just how dumb statistics are in relation to an opera singer's performance.

Kettmann continues the usage of analogies further throughout his passage and to tie all of his analogies together is the underlying theme between them which is music. He later on states, "You can go to the symphony and hear the music even as you’re texting with a client to close a deal. As your thumbs fly and you try not to be distracted by the dirty looks of the guy next to you, you might note the orchestra is playing Mahler’s Ninth. But with your attention so cratered, are you really listening to the music? Are you enjoying it?" This one is easier to comprehend and quite direct with it's purpose. Focusing on the minute and unimportant stats of baseball is like texting during a beautiful musical performance. You can't appreciate the beauty of what's going on when you do that, which is the point that Kettmann is attempting to convey through his musical analogies.

Overall, I felt that Steve Kettmann did a respectable and adequate job of representing that stats are meaningless and over appreciated by current baseball fans. By incorporating baseball specific experts, Kettmann was able to remain reliable and allow the audience to understand a possible unfamiliar topic of baseball by using musical analogies.

(http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/08/opinion/baseball-by-the-numbers.html)

IRB Intro #3-"All the President's Men"

The second independent reading book I chose is "All the President's Men" written by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. "All the President's Men" is a book about the biggest presidential scandal in the history of the United States of America. Bernstein and Woodward, two Washington-Post reporters, decided to write a book about their investigation that brought down President Nixon. Since I am very intrigued in US History and especially aspects of the US that are kept private or disclosed, I find those things very intriguing. I actually don't know anything at all about Watergate and I look forward to learning and discovering the full scope of the scandal.

TOW #16- "A Room of One's Own" (IRB)

I've suffered through enough, being outside of my comfort zone, but I come back to you to say that Woolf's essay wasn't half-bad. I can clearly see now why people call "A Room of One's Own" a landmark of twentieth-century feminist thought. Throughout the essay, Woolf explores the history of women in literature through an unconventional and highly interesting investigation of the social and physical conditions required for the writing of literature. These conditions, which include leisure time, privacy, and financial independence underwrite all literary production. They are especially relevant to the understanding of the situation for women in the literary position, because women, have historically been left out of those prerequisites.

Interestingly enough, Woolf uses fiction to compensate for some of the gaps in the factual record about women as well as to counter the biases that insert more conventional scholarship. Woolf did that to a tee in the fact that although this is a non-fiction essay she used bits of fiction to cover up holes in her essays. Virginia Woolf writes a history of a woman's thinking about the history of thinking women. So essentially that means, her essay is a reconstruction and a reenactment as well as an argument. In the end of it all her essay is able to open up in three different lights which to me, made me appreciate it maybe not for the ideas it presented but for how it was a well-crafted piece of literature.

TOW #15- "Grandfather who beat three types of cancer completes trek to South Pole" (Written)

In the Spring of 2012, Patrick McIntosh,58, was diagnosed with bowel cancer. Seven months later in celebration of defeating cancer, Mr. McIntosh scaled one of the biggest mountains in the world, Mount Kilimanjaro. He was later diagnosed with skin cancer a mere month later and then in the Spring of 2013, Patrick was diagnosed with prostate cancer. McIntosh thought to himself that nobody likes reading stories about cancer, but everyone likes stories of physical feats. Patrick McIntosh set out on a journey to trek to the South Pole. In preparation for his trek, McIntosh would ski more than three miles a night on a machine in his garage as well as he would take a plunge in his freezing cold outdoor pool as a part of his fitness training. McIntosh also ran a marathon, walked the lengths of Hadrian's Walls in two days, and spent hours hiking with over thirty pounds on his back while he would drag tires behind him. In the end it took him eleven days with eight hours of trekking each day until he finally reached the South Pole.

The Telegraph delves into a topic that is typically sad, emotionally brutal, and heart wrenching. With the story, they posed a new perspective on the harsh disease that is cancer and turned it into a man's overcoming of such obstacles and his achievement of some of his personal goals. Camilla Turner, the author of this piece, did a great job incorporating statistics to display emphasis on the physical feats that McIntosh completed. "...who has just completed a 138-mile (222km) charity trek to the South Pole." Turner inserts this number to display the enormity of what Patrick McIntosh accomplished.

All in all I thought Camilla Turner did a great job writing about Patrick McIntosh's story. I had a pleasant time reading it given the fact that the majority of time cancer is brought up in the news it is a negative thing so it was a nice change of pace to read about somebody who fought the battle and won it.
(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/antarctica/11353223/Grandfather-who-beat-three-types-of-cancer-completes-trek-to-South-Pole.html)