TOW #24 - Letters to Sam

Since it's my last TOW, I figured I should talk about my last IRB. I recently finished Letters to Sam by Daniel Gottlieb, a story about a paraplegic grandfather giving a lifetime of advice to his autistic grandson. Gottlieb wrote the book because he knew he wouldn't be around for all of his grandson's childhood, so he figured leaving behind a physical copy of all the advice he would ever give him was the best possible choice. Personally, I really enjoyed reading this story, and I'm glad that I didn't gloss over it like I have done so many times before. It is filled with inspiring words of wisdom and mantras, one of my favorites being the grandfather's lessons about pain. (This 'lesson' really hit home for me.) He writes, "All pain is about longing for yesterday--whatever we had before, whatever we used to be." Upon reading this I didn't understand at first, but when you think about it it really makes sense. Longing for something we can never get back will only bring us pain. I took it as Gottlieb's way of saying to live for now and look ahead. This junior year of mine started off with life changes great in size and number, and I had trouble (I still am) not getting caught up in thinking about how things used to be. This is the biggest reason why I was so happy to read this book; it gave me a helpful reminder that we can't change what has already happened, only what will.

TOW #23 - "What You Learn in College"

This week I read a piece of creative nonfiction written by Karen Donley-Hayes to reminisce about her college days and the underlying sadness and anxiety of the memories of parties she attended. As she gets more and more into her story, she speaks directly to the audience and uses a form of anaphora to express these hidden feelings, which I found to be very effective.
Donley-Hayes squeezes in her anaphora between each paragraph (for a few paragraphs) as she relays an uncomfortable memory of her and her classmates playing a game of drunken strip-spin-the-bottle. This form of anaphora involved the repetition of an entire sentence, rather than the beginning word of a sentence. She writes "The bottle spins." After each paragraph with the start of the next paragraph expressing an increasing level of uncomfortableness and anxiety. Not only does this show the author's emotions in this memory, it projects them onto the reader and allows them to experience the same feelings she did in that memory. This was an effective way to tell her story because it allows readers to quickly identify the purpose that Donley-Hayes is trying to convey. She wants to show how not all 'going-out' nights in college are going to be good ones, especially if you are surrounded by people you do not trust, or have stepped out of your comfort zone.
Besides this projection of emotions onto her readers, the author also speaks directly to the audience by using pronouns like 'you' and 'we' when describing her reactions to reliving these uncomfortable memories. She ends her essay with a pondering, "But the regret isn't gone. It will never be gone, and you don't need to learn that. You already know it." By speaking to her readers this way, she is instilling a sense of personal attachment to her own memory, making it more likely for her purpose and argument to resonate with them. In other words, even though the readers did not experience these memories firsthand, they are still able to, through empathy, understand how/why the author felt the way she did during her own experience.

TOW #22 - "In the Grip of the Sky"

This essay by professor Sonya Huber takes the traditional non-fiction essay and adds a creative spin to it. She takes two topics of her own concern--her own chronic joint pain and global warming--and combines them into the essay to show how even though the effects of each can be crippling, we must be strong and find other ways to fix them.
She first uses strong imagery as a metaphor to compare the brewing storm in the sky (which caused her joint sickness to badly flare up) to the brewing pain in her bones. She says, "If [I] could map [my] pain, the constellation of joints would glow on the map, lit to follow storm fronts and hurricanes." It was interesting to hear her talk about her pain not only because lupus/rheumatoid/psoriatic arthritis is something I have not experienced, but also because of the fact that the weather going south made it worse. At first it might not seem that out of the ordinary; I know many people who get 'rain headaches', but when you think about it, being forced to succumb to your couch because of extreme pain every time there is a rainstorm must make one tough person out of you. Her use of the extended metaphor throughout her essay makes sense because it must be so unfathomable (I certainly know I had trouble wrapping my head around it) for others to understand her struggle. I think this was an amazing way to get her point across, and provided such an effective way of showing her readers what it is like to be in her shoes.

TOW #21 - "Women shouldn't..." visual text

This week for my visual text I chose to analyze the advertisement I picked for our inductive/deductive reasoning activity in class. Because I think the advertisement's message and presentation are so powerful, I thought it would be perfect to analyze for a TOW.

Aside from the most obvious aspect of the "women shouldn't ____" one-liners in the search bar, the fact that the search bar is covering the woman's mouth is what make its 'searches' so powerful. The metaphor it provides shows how the discrimination women face on a day-to-day basis is impossible for them to counteract because they have no say in what they are capable of. This powerful rhetoric makes for a very effective argument on UN Women's part.

This particular ad is just one of many that are part of this installment, each showing different kinds and severities of sexism towards women around the world. The most important part of these advertisements is how they show how something a man might say jokingly has such misogynistic undertones (that he might not even realize). Showing how sexism can hide in plain sight when one is not educated on the matter, or simply not on the receiving end. Overall, I think the UN Women sector did a wonderful job in the creation and power of these advertisements.

TOW #20 - "The Fine Art Of Quitting"

This relatively new essay written by an man named Poe Ballantine was quite an interesting read. At first the title does not seem to fit the piece, but becomes the most perfect title once the essay is finished. This essay describes the life of the author while he is living in a dinky studio apartment on the San Diego beach. While many folks who come and go saying how beautiful the city is, the author knows whats really going on as he watches the biggest cockroaches he has ever seen "carrying off whole hams". While the beginning of the essay seems more like a real estate review rather than a message about the fine art of quitting, it takes a turn towards Ballantine's career as a writer and why he chose (or was given) that path. His most fond high school memory was his teacher saying "she was so impressed [by his ending of the unfinished Twain novel Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians] that she thought I should make an appearance on television and claim to be Twain's ghost." Because the author is such a gifted writer, it seems odd that he would title an essay about his career "The Fine Art of Quitting", since he tells everyone that he is one day going to win the Nobel prize for literature. However, the title could not be more fitting once the reader realizes that the author has not done his 'destined job' in a quite a while and does not plan to get back into the swing of things until he becomes the 'prime author age' between 32 and 36 and claims he just simply needs to find "something to write about" first. It was funny to read his descent into the satirical and metaphorical resignation from his 'job'. While the essay was filled with plot twists and witty remarks, it still kept a tone of sophistication--a prime example of his old high school teacher's words. This combination of slight vulgarity and formal tone ties back to why "The Fine Art Of Quitting" is so perfect for this essay's title. It mirrors not only the author's current point of view regarding his authordom, but also his unique style.

TOW #19 - College essay that worked

This week I read a college essay written by a student who was accepted to UC Berkley. The topic of the essay was to "Describe the world you live in" and this student took a very unique path in responding to it. They started with, "Most children acquire the same eye color or a similar shaped nose from their parents, but I've inherited much more: a passion for learning and and insatiable curiosity which has served me well throughout my academic career." (para. 1). This topic sentence of their introductory paragraph is the reason that their essay made such an impact on their admission because of its uniqueness and connection to the student's intended major (computer science). I feel that most students would answer this prompt in terms of their cultural and ethnic backgrounds, whereas this student, who may not have a very rich or involved cultural background, chose to describe what has ultimately affected their world the most. This is an excellent strategy because the student could have easily faked their way through an essay about how their German-immigrant great-grandparents have 'greatly impacted their life'. Instead they chose to take a creative and honest route, all while revealing why they plan on pursuing the major they have chosen. It not only provides a great platform for the integrity of their essay, but also gives a very personal touch.

TOW #18 - "Knoxville: Summer of 1915"

This beautiful essay by James Agee was written in 1938. After some research, I found that he had wrote it in a mere ninety minutes because he was practicing experiments with what we call free-form writing. Agee appeals to a lot of sensory factors, especially imagery when describing a "mid-summer's eve" in his hometown of Knoxville. The most emphasized symbol was a garden hose, which Agee spent nearly the entire middle portion of his essay talking about. "First an insane noise of violence in the nozzle, then the still irregular sound of adjustment, then the smoothing into steadiness and a pitch as accurately tuned to the size and style of stream as any violin." (172). This symbol was important in aiding Agee's overall purpose of describing how much times have changed since that summer in 1915. A garden hose is seen most often during the summer than any other time of year, whether it is watering a lawn or powering a sprinkler. To Agee, it is the ideal image of summer, and is what he remembers most vividly about the summer of 1915. Another symbol emphasized by Agee was the porches that wrapped around nearly every single house. He believed that something as simple as porches were an essential part of bringing families together, because they would gather on their porch together after dinner in summers to enjoy the sunsets and warm nights. It is important to realize that Agee is describing all of these events with a very nostalgic tone, because after the summer of 1915, his life would change dramatically. His father died the next year and the implementation of a television in every home on his street would mean families would no longer enjoy their time together outside on their porches. And so the lovely wraparound porch would no longer be built on houses erected after the summer of 1915. Agee's ways of describing this fond childhood memory are very effective in getting across his purpose, and he does a wonderful job of telling how important this summer was.