On the day that you present in front of the class you
must also write your response to the questions below and hand in your answers.
You must hand in your answers on the day you signed up for.
Guidelines for Reading Analysis Presentation
Sign-up on the presentation on the board
at the end of class or during a break. Make a note of the chapters and
presentation date that you sign up for.
You will be presenting your analysis in
class along with other classmates. The class will be counting on you to be on
top of the article you are covering, so please be prepared!
You will be graded primarily on your
written analysis (breakdown of scoring below), but outstanding presentations
will be rewarded.
Read the chapters or section that you
will be analyzing carefully. On your first reading, just try to identify the
main idea(s) and get a feel for the writer’s approach and the flow of the
chapter. On your second reading, go over the text more carefully; notice how
the writer creates characters and tells the story.
To prepare your written analysis:
Identify the author’s name and the title of the chapter(s) you are covering
1.What
is the central theme of your chapters? Your answer should be a complete
sentence in your own words (not a quote!). Be as specific as possible, but
remember that the theme of a book refers to the overall concerns of the author.
Don't confuse this with the plot, which is what happens chapter to chapter as
the book moves ahead.
2.There
are several parts to question two. What are the concerns of the characters in
the chapter(s) you have read? This book is a work of fiction, but do you think
the events in the book could happen in real life? Do you think the way the
characters act is believable? If so, does it make the book less effective?
3.Is
the central theme expressed explicitly or implicitly? The claim is explicit if
the writer spells out what it is. The claim is implicit if the writer only
implies the claim but does not state it outright.
4.Did
the events and actions in your chapter(s) surprise you or change your mind
about the characters in the book?
5.What is the tone - the feel -
of the chapter(s) you read?
6.What
things in the story give the most insight into human nature?
7.Does
the writer leave the opinions and feelings to the readers? If so, why? Is this
approach effective?
8.Make
up a question to ask the class about your chapter.
Water levels have dropped at Lake Tanganyika in Bujumbura, Burundi.Credit
Will Okun
BUJUMBURA, Burundi
If
we need any more proof that life is unfair, it is that subsistence
villagers here in Africa will pay with their lives for our refusal to
curb greenhouse gas emissions.
When
we think of climate change, we tend to focus on Alaskan villages or New
Orleans hurricanes. But the people who will suffer the worst will be
those living in countries like this, even though they don’t contribute
at all to global warming.
My
win-a-trip journey with a student and a teacher has taken us to
Burundi, which the World Bank’s latest report shows to be the poorest
country in the world. People in Burundi have an annual average income of
$100, nearly one child in five dies before the age of five, and life
expectancy is 45.
Against
that grim backdrop, changing weather patterns in recent years have
already caused crop failures — and when the crops fail here, people
starve. In short, our greenhouse gases are killing people here.
“If
the harvest fails in the West, then you have stocks and can get by,”
said Gerard Rusuku, an agriculture scientist here who has been studying
the impact of global warming in Africa. “Here, we’re much more
vulnerable. If climate change causes a crop failure here, there’s
famine.”
Guillaume
Foliot of the World Food Program notes that farmers here overwhelmingly
agree that the weather has already become more erratic, leading to lost
crops. And any visitor can see that something is amiss: Africa’s “great
lakes” are shrinking.
Burundi
is on Lake Tanganyika, which is still a vast expanse of water. But the
shoreline has retreated 50 feet in the last four years, and ships can no
longer reach the port.
“Even
the hippos are unhappy,” said Alexander Mbarubukeye, a fisherman on the
lake, referring to the hippos that occasionally waddled into town
before the lake retreated.
The
biggest of Africa’s great lakes, Lake Victoria, was dropping by a
vertical half-inch a day for much of last year. And far to the north,
once enormous Lake Chad has nearly vanished. The reasons for the dipping
lake levels seem to include climate change.
Greenhouse
gases actually have the greatest impact at high latitudes — the Arctic
and Antarctica. But the impact there isn’t all bad (Canada will gain a
northwest passage), and the countries there are rich enough to absorb
the shocks.
In
contrast, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned this
year that the consequences for Africa will be particularly harsh because
of the region’s poverty and vulnerability. It foresees water shortages
and crop failures in much of Africa.
“Projected
reductions in yield in some countries could be as much as 50 percent by
2020, and crop net revenues could fall as much as 90 percent,” the
panel warned. It also cautioned that warming temperatures could lead
malaria to spread to highland areas. Another concern is that scarcities
of food and water will trigger wars. More than five million lives have
already been lost since 1994 in wars in Rwanda, Burundi and Congo, and
one factor was competition for scarce resources.
“It
seems to me rather like pouring petrol onto a burning fire,” Jock
Stirrup, the chief of the British defense staff, told a meeting in
London this month. He noted that climate change could cause weak states
to collapse.
Yoweri
Museveni, Uganda’s president, describes climate change as “the latest
form of aggression” by rich countries against Africa. He has a point.
Charles Ehrhart, a Care staff member in Kenya who works full time on
climate-change issues, says that the negative impact of the West’s
carbon emissions will overwhelm the positive effects of aid.
“It’s
at the least disastrous and quite possibly catastrophic,” Mr. Ehrhart
said of the climate effects on Africa. “Life was difficult, but with
climate change it turns deadly.”
“That’s
what hits the alarm bells for an organization like Care,” he added.
“How can we ever achieve our mission in this situation?”
All
this makes it utterly reckless that we fail to institute a carbon tax
or at least a cap-and-trade system for emissions. The cost of our
environmental irresponsibility will be measured in thousands of children
dying of hunger, malaria and war.
IMAGINE
walking into the toy department and noticing several distinct aisles.
In one, you find toys packaged in dark brown and black, which include
the “Inner-City Street Corner” building set and a “Little Rapper”
dress-up kit. In the next aisle, the toys are all in shades of brown and
include farm-worker-themed play sets and a “Hotel Housekeeper” dress.
If
toys were marketed solely according to racial and ethnic stereotypes,
customers would be outraged, and rightfully so. Yet every day, people
encounter toy departments that are rigidly segregated — not by race, but
by gender. There are pink aisles, where toys revolve around beauty and
domesticity, and blue aisles filled with toys related to building,
action and aggression.
Gender
has always played a role in the world of toys. What’s surprising is
that over the last generation, the gender segregation and stereotyping
of toys have grown to unprecedented levels. We’ve made great strides
toward gender equity over the past 50 years, but the world of toys looks
a lot more like 1952 than 2012.
Gender
was remarkably absent from the toy ads at the turn of the 20th century
but played a much more prominent role in toy marketing during the pre-
and post-World War II years. However, by the early 1970s, the split
between “boys’ toys” and “girls’ toys” seemed to be eroding.
During
my research into the role of gender in Sears catalog toy advertisements
over the 20th century, I found that in 1975, very few toys were
explicitly marketed according to gender, and nearly 70 percent showed no
markings of gender whatsoever. In the 1970s, toy ads often defied
gender stereotypes by showing girls building and playing airplane
captain, and boys cooking in the kitchen.
But
by 1995, the gendered advertising of toys had crept back to midcentury
levels, and it’s even more extreme today. In fact, finding a toy that is
not marketed either explicitly or subtly (through use of color, for
example) by gender has become incredibly difficult.
There
are several reasons gender-based marketing has become so prevalent. On a
practical level, toy makers know that by segmenting the market into
narrow demographic groups, they can sell more versions of the same toy.
And nostalgia often drives parents and grandparents to give toys they
remember from their own childhood.
Such
marketing taps into the deeply held beliefs about gender that still
operate in our culture; many parents argue that their daughters and sons
like different things. This is particularly true for boys: parents tend
to stick with gender-typed toys for boys, either because they
understand that the social costs for boys who transgress into the “pink”
zone are especially high in a homophobic culture or because of their
own desire for gender conformity.
This
becomes a self-reinforcing cycle: as toys have become more and more
gender segregated, the social costs of boundary crossing and the peer
pressure to stay within the lines are huge, for kids and parents alike.
But if parents are susceptible to the marketers’ message, their children are even more so. In a study
on parental toy purchases led by the psychologist Donna
Fisher-Thompson, researchers who interviewed parents leaving a toy store
found that many bought gender-typed toys because their kids had asked
for them, and parents were a bit less likely to choose gendered toys —
at least for girls — on their own.
Moreover,
expert opinion — including research by developmental and evolutionary
psychologists — has fueled the development and marketing of gender-based
toys. Over the past 20 years, there has been a growth of “brain
science” research, which uses neuroimaging technology to try to explain
how biological sex differences cause social phenomena like gendered toy
preference.
That’s
ridiculous, of course: it’s impossible to neatly disentangle the
biological from the social, given that children are born into a culture
laden with gender messages. But that hasn’t deterred marketers from
embracing such research and even mimicking it with their own well-funded
studies.
For
example, last year the Lego Group, after two decades of marketing
almost exclusively to boys, introduced the new “Friends” line for girls
after extensive market research convinced the company that boys and
girls have distinctive, sex-differentiated play needs.
Critics
pointed out that the girls’ sets are more about beauty, domesticity and
nurturing than building — undermining the creative, constructive value
that parents and children alike place in the toys. Nevertheless, Lego
has claimed victory, stating that the line has been twice as successful
as the company anticipated.
The
ideas about gender roles embedded in toys and marketing reflect how
little our beliefs have changed over time, even though they contradict
modern reality: over 70 percent of mothers are in the labor force, and
in most families domestic responsibilities are shared more equitably
than ever before. In an era of increasingly diverse family structures,
these ideas push us back toward a more unequal past.
Elizabeth Sweet is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of California, Davis.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on December 23, 2012, on Page SR12 of the New York edition with the headline: Guys and Dolls No More?. Today's Paper|Subscribe
Fixeslooks at solutions to social problems and why they work.
David Stojcevski died in jail in Macomb County, Mich., a far suburb of Detroit, last year. He was taking doctor-prescribed methadone and two anti-anxiety medicines to alleviate symptoms of drug withdrawal when he began a 30-day sentence in June 2014. His familyallegesthat officials at the jail did not respond to his pleas for his medicines. He began hallucinating and was placed in a special cell with24-hour camera surveillance. (Local 4 television in Detroit first showed the video. A warning: Watching will produce nausea and outrage.) There he lay for 16 days, naked, on the floor. He lost 44 pounds. Finally he stopped breathing, was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead.
Guards are required to monitor the cell cameras, taking notes every 15 minutes. They watched Stojcevski for days as he died.
But this isn’t a story about horrendous jail practices, although the lessons should be obvious. Rather, the point is that Stojcevski received a death sentence for a traffic ticket: He had been arrested for obstruction of justice when he couldn’t pay a $772 fine for reckless driving.
His death is an extreme consequence of cash-register justice, a practice that ruins lives across the country every day in less dramatic ways.
And this is a story about a possible remedy: Make fines proportional to an offender’s ability to pay.
About a dozen countries in Latin America and Europe use such fines, called day fines. In countries where their use has been studied, day fines have markedly reduced the number of people incarcerated, made the criminal justice system fairer and less abusive to the poor, lowered recidivism and saved government money.
Day fines were tried in a handful of cities in the United States a quarter-century ago. They didn’t catch on, in part because the political climate was uncongenial: It was the peak of lock-’em-up sentiment. But America no longer wants to lock up every offender. Today, there is a rare bipartisan consensus on the harm created by mass incarceration.
So it’s time to take a serious new look at the day fine.
Photo
CreditIlana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times
First, why we need it:
In America, people are routinely jailed for failure to pay fines. Since the 1990s, courts in many parts of the country have had to pay for themselves, or even support their cities, so fines can be exorbitant. Ferguson, Mo., is the most notorious example: “Ferguson’s law enforcement practices are shaped by the city’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs,” said the Justice Department’s report on the police and courts in Ferguson.
Someone pulled over for a missing taillight can be given multiple fines, plus court fees that might equal or exceed the original fines. If the accused can’t pay, her case may be turned over to a private company that supervises “pay-only probation” — bill collecting, really. The company collects the money and charges the offender for doing so. (Here’s anexcellent summaryof the process, written in plain English.) The offender could pay off her whole fine and still owe thousands of dollars. If she doesn’t pay, she could go to jail, which would probably mean losing her job.
Cash-register justice incarcerates or keeps on probation many people who are not dangerous, just poor. And taxpayers are being abused by legislators who keep heaping fees on offenders. The lawmakers are not considering the enormous cost of jailing those who can’t pay, the cost of collecting their debts, or the cost to society of turning a civil violator into an incarcerated criminal.
“I don’t think legislators know this is not working — that the fees on the books are costing more money than they are bringing in,” said Karin Martin, an assistant professor of public management at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. The Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, for example,looked atthe incarceration of 246 people in Mecklenburg County, N.C., who fell behind on their court debt. The county collected $33,476, but jailing them cost $40,000.
Legislatures should not be making courts pay for themselves. It creates terrible injustice and ruins lives. It perverts justice by giving courts an incentive to convict. But if judicial systems are going to be made to pay their own way, it should be done fairly.
One way is to use the day fine. Rather than a set dollar amount, it is a percentage or multiple of an offender’s daily income — hence the name. In some countries, “daily income” is simply after-tax earnings. Others adjust for the number of dependents or fixed obligations like child support, and some consider only what is earned above a basic living allowance.
In the United States, for example, a very minor offense carrying a fine of one day’s income might cost a minimum-wage earner $72 if based only on straight income, while someone with an annual income of $250,000 might pay $685. A more serious offense could carry a fine of 10 or 20 days’ income, or more. For the system to function, additional court fees should also be proportional to income.
Different fines for different people — is that fair? Compared with the current system, yes. Even $500 for a traffic fine and fees can ruin the life of a minimum-wage worker. For someone who makes $250,000 a year, that same fine is a minor inconvenience, and an ineffective deterrent to further violations. The rich are more likely todrive recklessly, and they can put a fine on a credit card without a thought. Same offense – two very different punishments.
But with a day fine, an offense would carry a similar punitive hit for rich and poor.
Germany is probably the biggest user of day fines. In 1975, the government of what was then West Germany adopted the practice because it wanted to reduce prison overcrowding, and because research had shown that low-level offenders jailed for short times emerged more violent and dangerous. Offenders were no longer given short sentences, but rather fines that were adjusted for income.
In 2010, Germany used day fines in more than 94 percent of traffic offenses and in a vast majority of crimes that would otherwise have drawn short jail sentences, like fraud, embezzlement and theft.
An early study, published in 1980 by Hans-Jorg Albrecht of the Max Planck Institute,foundthat the fines were more effective than short sentences at preventing future offenses.
Since day fines are calculated to be bearable, collection rates are much higher than with traditional fines. But they still require enforcement – in Germany’s case by means of other civil (not criminal) sanctions like the seizure of property, the garnisheeing of wages or the imposition of a sentence of community service. Nonpayers go to jail very rarely.
Day fines were tried briefly in several American court systems at the close of the 1980s, led by theVera Institute of Justice.
Ron Reinstein, at the time the presiding judge of the Superior Court of Maricopa County, Ariz., said the program in Phoenix was only “moderately successful.” One obstacle was that judges had to give mandatory fines for drug possession; neither those fines nor court costs could be adjusted for income. Nor was everyone convinced of the project’s importance. “There were some good results in the pilot, but there wasn’t the commitment from everybody,” he said. “The prosecutors were not that interested.”
On Staten Island in New York, Vera itself operated a day fines office in the court, where staff members interviewed defendants, calculated fines and managed collection. “The rate at which people paid in full shot up,” said Judith Greene, at the time Vera’s director of court programs. “The amount of money collected over all shot up.”
The big challenge in administering day fines is determining an offender’s income, since tax returns are not public. But that is true in Germany also, and the courts there find what they need. The police and courts routinely collect information that helps determine income. And they can simply ask the defendant. About half give information voluntarily. The police end up investigating in less than 2 percent of cases.
Professor Martin, of John Jay, wants to resume day fine experimentation in the United States — not just for traffic fines and minor infractions, but the way it works in Europe: as an alternative to jail for anyone who might get a short sentence. “This is the only way we’re going to extricate ourselves from the horribly expensive and punitive system of punishing people with criminal justice debt,” she said.
One question is whether the fines should have a cap. If they did, they would be less fair — the superrich would pay less, proportionally, than others. And that would bring in less money, although very few offenders have multimillion-dollar income. But a cap would have value in heading off a public relations disaster: those few enormous fines that might make the whole system look outrageous. The New York Times ran anarticleabout day fines in Finland in April, focused tightly on a $58,000 speeding ticket issued to a businessman with an income of about $7 million a year and the public-relations campaign he started in retaliation.
Day fines could keep offenders with modest means out of jail and at home, with their families and in their jobs. The system could save money by reducing incarceration and probation. Supervising offenders on probation is pricey, and leads to more incarceration — half of all the inmates in American jails are there for technical violations of parole or probation.
Perhaps the most important advantage of day fines is this: The current system persists because it doesn’t affect people of means and clout. Cash-register justice is a poor-person problem. But it won’t change until it’s also a rich-person problem. Then there will be political pressure to do something about America’s counterproductive and unjust system of having defendants pay for our courts.
The
article “Our Gas Guzzlers, Their Lives” is about a country in Africa named
Burundi, and how the climate change is affecting it. This article is mainly
aimed at the people in well-established countries who have it better off.
Nicholas Kristof, the author, wants the readers to be convinced that global
warming is real, serious, and not a matter to be ignored. To achieve this goal,
he uses the three rhetorical appeals: ethos, logos, and pathos in such a way
that the reader is, both, convinced, and sympathizes with the text.
The
author starts off with a hook to gain the readers’ attention and intrigue them.
He uses strong adjectives and interviews different people to make it even more
convincing, and states facts on strong grounds. He also adds a touch of
sympathy, or pathos, in the article. He doesn’t only use the three rhetorical
appeals, but shapes the sentences, and the entire article in such a way that
it’s comfortable to read, and easy to understand.
Kristof
arranges the words, and uses them in a way that makes the reader feel bad about
the situation. This is where he brings in ‘pathos’. He tells us that Burundi is
the poorest country in the world with an annual average income of $100 per
individual. It is also stated that one of every five children die before the
age of five, and that the average life expectancy is 45 years. Not only does he
state facts but also quotes other people, like scientists, officials, locals.
He even tells us his own opinion about it, and says that global warming affects
the whole world, not only a part of it. “Against that grim backdrop, changing
weather patterns in recent years have already caused crop failures – and when
crops fail here, people starve [P4 GGTL]” he says. The last sentence of the
last paragraph states “The
cost of our environmental irresponsibility will be measured in thousands of
children dying of hunger, malaria and war” which is the author’s own opinion
but it also plays a part in pathos.
The
author also uses facts and figures, or ‘logos’ in his article. Kristof says
that Lake Tanganyika’s shoreline has retreated 50 feet in the last four years,
and ships can no longer reach the port, and Lake Victoria is losing half an
inch of water every day. The reason these facts are believable is because he
quotes credible people like scientists, and people who live or work there. As
mentioned in the previous paragraph, he states facts like the average life
expectancy, the average income of an individual, etc.
The
answer to the question “Why should I believe this?” is that he actually went
there and shares his own experience. And not only that, he quotes credible
people: scientists, officials including the president of Uganda, locals, etc.
Some of these people live there and go through the harsh conditions every day.
The author interviewed them and shares their opinions in his article. All of
this comes under ‘ethos’. He quotes Mr. Ehrhart, “It’s at the least disastrous
and quite possibly catastrophic. Life was difficult, but with climate change it
turns deadly. That’s what hits the alarm bells for an organization like Care,”
he added. “How can we ever achieve our mission in this situation?”
The
article would’ve been dull and boring if not played around with. The author
doesn’t leave the facts and quotes left separately, but mixes the three
appeals. He brings in sympathy to logos and ethos, and gives his own opinion
about the situation. All by shaping the sentences to make the reader feel bad,
and agree with him. The facts like the shrinking of lakes, average income, life
expectancy, death rate sound very sad because of how they are expressed, and
how they are arranged. The author also mixes ethos and pathos by quoting others
sharing their opinions about the climate change, and positioning them in a way
that it looks convincing. All three rhetorical appeals are also mixed together
when he quotes the panel “Projected reductions in yield in some countries could
be as much as 50 percent by 2020, and crop net revenues could fall as much as
90 percent”, where there are facts in a quote which bring in
sympathy.
The
whole article is perfectly organized and arranged as it makes the reader agree
to his argument and feel bad about it. The reader might share this article with
others, so they can try and make a difference. The author slipped in his
opinions in some parts, quoted credible people, stated facts to support his argument,
and brought emotions in this article and did a very good job at it. Although
there is a quote from a fisherman that says that even the hippos are unhappy,
which brings in a bit of humor and makes the reader not take the matter
seriously. Other than that, it was all well rounded.
Words
Cited (this would be on a separate page)
Kristof,
Nicholas. “Our Gas Guzzlers, Their Lives.” The New York Times, 28 June 2007
“To
analyze an argument rhetorically means to examine closely how it is composed
and what makes it an effective or ineffective piece of persuasion. A rhetorical
analysis identifies the text under scrutiny, summarizes its main ideas,
presents some key points about the text’s rhetorical strategies for persuading
its audience, and elaborates on these points.” --
Ramage, Bean, and Johnson in Writing
Arguments
]
Write a rhetorical analysis
essay of 4-5 pages on one of the articles listed below from The New York Times (search nytimes.com
or use links on course site):
Your essay should explain the
argument presented in the article and evaluate its effectiveness in persuading
its audience of its central claim and reasons. Your essay should identify at
the outset the audience at which the piece is aimed, its argumentative purpose,
and its central argument.Once you have
identified these concerns, evaluate the rhetorical effectiveness of the given
text.A rhetorical analysis examines 1)
the writer’s use of the three rhetorical appeals (ethos, pathos, and logos); 2)
the arrangement and style of the piece; 3) the context (kairos) of the piece
To earn a passing grade, your essay should
include:
1.A title!
An introduction that identifies your
article and sets up your argument about the article.
A thesis that evaluates the effectiveness
of the article based on the author’s use of rhetorical appeals (ethos,
pathos, logos), style, and context.
Effectively organized paragraphs with
strong topic sentences and transitions.
Examples from the article (summaries and
paraphrases in your own words and sentence structure, as well as some
brief, correctly integrated direct quotations).
6.A conclusion that provides closure to
the essay and considers the implications of the argument.
7.Consistent, correct use of MLA style,
including
Proper MLA in-text citations for all
paraphrases and direct quotations from the article (see pp. 384-7) and
A Works Cited page in correct MLA format
(which does NOT count towards your page minimum) since you will be
quoting from your article (see pp. 387-96). Your only source will be your article. No other research is
allowed.
8.Adherence to the conventions of
standard written English.
Prewriting:
Choose an article and
read it over carefully a few times.
Freewrite about your
response to the argument made in the article.What is the argument? Did the author
convince you of the argument? Why or why not?Be specific.
Freewrite or brainstorm
responses to each of the following questions:
a.How does the author present her- or
himself as credible (ethos)?Does this
strategy work? Why or why not?
b.Does the author use any emotional
appeals (pathos)?Are such appeals
effective?Why or why not?
c.Does the author use sound reasoning
(logos) to present the argument?Be
specific.
d.Is the style and organization of the
text effective? Why or why not?
e.What does the author do to frame the
context (kairos) of the piece?Could
more have been done? How so?
4.List 4 quotes you might use in your
essay, and explain how each one relates to your assessment of the author’s use
of ethos, pathos, logos, or kairos.
This
means it presents an opinion, an argument, or an illustration of a view
or experience. It is not a mere statement of fact.
It must ADDRESS the TOPIC.
While
this element seems obvious too, writers often get going and one thought
leads to another and another and the topic gets left behind. Re-read
the prompt several times to make sure you haven’t gone off topic beyond
the parameters of the assignment.
It must be SPECIFIC enough to be covered in the paper.
What
is the length of the assignment: two pages? ten pages? The length
determines how broad or narrow the scope of your thesis will be. Adjust
accordingly.
