Close reading: Why men are in trouble

Goal: Add more voice and analysis and blend it all smoothly with sophistication in 40 minutes. (Taking 5 mins away, considering you need to read the article/analyze). Also, i'm going to try deter from the 'formulaic' strategy a lot of people use because it just doesn't allow for growth much.

Here we go folks. 

Its often regarded as a common fact that girls mature earlier and at a much faster rate than men, some studies showing a four year difference in brain development between boys and girls of the same age as well as maturity. However, the article Why Men are in Trouble (Trouble) by William J. Bennett takes this to a whole new level. In his article, William uses diction to create a matter of factly tone that he uses to expose the fatal flaws in today's society and its effects on the male population.

Bennett structures his article by first citing his claim then, after establishing the fact that men are falling behind women, then pointing out the responses and sources to the problem. The matter of factly tone is first established by the numbers, the third paragraph being filled with, where Bennett builds his creditably as a intelligent writer and trust by his reader. Along with politically correct and unbiased words such as "out of wedlock" rather than something more humorous like "baby Daddy" that gives Bennett his tone, there is also a realism he presents that makes the reader know he is likely to be intelligent but also experienced. This is evident when he states "I've heard too many young women asking, 'Where are the decent single men?'". The diction that Bennett uses hones in onto the fact that he is not blind to society or the world, creating a truthful and brutally honest tone.

Using this tone, Bennett goes future to use it along with diction to prove the failures men in today's society and its problem areas. He first expresses his view of men failing by using words such as "pathetic" and men being "left in the dust", bringing about the subconscious comparision to the coyote that was outsmarted by the roadrunner. Furthermore, he uses language to show the holes in societal logic, specifically using video games as a segway. Bennett exploits the failures of society, comparing the number of video game hours to men's productivity, "Today, 18-to- 34-year-old men spend more time playing video games a day than 12-to- 17-year-old boys" . There is also a tonal shift in work, going from brutal honesty to slight disappointment in today's culture as he points out that people are telling men to 'be a man' yet failing to define what exactly is it. All this comes together in his last paragraph where he sums up the point of his article: "that industriousness, marriage and religion are a very important basis for male empowerment and achievement" and the fact that men are receiving mixed signals to the importance of these pillars, where the media has skewed the necessity of these things to achieve. 

Bennett compiles a series of facts and examples, led by simple yet defining choices in words and comparisons that come together to prove that men today are more at risk of failing, not only to women, but overall as a person if they do not pull it together. 

Response to Course Material

D: So sorry, it was saved in my draft! Oh and Ali Van, I think we've been peer reviewers before right? I went through and made sure I capitalized all my "i"s for you. Thanks for that tip. :)


I'm so confused!
I don't know how to approach my writing. Like, my thought process is so scattered and utterly disorganized that i sometimes wonder how i'm supposed to make sense about it. The essay over A Barred Owl and The History Teacher made my head spin because there was so much that I notice but I couldn't put it all into words, it was all there just not....there. (That doesn't make sense does it?) When we went through it I kept going "Yeah! I noticed that!" followed by "OMG how did i miss that?!" or "Why didn't I think of that!" or
"I'm a complete dumbsuck for not mentioning that.". Its like, I have good ideas, but the way I approach it (anxiety maybe?) and the way I execute my work seems to be lacking. Something about making the words come together confuses me, i notice that my writing lacks a certain.....spot on...its almost...vague-like.

Sometimes, when I'm writing these essays, I feel like I'm dying, shriveling up on the inside because I have so much to say and I can't put it out into words. Which is bad because I'm the type of writer where if I can feel a piece of work, it flows through me onto the paper yet I can't connect with anything we've read all year. Not even one bit.

Anyways,  I liked that we went over Salesmen. Father vs. Son, Linda being the not-so-doormat character, Willy is a prostitute. Pretty awesome, I feel almost proud that my Salesmen book is all marked up properly and its not even filler annotations, y'know, the type where you just underline and repeat what you just said three pages ago, my annotations were AP worthy. Or, atleast I'd like to believe that. I started a little bit on Ceremony by Silko and I can't wrap my head around it. The story's timeline is different, jumping from place to place, there aren't any chapters and the narrator sounds like he needs to grow a pair and deal with his problems (I'm only on page 40, he's just puking everywhere.)

Just treading through Ceremony now and trying to learn the best I can. Lit is still my favorite class and AP is supposed to be challenging, hopefully I can grow from this.

Open Prompt: Wine on the Streets

2009. A symbol is an object, action, or event that represents something or that creates a range of associations beyond itself. In literary works a symbol can express an idea, clarify meaning, or enlarge literal meaning. Select a novel or play and, focusing on one symbol, write an essay analyzing how that symbol functions in the work and what it reveals about the characters or themes of the work as a whole. Do not merely summarize the plot.

One of the biggest driving force in society is its insatiable appetite, restaurants account for a portion much of any developed country's revenue, taking food in, putting out new inventive entrees and in any underdeveloped country; people would kill for a meal. However, in A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens takes hunger to a whole new level. From one simple scene, the dropping of a wine crate in the middle of the street, Dickens characterizes the societal needs, wants and motivation during the book's setting.

A Tale of Two Cities is set around the late 1700s in either Paris or London, where there is conflict between the aristocratic class and the suffering peasants that work beneath them that eventually leads to the French Revolution. In the streets of France, outside of a wine shop a wine casket is broken, where red wine is split into the streets and its peasants begin to lap up the split wine like wild, untamed animals. 

Dickens describes the scene as chaotic and provides a grotesque and disturbed attitude towards the crowd that is swarming simply for wine. This chaotic hunger for a liquid is meant to represent the hunger that the peasants have for food, literally, and for freedom. In the book, the aristocratic characters are described to be evil, foreboding characters that have no sympathy towards anyone that works beneath them, especially the peasants. They are described to the overworked and under appreciated muscles of France, dying from hunger. The hunger is then taken metaphorically when the reader realizes that the setting is during the French Revolution, when peasants became rebels, trying, starving for the freedom that French higher class and royalty has taken from them.

The mad scene in which hordes of people are crowding around food, lapping up red wine is also meant to represent the mob mentality which plays out later in the book. The red wine symbol can also be extended to mean blood, which is exactly what Dickens wants the reader to realize when a peasant, hand soaked in wine write 'blood' on the walls of the street. Indeed, the symbolism in the fallen win crate, the mob mentality and blood, is then realized when the peasants join together quiet literally spill the blood of the French royalty and their suppressors on the streets in which the wine had been split earlier in the novel. 

Charles Dickens grew up during a time that was barely making its way out of the French Revolution and he himself came to critique the society of his time, where a frenzied mob with the same motivations held the same amount of weight as it did in his novel. Dickens uses the split wine to embody the hunger for justice and freedom of people who were ignored and at the same time, extends his metaphor to show the mob mentality through the red wine's color and the actions taken to obtain it and what was done with it. 

Open Prompt- To Kill a Mockingbird

1996. The British novelist Fay Weldon offers this observation about happy endings. "The writers, I do believe, who get the best and most lasting response from their readers are the writers who offer a happy ending through moral development. By a happy ending, I do not mean mere fortunate events -- a marriage or a last minute rescue from death -- but some kind of spiritual reassessment or moral reconciliation, even with the self, even at death." Choose a novel or play that has the kind of ending Weldon describes. In a well-written essay, identify the "spiritual reassessment or moral reconciliation" evident in the ending and explain its significance in the work as a whole.

Childhood has often been marked as a time of discovery and growth, where we learn to deal with the consequences of our actions, where the classic coming of age story begins. In To Kill a Mocking Bird, the young narrator, Scout, comes to an emotional and mental epiphany by the end of the novel as she is standing on Boo Radley’s porch.  Harper Lee paints a novel of Scout’s emotional development and eventual understanding of the world when ‘understanding’ one and another became a rare and novelty action.

To Kill a Mockingbird, is a classic novel about a young girl living in a small town, Maycomb, during a time where racial tension ran high. Through her experiences with her brother, friend and Father, as well as a mysterious neighbor deemed “Boo” Radley, Scout eventually learns to see the world from another person’s eyes.

Scout’s initial mindset at the start of the book was childish and immature, typical of a child, having no understanding or respect towards others. Scout’s description of Boo Radley was nothing short of a monster; she thought of him as a person who only came out at night, ate small animals, had teeth made for maiming things and bloodshot eyes. Although, by the end of the novel, after seeing an innocent man condemned and being saved by Boo Radley himself. She then describes him as a man with incredibly pale skin and proceeds to walk him home. Scout reaches a moment of emotional epiphany and growth as she stands on Boo Radley’s doorstep and sees the world, her world, from his point of view. Harper Lee uses a rather nostalgic tone as Scout describes seeing herself from Boo Radley’s doorstep many summers ago, making a play out of Boo Radley. This innocence that she possessed at the start of the novel has grown into maturity as she is able to do what her father said, to go “into someone’s skin and walk around in it”.

This moment of revelation in Scout’s life is central to the ongoing theme of the novel, the idea that one should treat another as he would like to be treated, no matter their skin color or of how you first judge them.  The novel’s title To Kill a Mockingbird directly relates to Scout and the plot of the novel as Tom Robinson, a falsely accused black man symbolizing a mockingbird is killed, because Scout no longer possesses the naiveté that drove her mostly white town to convict Tom Robinson in the first place. Instead, Scout has finally obtained the ability to see the world from another person’s eyes and realize that they are the same, that they are equal, to everyone else. So no longer makes fun of Boo Radley, sneaking into his backyard and leaves his doorstep with respect towards the man.
 

The ability to truly understand and empathize for a person may be more common known now than it was during Scout’s time. Since then, the world has grown more liberal but during Harper Lee’s time, a court may hold a guilty verdict simply for the color of a man’s skin. In her novel, Lee exploits this continuing theme in her time through the eyes of a child that has yet been taint by society’s corruption. She, instead, shows the insight that Scout achieves by using Boo Radley and Scout’s relationship as parallelism to that of a white and black man in her time. Only this time, Scout doesn’t hold a guilty verdict on Boo Radley, she comes to understand and respect him.


Ms. Holmes: Somehow the commenting on this died and my peers were not able to comment on this page. I'm working on the solution but they have posted their comments on my Spruz profile page. Please don't take off points for them. Thank you. :)