TOW#4 IRB post Maya Angelou I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings tells the story of her childhood and her upbringing in a segregated Arkansas town. Angelou was born in California but was sent to live with her grandmother who owned a small store in Stamps, Arkansas. By repeating words that define a person’s race, such as Negro or white folk, Angelou makes the reader understand how, “growing up is painful for the Southern black girl, [and] being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat.” (Angelou 4) Angelou grew up in a deeply segregated time where words like Negro, Colored, or even Nigger were not uncommon, and while all of these are all very hurtful and belittling words Angelou chose to use them to describe herself and other members of the black community with them. While it seems that she is degrading herself, she actually seems to embrace these titles. She used the connotations of these words to trick the readers in some way, while they think that she despises her upbringing in the black community, the people she really spites are the white people who put those labels on the people that she loves. The white folk were, “strange pale creatures that lived in their alien unlife”, people that she couldn’t even think of as people, her community of black people where the normal ones, and while all of the other children were blinded by the ignorance of not knowing any better she was fully aware of her situation. Maya Angelou didn’t understand why her people, the normal people, were being labeled by these people who she saw as less then people, the white folk. In the end, Angelou makes the reader comprehend her experience growing up it a world that was controlled by people that she didn’t understand. 

TOW #3 Article, Oculus Rift Review

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/sep/21/oculus-virtual-reality-headsets-gear-crescent-bay-review

This week, I read a review of the Oculus Rift, a new gaming device that puts the user in a virtual reality by strapping on a headset, by a man named Andrew Gumbel. From the title, Gumbel’s review sounds like it will be promoting this revolutionary device that, “appears to be on to something”, but by the end becomes a condescending reproach on not only all virtual reality divides but the gaming community. Gumbel starts out his review with, “I have seen the future, and I’m worried it’s really going to mess me up” this could mean that he is either scared of what’s to come or humbled by how advanced this technology is, giving the reader mixed impressions. After this he talks about his test of the Oculus Rift, but nowhere tries to establish any sort of credibility whether it be a connection to the gaming industry or prior experience with this technology or any technology. His argument also doesn’t connect with the reader because he separates himself from the gaming community, which is the assumed audience, by saying things like, “what the virtual reality geeks refer to as” or, “a watershed moment for gaming freaks” which not only puts space between him and gamers, but also insults his audience by calling them “freaks” and “geeks”. Beyond his connection to the gaming world Gumbel’s article is poorly formatted and very choppy, he starts by talking about the Oculus Rift and what problems the company has faced, to describing another companies device, then back to the Oculus rift and its developer. These several leaps between topics with almost no transition are very confusing and make it seem like Gumbel is doing his research as he goes and is writing whatever the next hit on Google is. Overall Gumbel’s argument is ineffective and at sometimes insulting towards its audience and offers little to no value. 

TOW #2 1950-1960's Graffiti

This graffiti is from the 1950s to 1960s, a time when being gay in America was, pretty much, illegal. In the early 1950s, president Eisenhower passed a bill that said that anyone who found one of their employees to be a “pervert” could legally fire them for being gay, or could refuse service to someone who was gay. The reason for this graffiti was the way that the illegal gay bars were operated. The mafia ran several gay bars in the cities where gay people would go, but were cheated out of their money with overpriced service. Then with the money that they had made, the mafia would pay off the police to keep quiet about their illegal operation. The creator of this not only made a profound public statement, but also used some rhetoric in the process. The first rhetorical device to address is the creator’s diction; whoever this person is specifically used the word “prohibition” for a reason. There are many words that one can use that mean discrimination and oppression, which is what the gay people of that time were facing, but they chose to use the word “prohibition”. Prohibition means to forbid something by law, which is what was happening to them, but this also speaks directly to his or her audience, the people of America. 20 years earlier, America had gone through a period when alcohol was illegal, a time called the Prohibition, which was a bad time for America especially because it came right after the Great Depression. This is saying that Prohibition, this awful time in American history, still lives on, but in a different form; it gives the people of America an idea of how hard this is for the gay community by giving it something to compare it to. The creator of this also choses to say, “feeds the mafia”, the word “feeds” puts a picture into the observers head that the mafia is this monster that is feeding off of the American society and that they are turning the cops against the people. This imagery is to make people see just how bad this situation is, not only for the gays, for everyone in America.

IRB Intro #1

Over te next few weeks, I am going to be reading Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. This book is an unorthodox autobiography telling the story of Maya Angelou's life. I hope to come out of this book knowing more about this very famous writer, her experiences, and how she became the great person that she was.

TOW #1 How to Say Nothing in 500 Words

Paul Roberts writes a surprisingly entertaining and humorous piece about the correct way to write with meaning in How to Say Nothing in 500 Words. Roberts starts off his writing like any other writer would, with a title, but his title is very relevant to the rest of his essay. He makes his title an oxymoron, a statement that seems contradict itself, to give the readers a subtle hint to his purpose, which would be to teach the readers the proper way to write an essay, or any piece of writing, with meaning. What Roberts means to say is that just because there is something that is written, doesn’t mean that it is written well or conveys any meaning or point. Roberts also chooses to take the third person point of view, becoming an objective narrator who guides a student in writing his or her composition on college football. In this position Roberts acts as a guide or teacher and educates the student and the reader on the proper ways and strategies to write something with meaning, and how to avoid meaningless “fluff” or “filler”. Throughout the course of this paper, Roberts uses a great deal of sarcasm. Roberts often pokes fun at a situation that he is addressing saying things like a college professor is at, “the brink of lunacy” after reading several student papers on the same topic, or, “This was till funny during the war of 1812, but it has sort of lost it’s edge since then”. He of ten uses this sarcasm to show how foolish the writer looks while writing something that is truly piss-poor in an attempt to persuade the reader to take what he is saying to heart so that they too do not make the same mistake and look as foolish as the people in his examples. Paul Roberts writes How to Say Nothing in 500 Words to inform his readers about the proper way to write something with true meaning.  

Lewis Thomas,The Lives of a Cell

Lewis Thomas was, among a long list of things, a researcher who attended both Princeton University and Harvard Medical School. During this essay, The Lives of a Cell, Thomas describes the intricate inner workings of a single cell and how many separate organisms are involved in making just one cell work. Thomas says that men often think of their existence as greater than they really are, so in an effort to explain to the readers how complicated and interdependent the cell is, he draws a parallel to the Earth and says that the Earth and a cell are very similar. Throughout this essay, to back up his point, he personifies and compares the systems inside a cell. He starts off by comparing chloroplasts, the system that provides plants with energy, to enterprises, meaning to say that chloroplasts do are very elaborate and full of many different possesses. He also points out that chloroplasts are their own organisms that came into the cell and that they speak their own language, Thomas means to say that like the inhabitants of Earth have their own languages that differentiates them from one another, the chloroplasts are also different and specialized from the cells. Thomas’ comparison of the cell to Earth is very well backed and an interesting viewpoint that makes this enormous concept easy to digest for the common person.

A Giant Molecule
http://magazine.jhsph.edu/2007/Spring/features/dna/_images/cell_to_earth.jpg