Article Gone Bad

Initially after reading Let us all bear witness to the conversation! How the media-Political Class Ate the News this summer I felt like I had just gotten off the teacup ride at Disney World. The article was all over the place. The most apparent issue that stood out to me was how it flipped between the death of Michael Brown and politics.  The second issue that stood out the most was the tone of the article. The article’s language choice flipped between serious and conversational. The original choice of language in the piece really took away from the heart of the argument. In the original piece the author has all the right ingredients to cook up a well written article and they just made certain mistakes that we are all capable of making. The mistakes they made turned the article into an article gone bad. Demonstrated in my analysis below are the techniques that I used to take this article from an article gone bad to an article gone good.

               The first thing I had to observe when reconstructing this discourse is where does my issue fall on my list of policy arguments. You may ask what list I am referring to? The list I am referring to is found within David Kaufer’s article A Plan for Teaching the Development of Original Policy Arguments. . I decided that my argument fell into category one which is “One of us misunderstands the intended sense of reference of certain statements” (Kaufer 59). I choose this as the level the argument was operating in because the original information acted as it was trying to prove the definition of what it is to bear witness and how through its relationship with national conversation how it should have been done this summer. Instead of some of the forms of Journalism that were practiced in Ferguson this summer.

              The second thing that I worked on within my article was the organization pattern. My first attempt at organizing the article involved me printing out the article and cutting it into sections. After I divided the article into sections I then begin to organize the strips of paper into an organization pattern that I thought had a flow too it. One of the biggest hassles about organizing this article is that it was all over the place but being that I decided on what my main argument was it was easy for me to construct the coherence once I saw all the pieces layed out. Our style manual states “readers must see how everything in a section or whole is relevant to this point”(William 75). I made a mass cut of mentioning Hillary Clinton because of this point that are manual listed. All the subject matters that I left in the paper have some sort of connection to each other and flow together. The mention of Mrs. Clinton stood out to me as a random fact that did not need to be discussed.

The third major thing I had to do with this paper is cut the amount of inappropriate words. The article did not contain strong inappropriate language but the choice of language in certain sentences was highly inappropriate. Chapter 13 of our Working with Words text goes into great detail explain to us that you can’t make assumptions with your word choice. One word that I left in the article that it talks about we shouldn’t disclose is race. I felt the need to leave in that Michael Brown was black because I thought it was key information to the story. Some of the other words that I decided to delete were cauldron and rhetorical snack food.  I deleted cauldron because it doesn’t have direct meaning it can be interpreted in to many different ways. Rhetorical snack food I thought was a clever usage of words but inappropriate for this because it made the article seem biased. When these words were used in the piece they were not acknowledging the other side of the argument they were making biases claims.