Close Reading #1: The Coming Meltdown in College Education & Why The Economy Won’t Get Better Any Time Soon

The article which I am analyzing for my first close reading is "The Coming Meltdown in College Education & Why The Economy Won’t Get Better Any Time Soon," a blog post by Dallas Mavericks owner and entrepreneur Mark Cuban. Predictably, this article discusses parallels between the economy and higher education, focusing on similarities between ballooning college debt and the housing bubble which led to the economic crisis in 2008. 

Cuban seems to have a working knowledge of the rhetorical situation, if he isn't consciously considering it. The piece uses very clear, direct vocabulary that nearly anyone can understand, delving into more complex language only when necessary to convey meaning. As his target audience probably includes a wide range of people, most notably fans of the Mavericks, his writing would be easy to read for anyone interested in his thoughts. His subject is also very obvious, as he is focused only upon college and the economics of getting a degree. He seems to want to convince people that college debt is a problem in the US, and his purpose may be just that. The way he wants readers to see him requires a bit more analysis on the reader's part; I would say he is trying to appear to be an intelligent, well-informed and experienced person from the business world delivering the 'truth' about the value of a college education, having had many varied experiences in different jobs himself. 

As far as more specific aspects of rhetoric go, his diction carries strong negative connotations when referring to college loans. The title itself refers to a coming "meltdown" when other less alarming words could have been chosen; simply coming forward and directly referring to "outstanding college loans" would convey more information about the topic and carry a more neutral tone. Much of the diction gains significance in the context of the economy, and carry a different connotation than elsewhere. He refers to the housing "bubble," a dreaded economic collapse that reminds people of specific economic problems in recent decades. "Easy money" is also mentioned a few times, and it would seem to be a positive thing. However, when used in the context of ballooning debt figures for American college students, it becomes negative.

The way his sentences are arranged also work towards his purpose of getting people concerned about the college debt situation. He mentions "innovators" immediately after "traditional universities" to emphasize that the universities are outdated and a system of the past. Juxtaposition is also used by referring to a degree as "a piece of paper" after writing that an employer searches for "people who can do the job" and "the best and brightest," again emphasizing his point that a college education does not guarantee to an employer that someone is a good candidate for a job. Cuban also uses short sentences set off from paragraphs in order to place more emphasis on key points of the article. In these places, he states that "a de-stabilization of the university system as we know it... can't happen fast enough," putting his view of the event as a positive occurrence in its own paragraph in order to make the reader focus on that sole idea. He does this a number of times, making his writing very clear to follow and very forceful in its statements.

The details which he chooses to include also clearly intentionally create a feeling of the facts being on his side. Nobody thinks positively about the housing crisis, so comparing the similarities between the two creates a very negative image. If Cuban were to simply give statistics as to the price of college over time and the amount of college debt, it might be a more powerful argument in terms of standing up to any opposing claims. However, it wouldn't carry the same weight to people who have just experienced the housing crisis and are likely to be scared if another such crisis is mentioned. There are very few statistics included, but it is stated that the student loan debt is "[past] 1 TRILLION DOLLARS." In an article with very few statistics, it makes this number seem even bigger, and the power of this one detail is emphasized by the lack of other details.

In his article about student loan debt, Mark Cuban uses rhetoric to convey his powerful and clear viewpoint on the issue.

Open Prompt #1: AP essay practice

Home is an emotionally powerful idea that has the potential to evoke strong responses from audiences in any form of communication. The meaning of home is different to each and every person, so it can draw widely varied responses from different people. When Sonsyrea Tate says that "you can leave home all you want, but home will never leave you" it could instill a feeling of dread in some readers, or a feeling of great joy in others, in addition to whatever other combination of deeply felt emotions the reader may be feeling.

The Grapes of Wrath is a work in which the characters may leave their homes, but their homes never truly leave them. Tom Joad is forced by the circumstances to become the major provider for his family, a major contrast to his position as an inmate while they still lived in Oklahoma. The family consisted of self-providing farmers who got by well enough on their own, but when they were unable to grow enough to survive, they were uprooted and it seemed like their whole lives changed. However, they still retained a few qualities that had been central to them at their home.

Family is very important when you are a farmer; when there are very few other people around, the bonds that are formed between family members are amazingly strong. An agricultural family works as a social unit to support each other against the face of a seemingly all-powerful force: nature. The Joad family tries to stick together throughout the story, but they are eventually split up as Tom again becomes a fugitive from the law, and the quality of home in the form of their family seems to be gone. It seems that their family is broken up, they have lost what held them together, and they are away from home in a hostile land where they can't survive like they used to. One could take away from this that they did indeed lose everything that had been theirs in their home. If all the details are accounted for, it would appear to be that while Tom may have lost almost all of what his "home" was, but there was still some with him. He refused to let the circumstances dictate his actions, and began to lead an effort to organize the farm labor of poor migrants with similar circumstances.

After losing his physical home, Tom found his home away from home in the form of his family. After being forced away from his family, Tom once again found a home in the form of the burgeoning organized labor movement that he became a part of. United once again with a group of people working to support one another against a seemingly all-powerful force, Tom retains an aspect of what his home was to him even though he has lost the most precious part of his home: his family, his farm, his livelihood. Home is not something that you can take away from somebody; it is a part of a person as much as their hands or their mind.

EDIT: I was responding to the following prompt:

2010, Form B. “You can leave home all you want, but home will never leave you.” —Sonsyrea Tate

Sonsyrea Tate’s statement suggests that “home” may be conceived of as a dwelling, a place, or a state of mind. It may have positive or negative associations, but in either case, it may have a considerable influence on an individual. Choose a novel or play in which a central character leaves home yet finds that home remains significant. Write a well-developed essay in which you analyze the importance of “home” to this character and the reasons for its continuing influence. Explain how the character’s idea of home illuminates the larger meaning of the work. Do not merely summarize the plot.

Response to Course Materials #1

The assignments in AP Lit up to this point have not been what I expected. I thought that I would be reading heavy literature this summer and analyzing much information, so the first meeting in the class was a surprise. The material is similar to much of what I learned in previous years but it is very clear that a much higher level of reading and writing is expected of me in this course, which I am actually glad about since I would like to become a better reader and writer.

Nearly everything that we have covered so far has clicked with me, except some of the poetry.Applying what we have discussed in class and in the readings is a little more challenging. Thinking back of books that I loved as a kid, there was so much about them that I didn't understand. In his Inheritance Cycle, Christopher Paolini clearly had something that he wanted to convey about the world and I didn't really think about how it was influencing me. My religious beliefs were greatly influenced by it, which I discovered when I re-read Eldest a year ago, as I found a passage with an extremely didactic tone about religion that I connected with on a very deep level. I must have missed a lot of the more subtle facets of his writing, as I didn't think about what it meant that it was raining when the character Roran was fighting agents of the evil Empire, and I have never even stopped to think about what the significance of the name Eragon could be. Since reading Foster's book, I feel like I have been thinking much more about seemingly random aspects of literature and why the author chose to include them.

The most significant topic we covered in terms of analyzing the intent of writers will probably be the rhetorical situation, but it's only been a few days since we went over it for the first time. In both American Literature and Lit/Comp 9 rhetoric was something that we learned about and it's certainly not new to me, so I have consumed media while considering parts of the rhetorical situation for quite a while now. I hope that during this course it begins to become second nature to me, because I am much more likely to think about it when I listen to a politician speak than I am when I'm watching a movie for entertainment.

I hope to apply the writing skills from Nuts and Bolts in my college applications, speaking of which, I have something that I need to work on....

Sedaris Essay Analysis

        When I saw the title of Sedaris' essay, I gritted my teeth and prepared for a painful read. "Me Talk Pretty One Day?" All I could imagine was a nightmare of grammatical errors and broken English that would be about as pleasant to read as a dictionary. However, I was pleased by the quality of his essay. It genuinely amused me and I was impressed with Sedaris' writing abilities.

        Although he probably didn't write it with a copy of The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing in hand, Sedaris displays his skills in impressive fashion with this humorous essay. The flow of the essay is very good, due in part to the fact that it is a narrative and "[good] essays unfold like stories" (Harvey 23). Sedaris uses a few characters very often in his work, mostly himself and his evil French professor. Instead of presenting "a jumble of characters," he has two main characters and introduces other minor characters as needed to further the purpose of his essay (Harvey 23).

        The flow of the essay might have seemed spot-on to me, but when I looked more closely I saw that nearly half of Sedaris' paragraphs began with something along the lines of "the seamstress," "the second Anna," "the two Polish Annas;" did this not contradict Harvey's assertion that the opening sentence is "where the reader can see how the paragraph" is connected to the previous one (Harvey 71, Sedaris 2)? It seemed to be the flaw of the essay that I had been searching for, but those openings worked well to connect the ideas of each paragraphs, as Sedaris was dealing with a fairly straightforward story in his piece, recounting what had allegedly happened.

        Lest I admit defeat and claim Sedaris could do no wrong, I turned to the beast that can defeat even the most talented writers: proper use of punctuation. Maybe the writer isn't the most careful person and had a comma or a period out of place that he missed. This is when my triumph came, and it was sweet. When quoting his mother, Sedaris wrote that she had said "'I love my cat, and I love ...' My sisters and I leaned forward, waiting to hear our names." Looks fine, right? Commas in the right places, chose to include the optional comma in the first phrase, the period is in the right place. But one thing was neglected: Sedaris used the three-dot ellipsis, ignoring Harvey's admonition that "if you are using [a] quotation to end a sentence in your essay, add a fourth dot, representing the period" (Harvey 65). How could Sedaris miss a detail so essential to his essay, creating such a monstrosity of ambiguity in a work which seemed to exemplify the clarity that Harvey had championed? It can only be said that the reader can never know for sure, but that they are on their own to decide what the author's real intent was.

        Despite this catastrophic failure of Sedaris to adhere to the stringent rules of English punctuation, I feel that his essay is a great example of the type of writing taught by Nuts and Bolts. While it is not picture perfect, it is worth mentioning that the writer is only human; or at least I would hope so.

Poetry MC response: Summer entry #2

• LEARN MORE POETRY VOCAB!
• "feel" the poem (emotion, author's tone)
• Learn to recognize subtle distinctions in meaning
• Recognize importance of capitalization, line breaks and how they place emphasis on certain things
• Learn the different types of poems (I kind of know sonnets)

 There were two things that seemed the very significant to me when I did the poetry exercises. The first was that I was in a "test-taking mode," where I just try to quickly analyze the contents of the poem and move on through the questions. In class (the only place where I really read poetry) I think I usually do something like this, and I don't really feel the meaning on the poem as I read it but just try to focus intensely and somehow dissect it that way. I don't think this really works for me, but maybe I just need more experience. It certainly hasn't made reading poetry the most enjoyable experience.

The other thing that stood out to me was that I didn't understand a lot of the vocabulary used in the questions about poetry, so I definitely need to learn that. I know that the book about reading literature like a "professor" said not to worry about types of poetry (other than sonnets), but I think for the purposes of this class I'll need to know some of the types. The more subtle parts of the poems escaped me, probably because I was trying to get through them quickly and wasn't able to make notes on them (used the .pdf file without printing to save paper).

In general, I'm not confident at all in my poetic abilities, but I'm sure most of my classmates are in the same boat as me, so that gives me some comfort.

Diagnostic test reflection (blog entry #1)

Taking the diagnostic test brought back painful memories of AP review from last year, reminding me just how excruciatingly close the new school year is and how boring it gets at times. Not a good outlook for going into a new year.

On to the results: I got 35 out of the 50 questions correct, performing slightly better on the prose sections than on the poetry, which is worse than I expected to do overall but I can live with it. I think I just need to brush up my skills of literary analysis, as I haven't done any sort of serious analysis of a piece of literature this summer. I'm confident that the course will prepare me for the AP test, but I think it is a bit ridiculous that a literature test is based on peoples' abilities to analyze writing when they have nearly no time to think about it, as it hardly seems to reflect one's ability to meaningfully read a piece of literature.