In today's society, much of America's high schools and colleges have put athletics on a pedestal. Kids who have high academic achievements are nothing compared to successful athletes. In “America Needs Its Nerds”, Leonid Friedman acknowledges this unfair imbalance and decides that it's time to change the way nerds or geeks are viewed by society. Fridman develops his argument over why nerds should be held higher by using a shift of tones, compare and contrast, and figurative language. First, Fridman develops his argument over why nerds should be held to a higher position by shifting his tone throughout the passage. In paragraph 2, Fridman tells the reader how the Webster definition for geek is a “street performer who shocks the public by biting off heads of live chickens.” By using this …show more content…
For example, Fridman compares athletes to nerds in his quote, “Nerds are ostracized while athletes are idolized.” Fridman is explaining how kids who prefer to do academic activities compared to playing sports, later become social outcasts. He also compares other countries views of their nerds to how America views our nerds. For instance, Fridman explains to the reader how in other nations, “.... A kid who studies hard is lauded and held up an an example to other students.” While in America, athletics are held above academics on any given day. Also, Fridman uses elite professions in other countries to elite professions in America. In other countries, jobs such as being a professor in a university are one of the most rewarding jobs one can have. But in America, Fridman states, “Average professional ball players are much more respected and better paid than faculty members of the best universities.” Overall, Fridman is saying that anti-intellectualism in America is a problem and it needs to
South Park is an animated TV series created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, which first aired on Comedy Central in 1997. The show features four boys Eric Cartman, Stan Marsh, Kyle Broflovski, and Kenny McCormick. South Park has been seen as one of the most controversial shows due to its raunchy humor and obscene depiction of characters in the show. South Park deals with many current issues in the news surrounding anything from in politics to religion. In dealing with these issues South Park involves adult comedy that parodies current issues going on in the United States and around the world. South Park also uses many other rhetorical deceives, such as
In the movie Bowling for Columbine, Michael Moore uses rhetoric in a very successful way by how he carried himself as your typical everyday American guy. Moore was effectively able to use the appeal to ethos, logos, and pathos by the way he conveyed his message and dressed when interviewing such individuals. Throughout the movie he gives his audience several connections back to the Columbine shooting and how guns were the main target. Moore is able to push several interviews in the direction of which he wants too get the exact answer or close to what he wanted out of them. He effectively puts himself as the main shot throughout the film to give the audience more understanding and allowing a better connection to the topic.
Rick Reilly, in his ESPN column (2007), contends that sports competitions are more than simple games, instead, they are events capable of bringing people together in unique ways. He reinforces his contention by integrating inspirational anecdotal evidence, bold syntax, and unvarnished diction. Reilly’s purpose is to point out the importance and humanity of sports in order to convince a college professor and readers of sports magazines that sports writing is indeed an advanced and valuable profession. He assumes a humorous tone (“...most important- sports is the place where beer tastes best”) for an audience of sports magazine readers, but more specifically, a professor that told him that he was “better than sports.”
He states, “Nerds are ostracized while athletes are idolized” The rest of the piece does not address this crucial claim and yet it still supports the overarching theme of rejecting intellectual pursuit. Americans are known for their preference of physical prowess over intellectual pursuit and Fridman acknowledges that however briefly. It is likely he chose to touch on the subject for only a moment because a further analysis would derail the purpose of the passage.
Amanda Ripley argues in The Atlantic in her article “The Case Against High School Sports”, that the United States place too much attention on sports rather than academics. Ripley argues that sports programs at schools should be reduced, maybe even cut out completely. She states that there are a lot of countries that outperform America on international tests, and it is because they put more of their emphasis on academics, where the United States puts more of an emphasis on athletics. Ripley says that high school sports negatively affects academics. (1). I disagree with Ripley on this topic; I think that sports are important for young kids because it teaches them very valuable life lessons and it keeps them out of trouble.
Botstein begins his essay by listing examples to assert that the American high school is obsolete. He describes high school as if to someone who knows nothing about it, so as to better expose the failings of the institution. Current or former high-schoolers remember the team sport culture, but might not realize its harm without Botstein’s detached and somewhat analytical description.
Mothers always want the best for their daughters, it’s a given feeling for a mother. Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom is written in her perspective as the mother. In The Joy Luck Club, Amy tan writes the novel through her eyes as the daughter of the relationship. Both passages portray the harsh emotions between the mother and her daughter. These emotions are caused by the mother pressuring her daughter to achieve expectations. The two excerpts have similar stressful tones but Amy Tan’s novel is much more intense and displays a uglier relationship.
In the book Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer wrote about Christopher McCandless, a nature lover in search for independence, in a mysterious and hopeful experience. Even though Krakauer tells us McCandless was going to die from the beginning, he still gave him a chance for survival. As a reader I wanted McCandless to survive. In Into the Wild, Krakauer gave McCandless a unique perspective. He was a smart and unique person that wanted to be completely free from society. Krakauer included comments from people that said McCandless was crazy, and his death was his own mistake. However, Krakauer is able to make him seem like a brave person. The connections between other hikers and himself helped in the explanation of McCandless’s rational actions. Krakauer is able to make McCandless look like a normal person, but unique from this generation. In order for Krakauer to make Christopher McCandless not look like a crazy person, but a special person, I will analyze the persuading style that Krakauer used in Into the Wild that made us believe McCandless was a regular young adult.
In “Hidden Intellectualism” by Gerald Graff, the author speaks about how schools should use students’ interests to develop their rhetorical and analytical skills. He spends a majority of his essay on telling his own experience of being sport loving and relating it to his anti-intellectual youth. He explains that through his love for sports, he developed rhetoric and began to analyze like an intellectual. Once he finishes his own story, he calls the schools to action advising them to not only allow students to use their interest as writing topics, but instead to teach the students on how to implement those compelling interests and present them in a scholarly way. In perspective, Graff’s argument becomes weak with his poor use of ethos, in which he solely focuses on his own anecdote but, through the same means he is able to build his pathos and in the last few paragraphs, with his use of logic he prevents his argument from becoming dismissible.
For a majority of children, their role model is their favorite celebrity. These celebrities tend to be athletes, or musicians. Several gifted children admire people who are not as famous, such as famous scientists, authors, or artists. While an intellectual child may be a fan of a celebrity, they may not look up to them in the same way other students would. “Certainly the image presented by modern celebrities suggests that intellectualism has no ties to success and social legitimacy,” which explains how celebrities are practically promoting anti-intellectualism (Penrod, 755). Other students will likely find intellectuals’ role models strange and will tease both the role models and the intellectual children, which decreases their reputation with the intellectuals. Nobody wants to be friends with someone who mocks their role model. When everybody is making fun of an intellectual’s role model, the chances of an intellectual socializing are slim for his ir her feelings are hurt. If the people setting examples were intellectuals, the anti-intellectual movement would probably be different, but as of now, the only way for gifted people to be popular is to change the world with whatever they do best. Changing the world sounds much harder when an intellectual student does not have
The journey begins at the heart of the matter, with a street smart kid failing in school. This is done to establish some common ground with his intended audience, educators. Since Graff is an educator himself, an English professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago, he understands the frustrations of having a student “who is so intelligent about so many things in life [and yet] seems unable to apply that intelligence to academic work” (380). Furthermore, Graff blames schools for not utilizing street smarts as a tool to help improve academics; mainly due to an assumption that some subjects are more inherently intellectual than others. Graff then logically points out a lack of connection “between any text or subject and the educational depth and weight of the discussion it can generate” (381). He exemplifies this point by suggesting that any real intellectual could provoke thoughtful questions from any subject, while a buffoon can render the most robust subjects bland. Thus, he is effectively using logic and emotion to imply that educators should be able to approach any subject critically, even non-traditional subjects, lest they risk being labeled a buffoon.
Speaking in regard to Graff’s credibility, throughout his article, he alludes to George Orwell, and Shakespeare, but doesn’t hesitate to mention sports figures such as Joe DiMaggio and Bob Feller. In these quotes, Graff writes, “a George Orwell writing on the cultural meanings of penny postcards is infinitely more substantial than the cogitations of many professors on Shakespeare or globalization” (265), and “I also loved the sports novels for boys of John R. Tunis and Clair Bee and autobiographies of sports stars like Joe DiMaggio’s Lucky to be a Yankee, and Bob Feller’s Strikeout Story” (265). In mentioning both spectrums of what he calls intellectualism, this provides Graff with more credibility because not only does
Fridman’s argument is extremely convincing in the proving his point through the use of drawing comparisons and juxtaposing them, adding a tone shift, and adding rhetorical questions that include anaphora to help emphasize his point in the passage. Leonid Fridman in “America Needs Its Nerds” reflects American ideological thinking in a harsh indifferent way. With the use of various rhetorical devices Leonid Fridman successfully develops his argument that for America’s sake, anti- intellectual values must be fought, and the need for America to reestablish its value system to remain a world- class power.
Graff begins by talking about the educational system, and why it flawed in many ways, but in particular, one: Todays schools overlook the intellectual potential of street smart students, and how shaping lessons to work more readily with how people actually learn, we could develop into something capable of competing with the world. In schools, students are forced to recite and remember dull and subject heavy works in order to prepare them for the future, and for higher education. “We associate the educated life, the life of the mind, too narrowly and exclusively with subjects and texts that we consider inherently weighty and academic. We assume that it’s possible to wax intellectual about Plato, Shakespeare, the French Revolution, and nuclear fission, but not about cars, dating, fashion, sports, TV, or video games.” (Graff, 198-199) In everyday life, students are able to learn and teach themselves something new everyday. It is those students, the “young person who is impressively “street smart” but does poorly in school” (Graff, 198), that we are sweeping away from education and forcing to seek life in places that are generally less successful than those who attend a college or university.
In their minds, if they do well in school, they can get a career that can help them become successful. Although the students do not put limits on the relationship between social class and education, the school system does. The view that the school system has for the classifications of intellectualism leaves out the interests of most of the students. The writer Graff address this in his article within the lines, “ Only much later did it dawn on me that the sports world was more compelling than school because it was more intellectual than school, not less. Sports after all was full of challenging arguments, debates, problems for analysis, and intricate statistics that you could care about, as school conspicuously was not.” (Graff 790) In those lines, he speaks about sports, which is a topic that is not considered to hold intellectual value by the school system. He shows that other interests besides the things we learn in school can have intellectual value. He makes it apparent that it does not matter the individual’s economic status because they can still be smart. This article shows that everyone can connect and contribute to learning with their different interests, and their interest can bridge the gap that society creates between the social classes if they decide that they want to be successful and take their education