Monday, April 18, 2016
Blog Prompt 4/27
At this point you have finished reading your book club texts and been working on presentations for a week. What are the key points you want to convey to your classmates about your interpretation of the content and, more importantly, writing style, of this text? What is the best way to accomplish that?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
The key points I want the audience to understand after our presentation is the life and struggles of the princess. When you think of royalty you imagine being waited on hand and foot, lavish lifestyles and respect and that's not the life of our princess. With this book being told through her perspective, we get a very special look into her and I think that allows the reader to become more emotionally tied to her. This perspective, I believe, was the perfect way to tell her story because it allows the reader a behind the scenes look into a culture thats strives on privacy. I think the best way to convey this emotional appeal is to give the audience a character break down along with knowledge of her family. This will allow the audience to picture her and her family structure to attempt to wrap their minds around her day to day life.
ReplyDeleteThe key points I want the audience to realize and understand from our presentation about Barbara Ehrenreich's novel, Bait and Switch, is that no matter how hard you try, how long you go to school, no matter how well you use your resources, it doesn't always turn out the way you plan. I feel like people these days believe that if they try their bests and do everything possible in their power to succeed, that they will reach their goals, it doesn't always happen that way. Barbara did everything she could, hired coaches for her to find a job, went on many interviews, and in the end, after months of searching and planning, she ended up getting only one offer, and it wasn't good pay at all and not a job she felt was up to her standards. As for writing style, Barbara actually immerses herself into her work and portrays it on the book, so you can feel her thoughts, her emotions and understand her thinking, all the while she's going through different situations. The best way to accomplish her perspective is to lay it all out, clear and plain so everyone can understand exactly what she dealt and went through to get to where she ended up, even if it wasn't that great.
ReplyDeleteI think the message you want the audience to receive is really important. We are raised to believe we can be whatever we want to but that's not true. I'll never be in the NBA for a princess and I think because we have always been told that we can be whatever we want, people have a hard time understanding and accepting that. I am looking forward to your presentation and interested to see how you convey that message.
ReplyDeleteI agree with everything you said. Conveying a message is very important or else the audience is lost in what the meaning of a message is.
DeleteAfter reading this story, Princess, it opened my eyes to what life can be like for people living outside of the United States. Living in America we are able to do basically whatever we want regardless of gender. Being a women and reading this story of how cruel they are to the women in Saudi Arabia really hit me emotionally and I hope that message gets out to the rest of the class when presenting the information my group has put together. By showing examples of scenes in the text and stories about the princess and her family I believe that the class will receive the message that royalty is not all it is cracked up to be. Without this text being written from the princess' point of view, that emotional appeal would not be as strong. We all wanted to be a prince or a princess when we were younger because we thought of it as a fairytale, but after reading this story and seeing the inside of the culture, students here in the US will consider themselves extremely lucky, especially the girls. I know I did.
ReplyDeleteI am excited to hear about this book because you make some good points about what we take for granted here in America and the misconceptions of royalty in certain places.
DeleteKayla Chernecky
After reading Unbroken, there are several key points that me and my groupmates would like to discuss extensively. First of all, we want to discuss Hillenbrands use of characters within the story, as we feel she does a great job getting the reader closely attached to each character, especially Louie. Secondly, we want to discuss and provide a general summary of the book, as that should help us convey our ideas about certain characters and more efficiently during our presentation. We would also like to go in depth discussing the epilogue following the orginal story, because we feel that certain events and sequences that can be found and occur in the epilogue make us completely second guess our original thoughts about Louie following the conclusion of the story. We will discuss what the epilogue was about, and also discuss why we believe Hillenbrand left it out of the original narrative. We will create a powerpoint and use visual tools to help provide our points to you and the rest of the class, and much of our work will be down on a Google Document that we can all access and work on at the same time even if we are not together.
ReplyDeleteDavid Creed
I agree that we should touch on the aspect of the characters because they did play a major role in the telling of Louie's story. I think we should also input our opinions on Hillenbrand's use of characters and if it had a positive or negative impact on us as readers.
DeleteAfter reading Katrina there are many points that are worth mentioning in the book, but there were a few that were more important than others. One point that was talked about the whole book is that there is still division between people, and there is still racism today. You think it would have stopped but it didn’t. After reading this book I was shocked to see how bad it was during a hard time were people should have worked together. I want to show what we saw in the media was not what really happened. I also want to show how our book showed corruption between the higher power and how they treated everyone. To also show that the people in higher power didn’t help that much in a time of need. The best way to show these points is by characters explaining their role, emotion and how they acted in hard times. Were these certain characters good at helping out or did they cave in trouble times and don’t know what to do. Did they have everything uncontrolled or was it all causes.
ReplyDeleteI agree Kayla I feel using these themes will really show everyone the division between the hard working people of New Orleans, the racists, and the elitists.
DeleteSean Burwell
The story talks about two curial themes, racism, corruption. The author uses examples to illustrate how terrible the racism was. In the beginning of the story the reader is told about instances when the majority White police force was expressing racism by blocking Black community from entering into the White neighborhoods, while they were trying to escape the disaster. There were others instances later on in the story that showed racism. The author used a example about when the newscasters were sayin that the White people were looting to provide for their family, while the flip side they were being racist by saying the Black people were looting just to steal. examples of corruption include the mayor at the time. Our group plans to make a power point zeroing in on the themes of racism and corruption by using the examples from the story to show class the impact it had during the disaster hurricane Katrina.
ReplyDeleteSean Burwell
I really enjoyed my group's book, "Unbroken". It was very well written and there are many important points I'd like to point out in our presentation. The way the main character, Louie, is portrayed is such an important part of the book. The title of the book truly reflects the kind of person Louie was and the courage he possessed while fighting in World War II and as his time as a POW in Japan. The author does a lot of thorough research into Louie's background as a young boy which helps build him as a character and makes the reader feel as though they know him and and therefore, they can easily sympathize with his struggles. Character, theme, and use of primary and secondary research are all important aspects of this book that I believe are important to include in the presentation. My group plans to create a slideshow to help guide us through our presentation and we will speak on our different views and opinions.
ReplyDeleteKayla Chernecky
Kayla what struck me about your post was that the main character, Louie, grabs so much attention and that the book reflects this. I especially like reading books during World War II, such as the Book Thief, and I think that this book would be interesting to read. A slide show would be great, since I'm a visual learner.
DeleteI think that one of the main points we want to identify in Unbroken is that it is written in a narrative style. It makes for a much easier, interesting read than maybe other nonfiction books. From what I've heard during class, the other books seem to take on a much more typical journalistic style. We would also like to touch on the research aspects that Laura Hillenbrand adopted. She did extensive research, both primary and secondary to craft a flowing text. The epilogue is an aspect that we will also discuss because my group and I feel that it is something of a game changer for all of us in terms of how we view the whole journey we went on with Louie Zamperini. I think we will do a PowerPoint presentation to clearly demonstrate the aspects we want to discuss, but I would also like to bring in something creative to make our presentation more interesting.
ReplyDeleteGary Rivlin writes on Katrina with perspective as someone who was there amidst all the things going on. He lives there and gives extensive details and exchanges from key figures like Ray Nagin Karl Rove, and at one point and even Brad Pitt.
ReplyDeleteFor Jean Sasson's Princess, the key points I want to convey to my classmates about your interpretation of the content would be style of the book. Throughout reading, Princess by Jean Sasson, it is evident that the prose is long, descriptive, and elusive. There are a lot of metaphors that elude to the sexism and culture of Saudi Arabia. The text reveals, "I can recall thinking that my body no longer required the fresh breath of life. I fancied myself in hibernation and wanted to feel the shallow breathing and lowered heartbeat experienced by creatures of the wild that will themselves away for months at a time" (Sasson 87). In other words, Princess Sultana is referring to the angst and exhaustion of living in her society. The style in this book reflects this suffering of women in Saudi Arabia, through metaphor and descriptive elements, whether physical or mental.
ReplyDeleteStephanie, I really love that quote you pulled. It's true, Sasson uses subtle metaphors throughout the text to explain the emotions of women in the region.
DeleteI would like to convey to the class what the everyday realities of being a Saudi Arabian woman are. As Americans we know freedom to be a God-given right and see this license to do as we please as part of our national and personal identities. To the class, I would like to emphasize that we are one of the few fortunate areas around the globe in this sense. While Princess Sultana’s life has its perks of wealth and status overall sadly her life is representative of the best possible scenario for Saudi women who live in a world of servitude, solitude, and misogyny held up by the pillars of traditionalism.
ReplyDeleteAs far as the writing style of the text, it is important to note that the story is written from the perspective of Princess Sultana herself. This gives the readers an inside source as much of this nation’s affairs are kept private. With this, the reader is able to connect with Princess Sultana along her emotional journey as she transforms from child to woman in Saudi Arabia.
One key point that I want the class to learn from our presentation of the book Bait and Switch is that no matter what resources someone has right in front of them or research they do there will always be hardships when it comes to looking for a job right out of college in today's society. There are many people who can help someone looking for a job, but it does not always go according to plan, like getting a job right out of college. Although going through all that Barbara went through in her time of trying to get a job and getting that experience is very good practice, it is still hard for someone to go through all of that and still not get a job they want. The book really portrays the style of Barbara's writing because she tells the reader exactly what she is doing and what she is feeling throughout the whole process.
ReplyDelete