PB2A

I chose an article titled “Does Gender Matter in the United States Far-Right?” written by Kathleen M. Blee. The front page of the article contains the name and volume of the book where the article was published in as well as the page numbers and the date of publication which are all exhibited in the top left corner. On the left hand side, the publisher’s name is printed. The article contains a title that is put in bold and beneath it is the name of the author. The article begins with an introduction paragraph that contains a brief intro in regards to what is going to be addressed throughout the article. The article is separated into segments that all have titles to introduce what is going to be talked about in that sub-paragraph. The article contains a lot of quotes as well as references and as a result almost every single page contains footnotes. Throughout the rest of the pages of the article only the page number and the author’s name and the title (it alternates, one page it’s the author’s name, the next it’s the title) on the top left corner of the paper. The author also used anecdotes about several contrasting people in order to add further plausibility to the point they were trying to make. This in addition to the way in which the author chose several differing views points about a specific argument in order to eventually show how they relate to each other further contributes to the validity of the author’s argument.  The paper is organized into distinctive sections that address the three different templates that are believed to characterize and explain gender and racism in the far-right. The style of the writing is extremely formal and the author never uses their own opinion throughout the article, instead when arguments were made there was evidence used to back up all of the claims. The use of many quotes and citations further enforces the argument the author is trying to make. The diction used throughout the article is also very formal there is absolutely no colloquialism used in any of the writing. There were no questions posed, instead the author set up an argument that they spent the entire paper working to prove. Because the author was addressing racial matters, there was a lot of mention of occurrences (with the KKK) that happened a long time ago, and as a result the author used a lot of direct quotes and references. The author talked a lot about women’s role in racist groups and the way in which they differ from that of men as well as the way that they are similar. The author used several different real life examples in order to drive home the point that racism isn’t something that people are born with and instead is something that is conditioned by outside influences. The author also used examples of members from other racist or extremist groups (such as the skinheads) in order to show the correlation between the two and drive home similarities between the ignorance of racist groups and the way in which they operate.  The author also addressed the way in which women would form racist groups under the same name as their male group counterparts but would have little or nothing to do with each others goals and objectives. The importance of the structure of the article was the way in which the author was able to address several different perspectives and ideas and bring them together in order to address the two main arguments of the piece; women’s roles in racist groups and the way in which they operate and are influenced. I think the most important aspect of the piece was the conclusion at the end of the writing where the author was able to piece together all the conclusions of the sub-paragraphs in order to exemplify the way in which they all come together to relate and uphold the author’s main argument. I also found that the addition of anecdotes really helped to give the author credibility especially since the work is an academic article where in order to be taken seriously, the claims and arguments have to be properly validated.

Thlog#4

I found the exercises we did in class on Monday to help us with the final edits on our papers were really helpful. I thought that the highlighting activity really helped me distinguish the areas where I was either lacking in detail/evidence or didn’t make a clear argument and although I’d read through my paper a bunch of times I think I just got lost in the jumble and all the words and sentences that I wasn’t able to see these things until we did the exercise in class. I also found it really helpful to read someone else’s paper/have someone read mine. I felt like since I had spent so much time writing and editing the paper that I was overlooking a lot of mistakes and discrepancies. I also found it really interesting to see what other students had decided to do with the assignment.  I thought the Murder assignment in class on Wednesday was really interesting I thought it really helped show the difference in conventions and rhetoric used depending on what perspective we were writing from whether it was a Facebook post from a friend, or a letter from the dead person’s family. Each group’s answers were so distinctively different that it helped bring to light the vast differences in conventions for each of the individual groups despite the fact that we were all talking about the same subject.

Thlog#3

This past week in class the main focus was working on our WP1. Coming into class on Wednesday I was a little uncertain about my paper and my topic. I found that I had so much difficulty finding a topic I liked/could write a lot about that by the time I finally settled on a topic I had put myself in a difficult time crunch where I felt like all of my writing was rushed. I worried a lot while I was writing that I would miss important points or conventions because I felt rushed frantic. Honestly, seeing that other people were having similar struggles as me when we discussed it in class made me feel somewhat relieved. Since my topic is news reports, more specifically ones involving the wrongful/accidental killing of a person of color. I worried while writing it that my own bias would overshadow a lot of the subtle differences that were being displayed in each of the individual news sources. In class on Wednesday, I found it helpful to talk to other people about my paper and have them read it. I also liked the idea that when we read each others papers we weren’t ‘editing’ we were instead told to ask questions that could either help clarify/point out an area where details, description, or analysis were lacking. Even though the group reading of each other’s WP1 was helpful, I still worry that I am not doing the assignment correctly.