For my WP3 I chose
an academic article called Race and Crime
Sixty Years After Brown v. Board of Education. The purpose of this article is
to address blatant racial issues that remain prominent in our society today.
The article talks about race in the prison system, racial issues with African
Americans in relation with the police, and the fact that race is a frequently
talked about issue in our society and although the topic is being addressed no
progress is being made to mend the issues. For my transformations I chose to write
one blog post meant to mimic the style of the Afrikan Black Coalition and then
a second one imitating a report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. While
creating my transformations I had to not only create different writing
identities-taking on different identities to cater to specific audiences- but I
also had to pay attention to the the audience, exigence, and the various constraints
for each (Losh & Alexander).
For
my blog post transformation, I had to pay special attention to the social
context of the article as well as the audience. My scholarly article talked about
the relationship between police and African Americans and how racial profiling is
a prominent issue so I decided to focus on that aspect of the scholarly article
in my transformation. When I wrote the article that was meant to be a blog post
for my fictional “African American Students Union” I read through several articles
on a website that I deemed to be similar to the group I had invented. This
non-fictional group is called the Afrikan Black Coalition, by reading through
several of their articles which addressed a variety of different topics (though
all of them were in reference to racial issues) I was able to get a better
understanding of their audience. This helped me determined the type of language
to use and the formality of my language and word choice (Carroll,41). I found
that many of the articles were written by young students (I even found a couple
posts written by a girl I went to high school with!) and the majority of these
articles were written in a very controversial and critical manner in which the
authors would blatantly refer to “whites [not caring] about black people” many
phrases and comments similar to that were extremely common. The most important
factor I kept in mind while attempting to mimic the style was “their sense of
position within [the] world” which greatly affected the style of writing
(McLoud, 19). I found that in order to
comply with that convention I would have to mimic their very blunt style where they
made little effort to be politically correct. The authors would also
continuously ask rhetorical questions a ‘move’ used which evokes a feeling of
injustice in the reader as exemplified by phrases such as “why are we putting
up with this?” or “we need Black media to inform our people about our people”. The authors would also use the words “we” and “our”
in order to address their audience who they believed to be other African
American students following their organization. The authors also continuously
ended their posts with phrases such as “in struggle and revolution” and “we
must resist, we must liberate, we must educate”. This is done to create a sense
of community and unity between the author and the readers seeing as they are
all members of the African American community and share similar social
struggles.
I
attempted to pay special attention to the formatting and style of the website
blog page in order to capture the same vibe as the website I was replicating. I
attempted to add as many symbols referencing black power and identity. For
starters I used the black fist symbol as the main symbol of the entire website.
I chose to do this because the website for the Afrikan Black Coalition displayed
an extremely large number of photos and graphic designs of African Americans mimicking
the same exact symbol so I gathered that it was something crucial to the
identity of the blog post and website (empowerment). I attempted to use a large
number of photos and visuals (though it was difficult because I only made one page).
Even in situations similar to mine where they were addressing an event that
hadn’t occurred yet they would still use stand in visuals that had to do with
the event/subject at hand which is why I chose to use a picture of a large
group of people holding candles in a vigil-like situation. They also used the
same color scheme over and over again (red, black, white, green) which is meant
to represent the colors of the African American flag as a result I used the
same color scheme.
The
scholarly article also focused a lot on the African American presence in the
jail system which is what I decided to focus on in my second transformation. I
chose to mimic a report created by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, this
particular report was analyzing jail population changes between 1999 and 2013. I
chose to mimic the style by making my report very official looking and
refraining from adding a lot of unnecessary colors since the colors used in the
original article were relatively dull. I also added a couple subtle graphics
including the great seal of the United States and a section at the bottom that
references the Office of Justice Programs something that would be found on an
authentic reporting. I also replicated the format by having several
subcategories all only a small paragraph long and containing a lot of
statistics and numbers. The purpose of having such small paragraphs was to get
straight to the point. I made sure to follow a similar format by creating
several subsections that all had titles and were followed by an extremely
concise statistical elaboration of what was written in the title. The audience- those who are the intended or
unintended recipients of the rhetorical message- of something like this would
be a board director looking for a concise and compact way to get annual data or
in my case, data from an extended period of time, about the prison system
(Carroll, 41). The original report I read didn’t necessarily grab my attention
so in my transformation I tried to take statistics and demographics straight
from the scholarly article and relay it in the most banal way possible.
By
examining one scholarly article about racial issues in modern day society I was
able to take the information given to me and “morph” it into two extremely
different genres, one a blog post for an African American student organization,
and the other a census report on race in the prison system (McLoud). Writing
using drastically different conventions based off of the differences in
audience, purpose, and exigence and the effect of using different moves substantially
changed the outcome of both transformations proving that though they come from
the same subject their differences in genre distinguish them completely from
one another.
Works Cited:
Census of Jails: Population Changes, 1999-2013. Digital
image. Bureau of Justice Statistics, n.d.
Web. 22 May 2016.
Carroll. "Backpacks to Briefcases: Steps Toward
Rhetorical Analysis." N.p.: n.p., n.d. 45-58. Print.
Alexander, Jonathan. "Writing Identities." Understanding
Rhetoric: A Graphic Guide to Writing.
By Elizabeth Losh. N.p.: n.p., n.d.
114-39. Print.
Means, Kadijah. "Where’s the Coverage on Daniel
Holtzclaw?" Afrikan Black Coalition. N.p., 9
Dec. 2015. Web. 29 May 2016.
McLoud. "Chapter 1." Writing with Pictures.
N.p.: n.p., n.d. 8-57. Print.
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