TOW #7- The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp by Rembrandt

           For my TOW this week I decided to do The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp by Rembrandt. This piece was made my Rembrandt who was famous painter during the 1600’s. This painting was the one that grew his reputation as a painted and what made him as famous as he was at the time.

            This oil painting depicts Dr. Nicolaes Tulp who was a well know Dutch surgeon. In the painting he is giving a lecture to a class where he is dissecting the forearm in order to show how the muscle system works. The men around Dr. Nicolaes Tulp are students. Rembrandt painted this painting in order to celebrate Dr. Nicolaes and his accomplishments, but to also show the psychological aspect of death. This was his overall purpose and it can be seen from the faces of the students.

            In the painting one of the first things you notice is the dead body. Rembrandt purposely made this bright in order to show it. Then the other bright objects are the faces of the people around the body. Each student has a different facial expression going on and this is meant to represent the different way people perceive death. For instance one man is hunched over and studying it hard while other can’t even look at the dead body. All of these are different because everyone perceives death in a different way. From this, Rembrandt wants to convey to a surgeons guild (who was the original audience for this piece) just how fragile the life of a humans is and how others perceive death. With his use of dark colors and facial expressions, Rembrandt expressed this purpose well.

TOW #6- After Shootings, Varying Shades of Recovery at Charleston Church by Richard Fausset

        

(A picture from the original article taken from the back of the Charleston Church, where 12 members where killed by a gunman in June)  

            It has been four months since the Charleston Massacre has occurred where 12 victims from the Emanuel A.M.E. Church were killed by a gunman. This article’s purpose was to focus on the recovery of the church and the people with in and this purpose is achieved well. According to the article it was a slow recovery for the church. As people entered for the first time they were confronted with the memories of what happened. In the walls there were bullet holes and some of the church had to be redone. Despite all of this the church still manages to go on. With support from the entire country the church was donated two million dollars and as the author, Richard Fausset, a national corresponant, for the New York Times puts it, the church still preached words of hope.

            The most powerful part of this article was the change in tone that happened throughout the article. In the beginning the article has a depressing tone. When describing the background of the massacre, the author says, “Four months after one of the worst racially motivated massacres in recent American history, the members of this historic African-American church are laboring to return to the everyday rhythms of worship. But they also know that things will never be the same” (Fausset 1). This line uses diction like “massacre” to get a sad and depressing tone. This tone continues then throughout the beginning of the article to appeal to the emotions of the audience, the American people. Then towards the end of the article this tone switches into something hopeful. Come the end of the article the author says, “It is a perspective, he said, that makes it possible, in the hardest times, to carry on” (Fausset 1). This quote is meant to leave the audience with this feeling of hope when they finish the article. With the combination of the depressing tone in the beginning to the hopeful tone at the end, the author is able to express a lot of emotions through this article in order to show the recovery of the Charleston Church after such a horrendous massacre.  

Link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/19/us/after-shootings-varying-shades-of-recovery-at-charleston-church.html?ref=us

TOW #5- “A Student Loan System Stacked Against the Borrower” by GRETCHEN MORGENSON

(The picture used in the original article. This is Patrick Wittwer, the person who the article revolves around)

This article was written by Gretchen Morgenson who is a columnist for the New York Times. She has been working for them since 1998 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for her work. To add to her credibility, this article was written in the perspective of Patrick Wittwer who deals with student loans on a daily basis. With this combination, the author is extremely credible

            This article was written for an audience of people who deal with student loans. In the article the author explains that student loans have been a major issue for everyday people. Not only are customers harassed, but the system in place for these loans is loose when it comes to code. This allows the companies to pretty much do what they want which makes the system very unorganized.

            Through this essay Morgenson was trying to rally up people in order to help combat this system. In the article she writes, “Borrowers and taxpayers deserve better” (Morgenson 1). This quote clearly shows that she is trying to get people together in order to make the student loan corporations change.  Besides this quote Morgenson is able to express her purpose well through rhetoric.

            Throughout the essay Morgenson used facts along with quotes from credible sources in order to appeal to logos. In the article she would write, “Discover Bank paid $18.5 million without admitting or denying wrongdoing” (Morgenson 1) and “’For a servicer to see a student loan borrower struggle and not help them get into the right repayment plan is a huge customer service failure,’ Ms. Wang said” (Morgenson 1). These facts and quotes help support her logical argument that she is creating. These quotes exemplify how the system needs tweaking. By appealing to logos the way she does, Morgenson is able to make the reader come to the conclusion themselves which then better supports her overall purpose.

            This was a very interesting article and one that scares me for the future.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/business/a-student-loan-system-stacked-against-the-borrower.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

TOW #4- This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein

            So for the past month I have been reading half of the book This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein. Klein is a highly rewarded author who writes for the New York Times. She has also made a number one best seller called The Shock Doctrine .

            So far this book has given me mixed emotions. The first half has been about Naomi telling the audience about how we have a disaster on our hands and how the only way to change it, is to change our way of thinking. She is of course talking about global warming and her purpose is to explain that capitalism is a driving force that creates pollution and waste, and the only way to combat this crisis is to change the way our economic system works, from capitalism to a more suitable form. She hasn’t discussed her solution yet; that will come later.

            Even though this book is written mostly for people who don’t believe that we have a crisis on our hands, like me, I find it hard to read. She expresses her purpose well using a lot of rhetoric, but at the same time she just says facts and facts and reiterates the same thing over and over again and it gets to become hard to read.

            For instance she will say something like, “Overwhelmingly, climate change deniers are not only conservative but also white and male, a group with higher than average incomes. And they are more likely than other adults to be highly confident in their views, no matter how demonstrably false” (Klein 58).  She appeals to logos here, giving a good fact with a logical argument. This is good and enforces her message, but her problem is that she will then give another five statistics on the same thing and repeat her point. It’s a great argument but for a reader who is reading this for fun, I got to her point a couple facts ago and find the rest unnecessary. But that’s the ways she writes so I got to live with it hahaha. We will see how the rest of this book goes.

(A polar bear trapped on a sheet of ice. A picture to represent the crisis that Klein is depicting)