PACE Academy News Commentaries

Article:  http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/05/how-obama-harms-the-press.html Kindly read the article and post a comment below--not on your blog--on the effectiveness of the author's introduction, transition from introduction to the body, transition from the body to the conclusion, and conclusion. For this assignment, comments should be 100 words or more. The purpose of this assignment is to think about how expert writers style their introductions and conclusions. Hopefully, you will be able to come out with a better sense of how you might style your own essays.

Article:  http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/17/talking-female-circumcision-out-of-existence/ You'll have to forgive my taking such a serious article and focusing solely on its rhetoric, for the manner in which Ms. Tina Rosenberg introduces the topic is a classic technique worth analyzing for pedagogical purposes. In my meetings with students to discuss the essay portion of the SAT, I have emphasized the difficulty of moving past an aggregate score of 8 as graders are typically unwilling to grant essays an individual score of 5 or 6. In order to persuade a grader to score an essay at a 5 or 6, the essay writer must write an exceptional paper, one that breaks from the norm. While there are a number of ways one can write an exceptional paper, one method that I have advocated is to use an anecdotal hook. For the most part, students are familiar with the concept of hooks. They generally know that a hook is meant to catch a reader's attention, though they forget to a...

Article:  http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21580462-muhammad-morsi-was-incompetent-his-ouster-should-be-cause-regret-not-celebration-egypts It wasn't until the recent ousting (the gerund form of oust seems more in line with what I understand of current standards of English) of former president Morsi that I have become aware of the situation in Egypt. While I hold but the utmost respect for our Egyptian brothers and sisters, I cannot help but share the sentiments of The Economist: ousting by force a democratically elected president seems a recipe for disaster. That the Egyptian military general, General Abdulfattah al-Sisi, was not only able to suspend the Egyptian constitution but also instate the Chief Justice of the Supreme Constitutional Court, Adly Mansour, as interim president strikes me as alarming. Now, as I understand it, supporters of this ousting have eschewed calling the Egyptian military's actions a coup (what with all the charged negative baggage the...

News Article:  http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/hendrikhertzberg/2013/07/devilishly-clever-that-putin-fellow.html I readily admit that I haven't made much of an effort to keep abreast of this whole situation regarding Edward Snowden. From what little I understand, I believe that Mr. Snowden leaked classified information for the purposes of drawing attention to possible violations of privacy by the government; I believe he subsequently fled to Russia to obtain political asylum (irony of ironies). Of this, I will say no more. What catches my fancy is The New Yorker writer Hendrik Hertzberg's analysis of President Vladimir Putin's comments on the Snowden's situation. Through his careful analysis, Mr. Hertzberg draws out the subtle nuances of President Putin's speech. While I do not intend to diminish Mr. Hertzberg's observations, I wonder how conscious President Putin was as to his actual shrewdness. That is to say, did President Putin intend to be as cl...

Huffington Post:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/01/police-shoot-dog_n_3530990.html First, might I recommend that you NOT watch the video--it is quite disturbing. My knee-jerk reaction was to assign blame to the officer who fired the shots; however, as I gave more thought to the situation, I realized that I was too caught up by the emotional argument forwarded by the video. A Burkean analysis of the situation provides a more nuanced view with respect to assigning blame. For the uninitiated, Kenneth Burke, one of the most influential rhetoricians of the 20th century, spoke of using his pentad as way to determine the origin of motivation. The pentad, as the name suggests, consists of five parts: act, agent, scene, agency, and purpose. These five parts roughly correspond to the the journalistic questions of who, what, where, when, why, and how. Unlike the journalistic questions, Burke's pentad is not meant to simply identify; rather, Burke's pentad is used in terms of...