For the next blog post, please write an original argument on one of the following topics below. Whichever topic you choose, support your argument with appropriate evidence from your reading, observation or experience. Your argument does not need to be multiple paragraphs, but you should have a clear structure, where you make claims, back them up with data, and provide a warrant for how the data supports a particular claim and your overall argument. Feel free to establish exigence and make your thesis as complex as possible.
Topic #1: Richard Corliss writes in Time magazine:
Ask any reader who has seen the movie version of a favorite novel, and the answer will usually be, 'The book was better.' That's because readers of a novel have already made their own perfect movie version. They have visualized it, fleshed out the locations and set the pace as they either zipped through the book or scrupulously savored every word. Often they have even cast it.
Many lovers of books argue that films are a lesser art form. Even if the film is a masterpiece, it will never provide the viewer with the same rich, thoughtful experience as a reader gets when reading a book. Write an argument which defends, challenges or qualifies this assertion.
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Topic #2
If you have not been following the Republican presidential campaign closely, watch the following statement from Republican candidate Newt Gingrich about food stamps and the African American community. Also, for background you might read the following news article about Republican candidates using racially-tinged rhetoric in their campaigns.
Leonard Pitts, an African American newspaper columnist, writes:
I got my first job when I was 12. The deacons at my church paid me $2 a week to keep it swept and mopped.
So I do not need Newt Gingrich to lecture me about a good work ethic. In this, I suspect I speak for the vast majority of 39 million African-Americans.
There has been a lot of talk about whether Gingrich's recent language, including his performance at last week's South Carolina debate and his earlier declaration that Barack Obama has been America's best "food stamp president," amounts to a coded appeal to racist sensitivities. The answer is simple: Yes.
Gingrich joins a line of Republicans stretching back at least to Richard Nixon. From that president's trumpeting of "law and order" (i.e., "I will get these black demonstrators off the streets") to Ronald Reagan's denunciation of "welfare queens" (i.e., "I will stop these lazy black women from living high on your tax dollars") to George H.W. Bush's use of Willie Horton (i.e., "Elect me or this scary black man will get you") the GOP long ago mastered the craft of using nonracial language to say racial things.
So Gingrich is working from a well-thumbed playbook when he hectors blacks about their work ethic and says they should demand paychecks and not be "satisfied" with food stamps. As if most blacks had ever done anything else. As if a jobless rate that for some mysterious reason runs twice the national average does not make paychecks hard to come by. As if blacks were the only, or even the majority of, food stamp recipients.
Then write an argument in which you defend, challenge or qualify Pitts' assertion that Republican candidates are using racism -- stereotyping and insulting black people, in particular -- to win votes.
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