For this posting, you will need to locate a piece of nonfiction writing, such as a newspaper article, a magazine article, or a journal article.
1. Briefly summarize your source. Include citation information. If the article came from a website, you may provide a link to the article in your post.
*Tip: Go to http://citationmachine.net/ to help you format your citation.
2. Evaluate your source for possible bias. Some things to consider:
*How logical is the argument? Where is it sound? Unsound?
*Does the writer attempt to use neutral language, or is the language loaded?
*Has the writer included or left out opposing viewpoints?
*For newspaper articles, especially: how long is the article? Does the length of the story seem commensurate with (seem to match) the importance of the story? Sometimes, publications will "hide" important pieces of news by shortening the article to the bare minimum amount of facts. Publications may also "overinflate" the impact of a piece of news by doing an in-depth article on something of lesser importance. This practice can reveal the bias of the writer, magazine or paper.
3. Include your reaction to the article.
To get full credit for this post, you must include all three parts. I would recommend typing your response in a word-processing program first in order to take advantage of the editing and revising capabilities. Afterwards, copy and paste your work from the word processor into your blog posting. As always, you may turn this in as handwritten work. You may also use the computers in our classroom!
Remember, your first posting and first response are due no later than Feb. 25, 2008! You are welcome to post earlier...
Your teacher,
Ms. Bedell
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20 comments:
Hey guys its bedell21e.
My newspaper article is about Hillary Clinton(BOO)!
The citation info is:Brooks, David. "Clinton's approach a replay of disasterous '93."News & Observer[Raleigh, NC] 7 Feb. 2008, Orange County Edition:Pg. 11 A.
This argument is based on a repeat of Hillary Clinton's health care plan. In 1993, her plan was attacked by Jim Cooper, a congressman from Tennesee.
During this primary season, she has been attacked by Barack Obama. Lightning strikes twice. Although the author starts the article by stating that he is not a "Hillary Hater", he basically goes on to do just that.
Although I agree wholeheartedly with his message, I dispute his claim to be unbiased. This is a biased article.
I chose an article from Nytimes.com. It was about a weekend shooting in kentucky. The citation information is: Einhorn, Catrin. "Relatives Say Victims of Illinois Shooting Were First Bound ." www.NYtimes.com. 2008. Eric Ferkenhoff . 7 Feb 2008.The article was about a weekend shooting that happened in a strip mall. Investigators all thought of it as another murder,but when they studied what happened a little harder they found that all the women that actually died, all died the same way,shot in the back of the head/lower neck. Only one woman was able to live as a witness. She doesn’t believe that this was a random act to rob a store. She believes that this was a man that won’t stop until he succeeds in what he trying to prove. This is Bedell20k signing off!
Hey guys! It’s Bedell08m
My article was called Murder Suspect was ordered to avoid elderly. It was in the News and Observer on Friday, December 7, 2007. It’s about a lady who is accused of killing one elderly woman and beating two others.
I don’t think there are any bias opinions put into this article. The writers did a good job of putting only the facts and investigators notes in the article because the woman hasn’t been prosecuted yet. The only opinions that are bias are the people involved in the case, such as the prosecutor and the suspect’s family. The suspect’s family doesn’t want to believe that their daughter is involved and the prosecutor is obviously bias because he’s trying to charge her with a crime and win his case.
I was really shocked when I read this article. It’s really hard for me to believe that somebody could do that to elderly people. I thought the author’s did a really good job of not putting in their personal opinions because I know that would’ve been hard for me to do. I think the only thing they could’ve done better would be to make their account of what happened a little bit clearer because it was a little hard to figure out what had actually happened and somebody has told me about this case before. Overall, I thought it was well-written, but hard to read because of what the suspect did.
Hey guys!
Ok- i read an article on why milk is bad and no one should drink it. It had some strong points, and everything it said made sense. One of the points was most milk comes from huge cow farms where cows are treated like milk machines. With intense advanced technology, an average dairy cow will produce up to 100 pounds of milk a day. This is more than ten times the amount that they would normally produce. To get the cows to produce more milk, they give them growth hormones. Along with an irregular milking schedule, the cows udders become so sore and heavy, that they drag the ground. This results in frequent infections. They go on to explain how the farmers overuse the antibiotics. The author also believes that that cows make milk for their calves, not for millions of humans to drink. They kind of go off topic, telling how male calves are put in boxes so small that they can't even turn around, for 14 to 17 weeks so they can be eaten as veal. They also state that female calves either replace their old mothers as milk machines, or are killed very soon after birth for rennet, which is an ingredient found in their stomach, used in most commercial cheeses. They go further to explain how cow manure is horrible for the environment. It causes water pollution and air pollution. Cows have to eat a lot of grain just to produce a small amount of milk, so imagine how much they would have to be force fed in order to produce 100 pounds of milk a day. I noticed that they talked around the subject instead of stating it directly, almost as if they were trying to hide something. All they said was that dairy cows produced a lot of manure, and a WHOLE LOT of grain produces a little bit of milk, but they never said dairy cows produce more manure than regular cows, or that they were fed more grain for more milk. They conclude the argument by saying that dairy products are linked to allergies, constipation, obesity, heart disease, cancer, and other diseases. They encourage you to eat tofu ice cream and drink soy and rice milk.
This article is not very biased as far as i can tell, it just lists facts along with pictures. But in some places, i got the feeling that they ignored some of the facts to get you to feel more strongly.
Overall, the article made me feel really guilty about eating meat and dairy products, but i don't think i have the willpower to be a vegan. Here's the citation info:
Go, Veg. "Milk Sucks." MilkSucks.com. 31 October 2005. 13 Feb 2008 http://www.milksucks.com/index2.asp.
See ya!
bedell22l
I found an article on Hillary Clinton on cnn.com [http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/]. This article states that Bill Clinton thinks that if Hillary loses Texas or Ohio, she's probably not going to be the candidate. (sorry for the bad grammar) It isn't really biased except for the fact that the author agrees with Bill and thinks that his statement is the most bold, frank statement yet. There is no exageration or fallacies, and the text is just informative, as opposed to argumentative. I think that this article is well written, and not clouded with the author's judgement.
Hey guys!
Okay, i am doing a posting in response to bedell08m's response on the article about the lady killing and beating elderly people. Just out of curiosity, what evidence led to the investigation and what made the evidence point to the accused lady? Also, what made the article confusing that you had difficulty reading it. Was it one of those very adult articles with fancy vocabulary words and figurative language that is totally unnecessary? If not, was it just the way he put his facts in order?
Anyways, good job summarizing your article.
bedell22l
In response to Bedell22l about the milk article and why it is bad to drink. I think this article is important by stating why all the milk that is being sold, is hurting cows. On the other hand,humans need MILK!! If people stopped selling milk, a lot of businesses would lose money. Not just milk, dairy products all together are important and are made good money off of. I don’t fully disagree that cows should not keep making milk to sell. But maybe there would be a way to not make cows produce so much milk, and to make a schedule that would allow them to rest. This would help cows to not be over worked.
Bedell13m
Hello there.
I'm writing my reaction to
bedell21e's posting on Hillary being attacked by Obama. Your response was well formatted, and you made sure your opinion didn't affect your response. It was included, but kind of as a "side dish". Good job. :)
Powell, Michael. "On Center Stage, a Candidate Letting His Confidence Show." February 24, 2008 02-24-08 www.NYtimes.com
This is an article I found about Barack Obama on the New York Times website. This article is about Barack Obama and how some people think that he is getting to cocky with his wins. The article gives several quotes by Obama that many people think show his over-confidence concerning the presidential elections.
Most of the information given in this article is purely the author’s opinion, not true fact. The article includes many quotes and the author’s opinion on the quotes. The author of this article does not give anyone else’s opinion on Obama’s recent quotes, just his own which does not let the reader understand both sides of the story. I also thought that this was a rather short article and I think it was most likely this short because the author did not want to have to expand anymore on others opinions.
I thought that overall this was a very badly written article. The purpose of this article is to inform people about Obama’s sudden confidence in the elections; instead the author writes about his opinions and gives hardly any facts. I think that this article would have been better suited if it was written as an editorial, but it does not give enough information to be a factual article.
`bedell07s
In response to bedell18e. I thought you did a really good job at talking about the author's writing style. I thought that this was a really good non-fiction post. GOOD JOB!!!!
Hi its bedell16j. This non-fiction piece is a novel not an article. It is "In Cold Blood" by Truman Capote. It is an amazing book that talks about the seemingly unprovoked murder of a Kansas family in 1959. It shows both from, at the beginning, the view of the family before they died and murders. Then as it moves along it switches to following the detectives and at the same time the murders. It is very compelling and is one of the strongest statements i could find that made me want to abolish the death penalty. BE WARNED if you read this it will scare you but it is very unlikely you will get killed.
This book i think is about as unbiased as you can get because it covers all sides of the story and Capote does not prosecute the killers or justify them. It is interesting to know that before the killers were killed Capote met them to get the story firsthand.
As you probably got from above it is a very good book.
Hey its bedell16J again hoping this will count in time. I read an article about a huge oil spill in Alaska that
the supreme court is bringing up again after 15 years.
Here is a link. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/200
80225/ap_on_re_
us/scotus_exxon_valdez
It is a bit biased and in some places unrealistic. A couple claims that their marrige was broken up because of the spill. (As if they didn't have problems before it.)
In terms of bias, the article does not perticly say anythink from the side of Exxon. The writer pretty much left out that entire side.
I think the spill was a horrible thing to happen and it killed lots of animals but the town is placing too much as the fault of Exxon
Ok so my article was about the debates between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. It says that the debate started out with the candidates agreeing on the issues and then quickly heated up when Hillary Clinton basically accused Obama of plagiarism. He said that was silly and that he had permission to use the lines in his speech. It says that Clinton repeatedly tried to discredit Obama and that he had only wanted to reply to her views on the issues.
I think that this article is a little biased. I think that it tries to make Obama sound better and portray Hillary as just wanting to criticize Obama instead of talking about the issues. The argument is probably pretty sound even though the language is slightly slanted towards Obama. The writers of the article probably reported the right things and added their own opinions a little by using certain words.
I think that this article is a pretty good length. It has a lot of information so it has to be pretty long, even though some of the facts are repeated.
My reaction to this article is that Hillary probably shouldn’t have tried to criticize Obama so much. I think instead she should have just tried to win by debating better.
Sincerely, Bedell05s
Citation info
The New York Times
Written by Patrick Healy and Jeff Zeleny
Friday, February 22, 2008
bedell23s
in response to bedell21e I love how you wrote that post it is short and to the point without dilly dally.
bedell23s
Hi I read an article about you tube called "Pakistan Causes Worldwide YouTube Outage" on wral.com
it is about how they blocked the worlds connection to youtube on Sunday because of raceist things posted on it. It didn't really say anything on the Pakistanian point of view but it did say about how mad everyone was!!
Hey guys!
I read an article off of the NY Times about Barack Obama.
The article is pretty much about people who support Obama for presidency but are worried about his safety if he made it into office. Many people are not voting for Obama because they fear that him winning the 2008 election could put him in danger. Obama himself tries to convince people that this is not so; he has top secret-service protection around the clock, and that they should stop worrying. People seem to think that the same thing that happened to Martin Luther King Jr, and Robert F. Kennedy will happen to Obama. Basically the article overviews Obama's protection - he says that he feels pretty safe because the assassinations people are worried about did not have secret service protection. One author who wrote books on the assassinations of MLK and President Kennedy says that Obama is not under much more of a threat because he has a broad range op people behind him.
Citation:
Zeleny, Jeff. "In Painful Past, Hushed Worry About Obama." NY Times 2/25/08 1-2. 2/25/08 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/25/us/politics/25memo.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=worry+obama&st=nyt&oref=slogin
I think that this argument isn't very biased because it isn't so much of an opinion, it just gives information. However, I think that they could have added in more information about Obama's protection; the writer seemed to be leaning towards the side of people worried about Obama's protection, because he seems to quote more people and give more examples when it comes to worrying about Obama's safety.
I think that Zeleny did a good job on covering both viewpoints even if he did lean a little more one way. He gave the information about Obama's Secret Service protection, and about his estimated lower risks. I also think that this article was a good length -- it didn't seem as though they were trying to conceal any information by cutting the story short.
My reaction to this article was not completely surprised; I knew of some people already voicing their opinions about Obama's safety. Some of the facts did surprise me, though, such as the fact that some people wouldn't vote for Obama just because they thought he could be in danger. It seemed to me that people cared more about the United States as a whole than for one individual -- not that I don't believe that keeping Obama safe is a bad idea. I was also surprised by the fact that Barack Obama doesn't seem so worried about his safety. He is constantly telling his voters not to worry - that he is safe. I can see why he would want his supporters to vote for him, but he seemed reluctant to receive much protection at all.
Dear all,
I'm excited to see that some of you are starting to think critically about non-fiction! If you are just now skimming this post, be sure to read the work posted by bedell07s, bedell05s, and bedell01l. Keep up the great work!
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