I need an essay done on 3 of Gladwells readings. I only need the intro and a little bit of the first body paragraph done. I also need a little bit of an outline on what you are going to do for this essay. I have provided the prompt below and 2 of his readings. I have also provided an example of an essay with the first few paragraphs down below to give you a look at what my Professor is asking for. I only need the first 2 paragraphs done just to show my Professor that I’ve been working on it. I will pay you good if you would like to continue the essay afterwards. Only problem is I need this done in 7 hours no later.
gladwell_prompt_2019__2_.doc
offensive_play__2_.doc
small_change__1_.doc
gladwell_example2016.docx
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Project 2 RWS 280
Spring 2019
We’re reading Malcolm Gladwell. He is a popular author who has cashed-in on several
best-selling books and well-received articles in esteemed publications. He hails from a
certain level of sophistication. Not surprisingly, he is a good reader. His writing reveals
some of his astute observations about our culture. He focuses on certain phenomena or
trends and attempts to trace them back in order to comprehend a specific sociological
pattern or reality. He seems fairly adept at bridging sociological and/or scientific
research to more accessible common knowledge and perspective.
For this project, I want you to write a 5-6 page essay in which you:
•
Explain his rhetorical style based on our three readings: “Small Change,”
“Offensive Play,” and “Harlan, Kentucky”
His style and rhetoric are interrelated. We are going to combine our study of classical
rhetoric (ethos, pathos, and logos) with the astute identification of specific characteristics
in Gladwell’s writing (his style). What rhetorical or literary “moves” do you notice in his
work? Granted, we are looking at a relatively small sample of his writing, but it should
be enough to see a semblance of style emerge, based-on typical moves or characteristics
that we notice.
Part of the assignment requires you to read closely in order to notice these elements.
How does he write his essays? How does he construct his arguments? Explain his
typical approach and strategies, based on what you have read. You should identify three
different characteristics that will help you give the reader a sense of his style, as well as
give your rhetoric audience some clarity on the effectiveness of his arguments. The three
characteristics/elements/strategies should align with the three rhetorical appeals (ethos,
pathos and logos). In other words, explain each appeal with a certain
characteristic/device that you can pattern in his work.
A note on your approach to this paper: You need to include discussion of all three of
his writings in your paper (I hope this seems obvious). So, do you have to discuss all
three as you illustrate a specific characteristic? No. But you have to discuss at least two.
Since the paper is 5-6 pages, make good choices. Perhaps “Offensive Play” and “Harlan,
Kentucky” provide similar examples of Gladwell’s style of logos. Writing about those
two in that case is fine. “Small Change” will certainly be used to illustrate other
characteristics/strategies Gladwell typically uses. In other words, you are discussing all
three throughout the paper in one-way or another. If you have questions about this,
please ask.
The paper should be written in MLA format. Please see me if that is a problem (if you
would rather write it in APA format).
Good luck!
Offensive Play
How different are dogfighting and football?
From The New Yorker, September 19, 2009
By Malcolm Gladwell,
An offensive lineman can’t do his job without “using his head,” one veteran says, but
neuropathologists examining the brains of ex-N.F.L. players have found trauma-related
degeneration.
One evening in August, Kyle Turley was at a bar in Nashville with his wife and some
friends. It was one of the countless little places in the city that play live music. He’d
ordered a beer, but was just sipping it, because he was driving home. He had eaten an
hour and a half earlier. Suddenly, he felt a sensation of heat. He was light-headed, and
began to sweat. He had been having episodes like that with increasing frequency during
the past year—headaches, nausea. One month, he had vertigo every day, bouts in which
he felt as if he were stuck to a wall. But this was worse. He asked his wife if he could sit
on her stool for a moment. The warmup band was still playing, and he remembers saying,
“I’m just going to take a nap right here until the next band comes on.” Then he was lying
on the floor, and someone was standing over him. “The guy was freaking out,” Turley
recalled. “He was saying, ‘Damn, man, I couldn’t find a pulse,’ and my wife said, ‘No,
no. You were breathing.’ I’m, like, ‘What? What?’ ”
They picked him up. “We went out in the parking lot, and I just lost it,” Turley went on.
“I started puking everywhere. I couldn’t stop. I got in the car, still puking. My wife, she
was really scared, because I had never passed out like that before, and I started becoming
really paranoid. I went into a panic. We get to the emergency room. I started to lose
control. My limbs were shaking, and I couldn’t speak. I was conscious, but I couldn’t
speak the words I wanted to say.”
Turley is six feet five. He is thirty-four years old, with a square jaw and blue eyes. For
nine years, before he retired, in 2007, he was an offensive lineman in the National
Football League. He knew all the stories about former football players. Mike Webster,
the longtime Pittsburgh Steeler and one of the greatest players in N.F.L. history, ended
his life a recluse, sleeping on the floor of the Pittsburgh Amtrak station. Another former
Pittsburgh Steeler, Terry Long, drifted into chaos and killed himself four years ago by
drinking antifreeze. Andre Waters, a former defensive back for the Philadelphia Eagles,
sank into depression and pleaded with his girlfriend—“I need help, somebody help
me”—before shooting himself in the head. There were men with aching knees and backs
and hands, from all those years of playing football. But their real problem was with their
heads, the one part of their body that got hit over and over again.
“Lately, I’ve tried to break it down,” Turley said. “I remember, every season, multiple
occasions where I’d hit someone so hard that my eyes went cross-eyed, and they
wouldn’t come uncrossed for a full series of plays. You are just out there, trying to hit the
guy in the middle, because there are three of them. You don’t remember much. There are
the cases where you hit a guy and you’d get into a collision where everything goes off.
You’re dazed. And there are the others where you are involved in a big, long drive. You
start on your own five-yard line, and drive all the way down the field—fifteen, eighteen
plays in a row sometimes. Every play: collision, collision, collision. By the time you get
to the other end of the field, you’re seeing spots. You feel like you are going to black out.
Literally, these white explosions—boom, boom, boom—lights getting dimmer and
brighter, dimmer and brighter.
“Then, there was the time when I got knocked unconscious. That was in St. Louis, in
2003. My wife said that I was out a minute or two on the field. But I was gone for about
four hours after that. It was the last play of the third quarter. We were playing the
Packers. I got hit in the back of the head. I saw it on film a little while afterward. I was
running downfield, made a block on a guy. We fell to the ground. A guy was chasing the
play, a little guy, a defensive back, and he jumped over me as I was coming up, and he
kneed me right in the back of the head. Boom!
“They sat me down on the bench. I remember Marshall Faulk coming up and joking with
me, because he knew that I was messed up. That’s what happens in the N.F.L: ‘Oooh.
You got effed up. Oooh.’ The trainer came up to me and said, ‘Kyle, let’s take you to the
locker room.’ I remember looking up at a clock, and there was only a minute and a half
left in the game—and I had no idea that much time had elapsed. I showered and took all
my gear off. I was sitting at my locker. I don’t remember anything. When I came back,
after being hospitalized, the guys were joking with me because Georgia Frontiere”—then
the team’s owner—“came in the locker room, and they said I was butt-ass naked and I
gave her a big hug. They were dying laughing, and I was, like, ‘Are you serious? I did
that?’
“They cleared me for practice that Thursday. I probably shouldn’t have. I don’t know
what damage I did from that, because my head was really hurting. But when you’re
coming off an injury you’re frustrated. I wanted to play the next game. I was just so mad
that this happened to me that I’m overdoing it. I was just going after guys in practice. I
was really trying to use my head more, because I was so frustrated, and the coaches on
the sidelines are, like, ‘Yeah. We’re going to win this game. He’s going to lead the team.’
That’s football. You’re told either that you’re hurt or that you’re injured. There is no
middle ground. If you are hurt, you can play. If you are injured, you can’t, and the line is
whether you can walk and if you can put on a helmet and pads.”
Turley said that he loved playing football so much that he would do it all again. Then he
began talking about what he had gone through in the past year. The thing that scared him
most about that night at the bar was that it felt exactly like the time he was knocked
unconscious. “It was identical,” he said. “It was my worst episode ever.”
In August of 2007, one of the highest-paid players in professional football, the
quarterback Michael Vick, pleaded guilty to involvement in a dogfighting ring. The
police raided one of his properties, a farm outside Richmond, Virginia, and found the
bodies of dead dogs buried on the premises, along with evidence that some of the animals
there had been tortured and electrocuted. Vick was suspended from football. He was
sentenced to twenty-three months in prison. The dogs on his farm were seized by the
court, and the most damaged were sent to an animal sanctuary in Utah for rehabilitation.
When Vick applied for reinstatement to the National Football League, this summer, he
was asked to undergo psychiatric testing. He then met with the commissioner of the
league, Roger Goodell, for four and a half hours, so that Goodell could be sure that he
was genuinely remorseful.
“I probably considered every alternative that I could think of,” Goodell told reporters,
when he finally allowed Vick back into the league. “I reached out to an awful lot of
people to get their views—not only on what was right for the young man but also what
was right for our society and the N.F.L.”
Goodell’s job entails dealing with players who have used drugs, driven drunk and killed
people, fired handguns in night clubs, and consorted with thugs and accused murderers.
But he clearly felt what many Americans felt as well—that dogfighting was a moral
offense of a different order.
Here is a description of a dogfight given by the sociologists Rhonda Evans and Craig
Forsyth in “The Social Milieu of Dogmen and Dogfights,” an article they published some
years ago in the journal Deviant Behavior. The fight took place in Louisiana between a
local dog, Black, owned by a man named L.G., and Snow, whose owner, Rick, had come
from Arizona:
The handlers release their dogs and Snow and Black lunge at one another. Snow rears up
and overpowers Black, but Black manages to come back with a quick locking of the jaws
on Snow’s neck. The crowd is cheering wildly and yelling out bets. Once a dog gets a
lock on the other, they will hold on with all their might. The dogs flail back and forth and
all the while Black maintains her hold.
In a dogfight, whenever one of the dogs “turns”—makes a submissive gesture with its
head—the two animals are separated and taken back to their corners. Each dog, in
alternation, then “scratches”—is released to charge at its opponent. After that first break,
it is Snow’s turn to scratch. She races toward Black:
Snow goes straight for the throat and grabs hold with her razor-sharp teeth. Almost
immediately, blood flows from Black’s throat. Despite a serious injury to the throat,
Black manages to continue fighting back. They are relentless, each battling the other and
neither willing to accept defeat. This fighting continues for an hour. [Finally, the referee]
gives the third and final pit call. It is Black’s turn to scratch and she is severely wounded.
Black manages to crawl across the pit to meet her opponent. Snow attacks Black and she
is too weak to fight back. L.G. realizes that this is it for Black and calls the fight. Snow is
declared the winner.
Afterward, Snow’s owner collects his winnings; L.G. carries Black from the ring. “Her
back legs are broken and blood is gushing from her throat,” Evans and Forsyth write. “A
shot rings out barely heard over the noise in the barn. Black’s body is wrapped up and
carried by her owner to his vehicle.”
It’s the shot ringing out that seals the case against dogfighting. L.G. willingly submitted
his dog to a contest that culminated in her suffering and destruction. And why? For the
entertainment of an audience and the chance of a payday. In the nineteenth century,
dogfighting was widely accepted by the American public. But we no longer find that kind
of transaction morally acceptable in a sport. “I was not aware of dogfighting and the
terrible things that happen around dogfighting,” Goodell said, explaining why he
responded so sternly in the Vick case. One wonders whether, had he spent as much time
talking to Kyle Turley as he did to Michael Vick, he’d start to have similar doubts about
his own sport.
In 2003, a seventy-two-year-old patient at the Veterans Hospital in Bedford,
Massachusetts, died, fifteen years after receiving a diagnosis of dementia. Patients in the
hospital’s dementia ward are routinely autopsied, as part of the V.A.’s research efforts, so
the man’s brain was removed and “fixed” in a formaldehyde solution. A laboratory
technician placed a large slab of the man’s cerebral tissue on a microtome—essentially, a
sophisticated meat slicer—and, working along the coronal plane, cut off dozens of fiftymicron shavings, less than a hairbreadth thick. The shavings were then immunostained—
bathed in a special reagent that would mark the presence of abnormal proteins with a
bright, telltale red or brown stain on the surface of the tissue. Afterward, each slice was
smoothed out and placed on a slide.
The stained tissue of Alzheimer’s patients typically shows the two trademarks of the
disease—distinctive patterns of the proteins beta-amyloid and tau. Beta-amyloid is
thought to lay the groundwork for dementia. Tau marks the critical second stage of the
disease: it’s the protein that steadily builds up in brain cells, shutting them down and
ultimately killing them. An immunostain of an Alzheimer’s patient looks, under the
microscope, as if the tissue had been hit with a shotgun blast: the red and brown marks,
corresponding to amyloid and tau, dot the entire surface. But this patient’s brain was
different. There was damage only to specific surface regions of his brain, and the stains
for amyloid came back negative. “This was all tau,” Ann McKee, who runs the hospital’s
neuropathology laboratory, said. “There was not even a whiff of amyloid. And it was the
most extraordinary damage. It was one of those cases that really took you aback.” The
patient may have been in an Alzheimer’s facility, and may have looked and acted as if he
had Alzheimer’s. But McKee realized that he had a different condition, called chronic
traumatic encephalopathy (C.T.E.), which is a progressive neurological disorder found in
people who have suffered some kind of brain trauma. C.T.E. has many of the same
manifestations as Alzheimer’s: it begins with behavioral and personality changes,
followed by disinhibition and irritability, before moving on to dementia. And C.T.E.
appears later in life as well, because it takes a long time for the initial trauma to give rise
to nerve-cell breakdown and death. But C.T.E. isn’t the result of an endogenous disease.
It’s the result of injury. The patient, it turned out, had been a boxer in his youth. He had
suffered from dementia for fifteen years because, decades earlier, he’d been hit too many
times in the head.
McKee’s laboratory does the neuropathology work for both the giant Framingham heart
study, which has been running since 1948, and Boston University’s New England
Centenarian Study, which analyzes the brains of people who are unusually long-lived.
“I’m looking at brains constantly,” McKee said. “Then I ran across another one. I saw it
and said, ‘Wow, it looks just like the last case.’ This time, there was no known history of
boxing. But then I called the family, and heard that the guy had been a boxer in his
twenties.” You can’t see tau except in an autopsy, and you can’t see it in an autopsy
unless you do a very particular kind of screen. So now that McKee had seen two cases, in
short order, she began to wonder: how many people who we assume have Alzheimer’s—
a condition of mysterious origin—are actually victims of preventable brain trauma?
McKee linked up with an activist named Chris Nowinski, a former college football player
and professional wrestler who runs a group called the Sports Legacy Institute, in Boston.
In his football and wrestling careers, Nowinski suffered six concussions (that he can
remember), the last of which had such severe side effects that he has become a full-time
crusader against brain injuries in sports. Nowinski told McKee that he would help her
track down more brains of ex-athletes. Whenever he read an obituary of someone who
had played in a contact sport, he’d call up the family and try to persuade them to send the
player’s brain to Bedford. Usually, they said no. Sometimes they said yes. The first brain
McKee received was from a man in his mid-forties who had played as a linebacker in the
N.F.L. for ten years. He accidentally shot himself while cleaning a gun. He had at least
three concussions in college, and eight in the pros. In the years before his death, he’d had
memory lapses, and had become more volatile. McKee immunostained samples of his
brain tissue, and saw big splotches of tau all over the frontal and temporal lobes. If he
hadn’t had the accident, he would almost certainly have ended up in a dementia ward.
Nowinski found her another ex-football player. McKee saw the same thing. She has now
examined the brains of sixteen ex-athletes, most of them ex-football players. Some had
long careers and some played only in college. Some died of dementia. Some died of
unrelated causes. Some were old. Some were young. Most were linemen or linebackers,
although there was one wide receiver. In one case, a man who had been a linebacker for
sixteen years, you could see, without the aid of magnification, that there was trouble:
there was a shiny tan layer of scar tissue, right on the surface of the frontal lobe, where
the brain had repeatedly slammed into the skull. It was the kind of scar you’d get only if
you used your head as a battering ram. You could also see that some of the openings in
the brain were larger than you’d expect, as if the surrounding tissue had died and shrunk
away. In other cases, everything seemed entirely normal until you looked under the
microscope and saw the brown ribbons of tau. But all sixteen of the ex-athlete brains that
McKee had examined—those of the two boxers, plus the ones that Nowinski had found
for her—had something in common: every one had abnormal tau.
The other major researcher looking at athletes and C.T.E. is the neuropathologist Bennet
Omalu. He diagnosed the first known case of C.T.E. in an ex-N.F.L. player back in
September of 2002, when he autopsied the former Pittsburgh Steelers center Mike
Webster. He also found C.T.E. in the former Philadelphia Eagles defensive back Andre
Waters, and in the former Steelers linemen Terry Long and Justin Strzelczyk, the latter of
whom was killed when he drove the wrong way down a freeway and crashed his car, at
ninety miles per hour, into a tank truck. Omalu has only once failed to find C.T.E. in a
professional football player, …
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