B9: Lobsterlicious


Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace was a very interesting piece of writing. Having never even tasted lobsters before, I learned a lot about them through the information included in this article. I had never even thought about how the process of preparing lobsters could be as big of an ethics issue as slaughter houses and cramped chicken houses. At the beginning, Wallace introduces the assigned subject of this article: the 2003 Maine Lobster Festival. Wallace goes off on a lot of tangents throughout the writing and follows them – he even makes use of footnotes when he has excessively long tangents that would otherwise confused the reader or get in the way of the flow of his story. Even though these tangents are related to his subject of lobsters they often hold different types of information. Wallace is sure to include a lot of details, descriptions, and definitions. He starts this article strong with thorough background information of lobsters in general. Then, he includes ideas of others and conflicting groups (MLF and PETA) on what he believes could be an enormous morality problem. Wallace invites a lot of different people/ideas to the table to facilitate the discussion of his question of morality. His purpose of this writing is to answer his question about the ethics of lobsters and describe his experience at the Maine Lobster Festival. Throughout the article, he certainly writes with more of a conversationalist style as seen by discussion above. He never really finds an answer, which is seen in how he admits the complexity of the issue. He also has personal bias in how he takes in the atrocious information that represents lobsters might feel pain because he is not about to stop eating meat cold turkey. I think that overall this piece was educational and informative. Wallace was attempting to collect as many facts, opinions, and research as possible in order to address and answer his question. He takes what he has learned and evaluates the meaning of each tangent. At the end, Wallace asks a lot of questions towards the reader/audience: gourmet readers. I guess he wanted the gourmet readers to morally question what they were doing because it is what he experienced in the time before, during, and after the 2003 Maine Lobster Fest. He uses his unclear answer to make his audience question and find their own answer to the question, making them question their morality.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

B1: The Loneliness of The Interconnected - Charles Seife

Charles Seife does an amazing job at getting his point across in The Loneliness of the Interconnected . His purpose in writing this piece is to give readers new and fresh insight. The use of a quotation at the beginning of his writing helps him catch the reader’s attention and give a glimpse of the topic he will address: human interaction. The evidence he provides gives his writing credibility and further supports his purpose to educate/inform about all aspects of information including its impacts on societies interactions and “common” beliefs. Seife explains that even though people feel comfort in numbers there is loneliness because their crowd becomes limited. He encourages others to question their environments by listing numerous times the internet has negatively led to isolation in society. People get caught up in their own information bubble because of how the media markets specifically to every individual. The author highlights the narrowness that media has created and explains...
Read more

B8: "The Unitasker"

Although the “Unitasker” went in each of Huxley’s 3 directions, there were never any concrete moments where you felt he was moving directly in a single direction. In the beginning, when the author introduced his topic he typically stayed in the direction towards the personal, the autobiographical, and inner experience, but as his writing progressed it was pretty sporadic. I’d say that the essay was much more like a conversation. He begins the essay with personal anecdotes and describes a setting, giving the readers context about where he is coming from and what he is trying to do. For his experiment, the author researched a lot about different theories involving his coined term “unitasking,” or focusing on one thing at a time and living in the now in order to help him with his experiment. He even goes as far as contacting and meeting with people who would most likely be the best at unitasking / limiting distractions and errors and proceeds to take their advice. He also asks questions ...
Read more

B5: CRA Intro Paragraph

             Everything in moderation? On April 26th, sixteen-year-old Davis Allen Cripe collapsed during art class and was pronounced dead in the hospital just over an hour later. The cause? Too much caffeine in too little time. Cripe ingested one McDonald’s latte, one large Diet Mountain Dew, and one energy drink over a two-hour period and it killed him. (Lynch) Energy drink risks are discussed worldwide across the internet and through the media in the forms of both positive and negative responses. I am going to analyze how the issue of energy drinks is publicized across a variety of sources, from formal to informal, including pages from a scientific journal, an article on NBC News, and a Red Bull energy drink advertisement as well as compare each medium’s message and rhetorical features. Lynch, Jamiel and Goldschmidt, Debra, “ Teen dies from too much caffeine, coroner says.” CNN , 16 May 2017, http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/15/health/teen...
Read more