TOW #7- She’s America’s youngest female billionaire- and a dropout (Article)

            As I was scrolling through the articles this title caught my eye. It was a captivating article however as I read I noticed the topic of this essay is not about a young female who became a billionaire despite dropping out of college. This article was about a woman who started a lab that is now making groundbreaking changes in blood testing around America. And she just happens to be America’s youngest female billionaire and a college dropout.

            Along with many of these articles there are videos. In this video CNN interviews Elizabeth Holmes and asks her about how it feels to be a college dropout with all of this success. It is very obvious that she would much rather be talking about her discoveries in science then her wealth or her past.

            Despite the off-topic titling of the article, it was still a very informative piece about the future of blood testing. Rachel Cranes purpose in writing this essay was not to inform the reader of Elizabeth Holmes but to convince the reader of the vitality of blood testing. Crane uses pathos and logos to convey her purpose.

            Towards the end of the article, the author uses statistics to back up her points. For example, as Crane was explaining how much say laboratories in the U.S. have she used a statistic that U.S. labs dictate 80% of clinical decisions annually. This helps her further prove her point of the necessity of one getting their blood taken and sent to a lab. She also backs this point up by saying that 46% of Americans are not compliant with the tests that their physicians give them. These statistics make the necessity and lack of blood tests un-debatable.

            Not only did Crane convince the reader blood tests are vital but she also convinces them that they aren’t so bad. She says this by conveying to emotions through diction. Theranos Wellness Center is the lab that Holmes helped found and it is described to have calming music, glossy magazines and offers a blood test with a relatively painless prick.  These descriptive words help the reader picture a calming entertaining space, making blood testing seem better.

            Although the title was misleading, the article was just as interesting. Through logos and pathos Rachel Crane convinces the reader of importance of blood testing.

http://money.cnn.com/2014/10/16/technology/theranos-elizabeth-holmes/index.html

TOW #6- Virtual Reality: The Next Frontier in Gaming (Article)

TOW #6

Trends are mainly identified with the fashion industry. However, many fads also come and go in the gaming industry. Some include 3-D games, social networking games, and moving your body to control the game. The time has come for a new one: Virtual Reality (VR). The goal of VR is to make the game feel as if they are inside of the game.

An article on CNN.com titled VirtualReality: The Next Frontier in Gaming describes the new trend and what it entails for not only gamers, but also game creators. The article is by Larry Frum who writes tech/gaming articles for various different websites. He is very in tune with current tech issues, which gives him credibility on the subject.

Frum directs the article to game creators by taking many quotes from the VR creators. He takes many quotes from two major companies, Oculus Rift and Sony, which were creating their own version of virtual reality. By using these two credible sources he creates ethos to help his purpose, which was to express the importance in the quality of games they create for the headset.  He quotes the CEO of Oculus Rift, Brendan Iribe, and Anton Mikhailov, a researcher and developer for Sony. Both Iribe and Mikhailov tried to explain how important the games are to the gaming system. The creation has been a long hard process and the fait of the system lays on the games that support it. Oculus Rift and Sony are both very dependent on game creators to make epic games to match their epic system.

Not only does the author quote credible sources but he also uses diction. Through the diction he describes to game maker what the games they are creating should be like. For example, it “plunges headset wearers into three-dimensional virtual worlds that feel incredibly lifelike”. Throughout the article he uses describing words like this to hint at the game makers.

Through powerful diction and multiple credible sources Frum achieves his purpose of informing game makers of the vitality of their games. Virtual gaming has a great potential to stay around a lot longer then other gaming trends, depending on the games made for it.

In case you were curious, this is the Oculus Rift. It is out now.

TOW #5- Visual Text

Anyone who has witnessed a temper tantrum of a young child knows how awful it is. Lying on the ground, kicking and screaming for an underserving reason. The pain and wretched look in a crying child’s eyes is heartbreaking. The Children Corporation Against Cancer’s (CONAC) ad channels that sympathy and turns it around as blame.

CONAC created this ad in order to remind parents who smoke of the harm it does to their children. In the ad it shows almost a bag of smoke around the young boys head and appears to almost be choking him. At the bottom of the ad inside a shape of a cigarette the words “Smoking isn’t just suicide. It’s murder”. The creator of this ad holds a lot of automatic ethos being a corporation with the direct purpose of the ad.

This ad has the obvious audience of parents who smoke. The words at the bottom are one of the most powerful things about this ad. There are many ads saying that smoking can kill you however there aren’t many ads saying smoking can murder someone else. Parents love their children more then anything and this ad uses that strong audience to their advantage. The ad is not only saying parents can hurt their children but they can kill their children.

The photograph of the child is very disturbing. It appeals greatly to pathos. The pain and anguish in his facial expression makes the audience want to help the child. The smoke around him helps convey the meaning behind his facial expressions. The smoke going in through the mouth and nose is very noticeable. The aspect of choking or being engulfed by the smoke conveys even more pathos. It looks as if the child is begging for help.

Overall the author’s purpose was very well shown through the quote as well as the photo. This advertisement is unique and very well executed.  

TOW #4- Hyperbole and a Half (IRB)

            When scrolling online whether it’s through blog posts or tweets on twitter it never feels as if you’re reading as you would read a proper novel. When I read any text for school I am conscious of myself reading at all times and I have one purpose in mind: get it done. Reading Hyperbole and a Half simulates reading a text message, or a funny article online.

            Allie Brosh has created an assortment of stories that can teach someone a lesson as well as make someone laugh. Brosh doesn’t write about her love of family or the meaning of life she writes about how she found out her dog was retarded and how she gets things done by procrastinating. These stories actually happened to her which giver her automatic ethos.

            Her placement of stories is random. It is not in chronological order. The first story is when she was ten years old and in the second story she is living alone with a dog. This forces the story not to focus on becoming the person she is today but rather the true stories and their meaning. This helps Brosh achieve her purpose of helping her readers relate to her and learn from her mistakes.

            On every page there is at least one illustration. These illustrations are not detailed pieces of artwork. They are stick figure sketches that have a joking animated style to them. Each sketch is simple in order to not draw too much attention to them however they keep readers interested and they help convey emotion. For example, in a story about the authors need for cake at her grandmothers birthday party Brosh says that while her grandmother was holding her she “lapsed into a full scale psychological meltdown”. On the next page there is a drawing of Brosh in her grandmothers arms as a blur to show how quickly and violently she was moving. This assists the reader in picturing the event.

            In the end of each story there is a lesson to be learned. For example, in Brosh’s story about depression she ends by saying that not knowing the future is a strange ray of hope. She says this in order to help people currently struggling with depression or relate to the ones who already have.

            Whether it’s through her comedic illustrations or meaningful endings, Allie Brosh makes the reader feel as if they are not reading a book, rather just listening to someone tell a story. She also manages to fit meaning into what seems like the most pointless story.

TOW #3- Visual Text

            As technology starts gaining popularity, the need to hold a book and flip through the pages is declining. When the iPad and Kindle surfaced so did a popular trend called eBooks. Now you can have a library of your favorite books wherever you go in one tiny device. Not only can you read your books from your mobile device, but now you can listen to them as well. Almost every book from classics to new releases can be found in audio form. A company called Penguin Group is one of the most popular providers of audiobooks.

Penguin Group released an ad campaign of seven ads. In each ad it is an image of a famous classical book. In each scene there’s a penguin, the icon for Penguin Group, acting as a boom pole operator camouflaged to look like it is apart of the scene. A boom pole operator is the person who holds the long pole with a microphone attached in order to record a better audio of the scene. The boom pole operator has the intention of portraying that listening to a Penguin Group audio book makes you feel like you are in the scene, apart of the action. In each image there are artistic differences to represent the context of the book, like the genre or time period the book was written. For example in the Frankenstein ad, the scene is surrounded with many pieces of intense technical equipment. The penguin has a piece of equipment across his body, unlike in other scenes, to contribute to the overall theme of the image. In the D-Day ad, the Penguin has on a helmet, just like the other soldiers. In the Alice and Wonderland ad, the microphone is wrapped in a leaf in order to blend in. The illustrator did not make the penguin a different color or bolder in order to stick out, they made the Penguin blend in in order to portray that the Penguin Group audio books sound like they were recorded straight from the actual scenes. Listening to them feels like you are actually physically in the event. Sometimes it is hard to identify where the penguin is. Mirroring that it is hard to identify if you’re listening or if you’re actually there.  

Also, there are seven different ads, each portraying a different book. The books include Frankenstein, Moby Dick, D-Day: The Battle for Normandy, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Tales of the Greek Heroes, Don Quixote De La Mancha, and Dracula. The wide range of genres from fantasy to science fiction and nonfiction, helps the Penguin Group appeal to many different audiences. All of the books mentioned are classics. This could possibly be targeting an older audience. Most older people that like these classical books are not used to listening to audio book. Seeing these ads may open their minds to it. Overall, these ads clearly get their meaning across as well as showing great artwork.