TOW #4: Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer (written, IRB)

Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air is about the author and his team’s expedition to reach the peak of Mount Everest. In contrast to the readers’ anticipations of typical glory and fame that comes with reaching the summit of Mount Everest, Into Thin Air depicts the catastrophe and the everlasting impact that the horrifying events, especially the Mount Everest disaster had on Krakauer and his teammates. Krakauer, feeling partly responsible for the death of his friends wrote this book to tell the world about the tragedy and deaths of his brave fellow climbers, so their courage would be unforgotten. After returning from Mount Everest and writing about their journey for a magazine Outside, Krakauer realizes that he had made a mistake while describing about the death of one of his fellow climbers. This mistake propelled Krakauer to write Into Thin Air to accurately deliver the information and therefore consoling the families of the victims who had been affected by his inaccurate reports for Outside. Krakauer also raises awareness of the dangers involved with Mount Everest and climbing with lack of knowledge and competence by mentioning the Taiwanese and South African teams he had encountered. Krakauer establishes his ethos by writing about his own experience as an expert mountaineer and renowned author. He also admits his past blunder of inaccurately reporting the incident of one of his fellow climbers and ensures the readers that to avoid his own perceptions, which were likely to be distorted by shock and exhaustion, he interviewed his teammates to reach a consensus of what actually had happened. Other than ethos, Krakauer also uses understatement when describing deaths of others. While acclimatizing, Krakauer comes across two dead bodies consecutively. Instead of describing the terrible conditions the bodies were in, he simply states “I came upon another body in the snow” (111). He explains his understatement of death by claiming that there was an unspoken agreement to pretend that the bodies were not real to keep the high morale among the team. Krakauer states, “The first body had left me badly shaken for several hours; the shock of encountering the second wore off almost immediately” (111). This describes the callousness among teammates as they grow increasingly exhausted and dubious.

TOW #3: Child Health Foundation Poster (visual text)

The young innocent-looking girl in the poster has a halo above her head and is looking distantly in the space. The halo in this poster is not the usual ring of light that gives a golden glow, but a ring of smoke that is coming from the right edge of the poster. To further explain the image, the poster has a text that says, “Children of parents who smoke, get to heaven earlier.” The creator of this poster is stating that smoking could harm not only oneself but also one’s child. This anti-smoking poster is from Child Health Foundation which promotes and raises awareness for children’s health. Child Health Foundation’s primary audiences are parents who smoke and adult smokers who will be parents someday. Child Health Foundation wants to avoid parent smokers from unintentionally abusing their children’s health. Its secondary audiences are the bystanders around smokers who normally ignore the smokers. Child Health Foundation wants to encourage these observers to help the smokers to quit smoking. When non-smokers only know that smoking impacts the smoker, they might scoff at the smoker’s foolishness, but when they know that smoking also influences harmless children, they get an urge to stop the smokers. Child Health Foundation intentionally uses pathos to appeal to the audience’s emotions. Child Health Foundation knows that everyone, even the smokers themselves know smoking is harmful for their health and that those who continue to smoke either do not care or think the joy of smoking is more valuable than their well being. So it utilizes the idea to make smokers think that smoking affects not only themselves, but their innocent children. The creator of this poster effectively achieves his purpose of making smokers reconsider before smoking. The idea that something that people do to themselves aware of its harmful effects will hurt their loved ones efficiently leaves a lingering feeling among the smokers. The poster reminds people that their transient pleasure of smoking could kill their everlasting joy, children.

TOW #2: This is the Life by Annie Dillard (written, non-fiction text)

“This is the Life” is a short essay written by an American fiction and non-fiction author Annie Dillard. Her work serves as a spiritual healing for many, as it makes reader reflect on their on actions and ways of living. In “This is the Life,” Dillard emphasizes how people of the modern society take everything for granted and therefore are unable to progress and think outside of the box that they were put in. Rather than having their own views, people are inclined to think what “everyone” else thinks, although that group of everyone might differ depending on their surroundings. To condemn the modern society, the author uses a sarcastic tone as well as a provocative one. She describes something that would have been considered fortunate many years ago, but is not so fortunate in the modern society. She purposely describes this idea as something “Everyone you know agrees: this is the life”(3), to demonstrate how lucky we are to take those things for granted, but how unfortunate we are to forget that we should be thankful for those things. Also, she outrightly describes the things people take for granted by saying “[T]hese are not universal”(1). She is emphasizing that people need to realize that their everyday pleasure is the greatest desire for others. Dillard’s main audience is the people who take things for granted and need to appreciate what they have, and her secondary audience is the future generation who might make the same mistakes of taking things for granted. She is afraid that the future generation will make the same mistakes again and this is evident as she describes humans “who were ever alive lived inside one single culture that never changed for hundreds of thousands of years,” but people still do not understand what they are doing wrong as they “scratch their heads at so conservative and static a culture”(12).

Dillard achieved her purpose because after reading her essay the audience feels contrite and remorseful and makes them look back and evaluate their actions. Dillard’s bitter accusation makes people realize how fortunate they were.

IRB Intro #1 - Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer

The book I chose to read for my IRB is Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air. I decided to read this book because my cousin read Into The Wild by the same author, and recommended it to me, but I never had the chance to read it. This book is about Krakauer's expedition to Mt. Everest. I never attempted to read this book because I am not really a fan of adventure books. However, I decided to choose a different path than the one path that I always vhoose when picking a book.

TOW #1: How to Say Nothing in 500 Words

What if the way you wrote any paper for the past sixteen or seventeen years was all a hoax? What if the techniques of writing that you trusted to be indisputably important to a sound writing piece were rather harmful thus opening the many doors of possibility to giving you a D on a paper? Well, Paul Roberts, in his “How to Say Nothing in 500 Words” describes some common techniques that most juvenile writers use to either enhance their papers or get the assignment done, and how to refrain from using these errors. Intended towards inexperienced writers, Roberts tells the readers that every student is expected to make a dull subject interesting and it is the writer’s job to entice the reader into his writing with the style and wording. He informs the students to avoid the obvious: to refrain from general content and wordiness, to take the less usual side that would be refreshing for the teachers who have been reading the cliched essays for the past two hours. As an expert in linguistics, Roberts uses effective rhetorical devices such as coherence and didactic. Roberts does not conceal his points about how to be a better writer by using obscure and ambiguous wording; he clearly outlines his main points solely focusing on the idea to teach jejune writers about how to write more effectively. Under the bolded heading of his main points, the writer elaborates his points with explanations and real or unreal examples. For instance, under the heading, Call a Fool a Fool, he demonstrates how people euphemise the word “dead”, to avoid such harsh word choice, but only ends up making oneself sound incompetent. Roberts accomplished his purpose by clearly instructing what to avoid and what to carry out to readers. Although some juvenile writers might be tempted to argue against Roberts because he denounces the way they wrote for their lifetime, but Roberts’s coherent objective and analysis makes it difficult to argue against.