ToW #13 - Article from ESPN: "Jaguars to let MJD test market"

Disclaimer: Be it through forgetfulness or repeated negligence, I have clearly neglected to complete this ToW, number 13, before its assigned deadline. That said, I have found APELC to be a very rewarding class, so I am determined to complete this ToW in solidarity with APELC's curriculum. Here goes.

        As someone whose only connection to American Football is passing glances at what his brother has on TV, it seems that football player Maurice Jones-Drew (MJD) is nearing the end of his contract with the Jacksonville Jaguars, an NFL team that I have never heard of. This article presents many of the facts of MJD's career with the Jaguars and quotes a few statements from the Jaguars' General Manager and MJD about his chances of getting recontracted. The article excels in reporting and organizing facts but falls far short in being stylistically pleasing. Its author, Michael DiRocco, seems to have a duality in his credibility, too; he has received multiple awards from the AP Sports Editors but was educated at the lesser-known Jacksonville University. Either way, I would say that he succeeds in the reporting aspect of any article's purpose but fails in the entertaining aspect of it.
        Obviously written for football fans eager enough to look for articles on ESPN.com, DiRocco presents all of the facts that I imagine an avid sport connoisseur could want. In one information-filled but ever-so boring paragraph, he states, "Jones-Drew, who will be 29 years old in March, is a physical runner despite his 5-foot-7, 210-pound frame. He has a lot of mileage on his legs, too. He has carried the ball 1,804 times, caught 335 passes for 2,873 yards, and returned 70 kickoffs and 15 punts." These alphanumerics would constitute an appeal to logos, but DiRocco doesn't have anything to prove to the reader -- he simply presents the facts and lets the reader conclude on them.
        My inability to expertly conclude on these facts may be what made the article so boring to me, but we cannot ignore the rather dull style about it. For example, "He said it would be hard to keep Gabbert if the team re-signed Chad Henne and drafted a quarterback with the No. 3 pick, but he also said the Jaguars aren't automatically going to draft a quarterback with their first pick." The stylistic crime committed here is the double repetition -- of "he said" and "draft a quarterback" -- which makes a parallel structure out of an already boring sentence. So many errors like this are made that I have to wonder if DiRocco ever had a class like APELC to teach him the value of entertaining his audience.

Maurice Jones-Drew punching a guy.

ToW #12 - IRB by Meg Jay: "The Defining Decade"

        Jay begins her "self-help"ish book on how to seize your twenties with a chapter-long description of the plight of current twentysomethings and a preview of the advice that she gives them in her psychology practice. In doing so, she gives anecdotes about the twentysomethings that she has sessions with and frequently quotes other psychologists in proving her points.

        The introduction begins with the tale of Kate, a lost twentysomething who enrolled in Jay's therapy sessions. Stories are told about Kate's failures so far: she needs a driver's license to get to any good jobs, she distracts herself from her depression with shallow histrionics, and she insists on contemplating her life rather than living it. A conclusion is eventually made; Kate acts the way she does because she follows the doctrine that "thirty is the new twenty", giving her an excuse to procrastinate on her goals with the promise that they'll be easier to fulfill in her thirties. Jay denies this and makes an example out of Kate, likening her experiences and thoughts with those of many other twentysomethings. In talking specifically about Kate, Meg Jay makes it much easier to understand the plight of every new adult.

        Then, understanding that just anecdotes and examples are have messages too shallow to provoke understanding amongst her readers, Jay weaves a few quotations regarding early adult life for twentysomethings to use as maxims to live by. For example, when countering Kate's desire to contemplate her life, Jay urges her to stop following Socrates' "the unexamined life is not worth living" and start abiding by Sheldon Kopp's "the unlived life is not worth examining". She later states the adage that "hope is a good breakfast but a bad supper" when asking twentysomethings to hope before their twenties and then act during their twenties rather than hoping before and after their twenties. In using these short, memorable phrases, Jay provides her readers with a constant stream of take-aways from her text. Instead of having to develop mottos for themselves, they just have to read Jay's book.

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ToW #11 - Article from BBC "Autos": "For Japan’s hot-rodders, the eyes have it"

        This randomly-selected article from BBC's online magazine, written by Brendan McAleer, an "independent automotive writer" and thus member of the Automobile Journalists Association of Canada, compellingly portrays the history of Japan's Mooneyes hot-rod shop. Mooneyes, an extension of Dean Moon's 1950s-revolutionary custom parts company, soups-up cars from all over the world with Japanese style. This automobile culture, which is normally uninteresting to me, is artfully and expertly described by McAleer, making it not only interesting, but engaging. This raises a question: is he only writing for automobile enthusiasts? Its seems not; his prose is entertaining enough to appeal to a much broader audience than that. It is a combination of McAleer's unexpectedly descriptive writing and his tasteful choice of subject that allowed him to successfully educate me about the half-ordinary and half-wondrous Mooneyes Japan shop.

        At the very outset of his article, McAleer goes into a frankly startling level of detail. Perhaps I'm just used to the rather sterile world of functional cars and not the realm of artful hot-rods, but doesn't this paint a gorgeous mental image?

"Welcome to Mooneyes Japan, a slice of Californian automotive history basking in the glow of the Rising Sun. Holding pride of place out front, a glinting yellow dune buggy looks as if it just alighted from the cover of a vintage hot-rodding magazine. Millions of metallic golden flecks in the citrus-yellow paint catch the dancing light, making the car twinkle like a mirage."

        You can almost feel the brush strokes. The beauty of the prose parallels the beauty of the cars perfectly. I can only assume that this move towards creative writing was a result of McAleer's perception of the creative side of custom car design. This makes McAleer the most literary "automotive writer" that I expect to find any time soon.

        Even without the more engaging of the descriptive tricks employed, this article may have still appealed to me. Through the sheer luck of myself being a student of the Japanese language, I find learning anything about the culture engaging. From working through the proper pronunciations of names like "Sugamuma" and "Ishii" to exploring the relationship between the Japanese Mooneyes and the Californian Dean Moon, I have to say that I found the experience spontaneously enjoyable. But I do not think that I am the only one who could enjoy a piece involving Japan; in modern times, when Japan seems to balance both extreme technological innovation and a richly historied culture, almost every forward-thinking or sentimental person has an eye for the Japanese. This recalls the question of audience; perhaps it was not fully wise for this particular article to be situated only in the "Autos" section. In my opinion at least, it's front page material.