Outside Reading 3-3

Date: Jan. 9^th
Title: Teacher Training, Taught by Students
Author: Winnie Hu
Type of reading: Newspaper piece
You can find the actual article I read from the website below:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/15/nyregion/15metjournal.html?ref=education

Editorial columns, features, and other magazine and newspaper pieces with clear points of view and strong voices—how does the author craft a narrative persona and a “voice” here, and how do these elements impact your response to the content of the piece? If this piece were AP essay, would the speaker be appropriate? Why or why not?

             I really liked the title of this article; it was really heart-warming to me somehow.

             When I was reading the article, at first I thought that there was no clear voice in this article. However, I thought if so the article was saying something, then there should be a voice. And I found out that the author was creating the voice through other people. By “through others,” I mean that the author is not expressing his or her own opinion. Most of this article is about how people reflected to this issue and what actually people said about the issue, and through those the author is telling us how people felt about the new way of teacher training.

In AP essays, it is good to have some references to support our own opinions. However, the point of AP essays is to appeal our own thoughts about the literary works, so this kind of voice would not be appropriate.

As a fellow writer, to talk about the writing of this article, I felt it was a well organized article. Above everything, the opening line of the article arouses the reader’s interest in the first place. The readers would wonder when they read the line, why teenagers are so sleepy in the classes. And then they would keep reading to find the answer. And then it is transited into its real topic smoothly by indicating that the teacher, Ms. O’Bryant, found the answer for the wonder from her student. Followed by the “informal” introduction, the author “formally” introduces this new teacher training program and shares how the program is being spread out and how people feel about it. The organization of the information is logical and straightforward and I think it helped forming the voice. If the passage was not as organized, then the voice could have been unclear.

From a rhetorical point of view, the author’s quotation of actual speech of people increased the credibility of the information; the concise and grammatically perfect sentences made the article more readable but also more formal at the same time; author’s use of parentheses, quotation marks, dashes and rhetorical questions gave the readers more fun reading the article, but the author also limited the use of those “special” punctuations so the article would not lose its formality.

The language, not the voice, of the author, in my opinion, is applicable to AP essays for it is formal but not as hard to read through and also does not cause loss of interest of the readers.