Column- "a plea to play"

     Recently my independent reading has been a little slow, but the topic of columns has still been on my mind for some reason. The Enquirer came this weekend (I guess thats not much of a surprise) and I thought I'd look through it to see if there were any good columns. It being a newspaper and it being that newspaper writers jobs are to write good columns, It also wasn't a huge surprise that I found one. The story is called "a plea to play" if you'd like to read it, and i thought if was good because it almost followed the guidelines that we needed for our creative nonfiction pieces. The story is about a political refugee from the Democratic Republic of congo and he lives here in Ohio. But the larger world issue is not what the article focusses on. The article aims at telling his story of ineligibility to play soccer as a senior, and his dream to do so.
     I'm not really supposed to summarize it here, so if you're interested, I would suggest going and reading it yourself, because it was a very well- written article. What I found in the article as I read through it, was that the author had used a lot of the techniques that we talked about in class (so I guess Mrs. Bross wasn't making that up after all).that most prevalent techniques I noticed was that the author used a lot of more casual, conversational diction that avoided being chatty. this can be seen in sentences like, "The alarm clock sounds at 5:30 a.m. Daniel gets ready in his family's Millvale apartment, then we walks down the street to catch the bus to Hyde Park for school." Here, not only did I notice that the author was using casual diction, but also that it was used to create a more relaxed tone. It is like this throughout the article even though it talks about an issue that is not necessarily of national concern, but affects the life of one person greatly.

more about columns

As I haven't been doing a lot of independent reading lately, I thought I would spend some more time writing about columns. I learned two big things during this this unit. One of them Is that the elements of rhetoric and be used in a lot of interesting and captivating ways to make your writing better and more descriptive. The other, Is that I only really enjoy only really enjoy humor columns. Going through the unit we talked more about how diction choices can better our writing, which seems like it may be important because we've talked about it only a few more times than once this year. We also continued talking about syntax and learned about how purposeful fragments could add effect to our writing or place emphasis. One technique that I've used in my speech to ridicule and tease my friends with for a while now (all in good fun) is rhetorical questions. I never really thought about using it in my writing until this unit. The way I've seen authors use rhetorical questions in the columns we read during this unit really gave me reason for using it myself. Why did I not use it before? That's rhetorical.

Now to talk about the other thing I learned during the unit. I only like humor columns. Maybe it has something to do with my dislike of reading ( despite Mrs. Bross' efforts to change that) or possibly it's because I like to stumble across the topics of most columns by myself instead of have someone tell me what those things are like. I don't really know why myself. what i do know is why I do enjoy humor columns. The reason for that is in the theme itself. Humor. Honestly for me, theres no such thing as a good day without laughter. I like both to be laughing and to be making others laugh. I am always looking for new ways or situations to be the cause of another person's chuckles. When I see my classmates reading the humor columns that we did this unit , I feel like they are only getting half of what I got out of them. Not only did I find them funny, I saw them as a place to find new techniques to use myself. Whatever the reason, I feel like I don't get The same double value from the other columns. Oh well.