Rhetorical Analysis

More Than a Game

Ja’Brian Blackwell

                                               English 1A M,W,F: 9am     

            For the 30^th year and running, the NFL has been the most popular sport of America. One of the biggest issues in the National Football League is the amount of injuries that are happening. Of course there is a wide variety of injuries but one in particular, concussions. These traumatic   brain injuries are caused by a jolt or blow to the head that can change how your brain works. To go along with my theme of football concussions, I decided to create an object that depicts how every traumatic incident you get contributes to the development of cognitive impairments and other negative outcomes.

            To show this, I chose to build a brain inside of a football helmet that showed how each impact to the head could break away at a part of your brain. The main object, which is the helmet, is actually a piñata that I found in target. My main idea was to get an old helmet from the equipment manager down at the football facility and then find a way to cut a wide hole in it somehow. Then as I was walking through target looking for materials I glanced over and saw this piñata in the shape of a football helmet, and thought to myself “this is perfect!”

            The size of this helmet is actually the normal size of a real life football helmet and is colored with grey and green confetti, which I found to be awesome because it is similar to CSUS colors. I formed the brain out of a dark shade of white air-dry clay with my hands. I placed a thick cardboard tube inside of the helmet and glued it to the bottom of the brain to hold it up. Next I stuck a long wood-piece vertically on top of the brain. Then I used about 8 smaller wood-pieces to glue horizontally to the vertical one. After that I tied strands of tooth floss to the 8 smaller wood-pieces, which will be hanging on to the deteriorated brain fragments from the blow to the head. The toothpicks were placed around the top of the helmet with red strips of paper on the tips of them to indicate that there was an impact that caused the brain to break apart.

            The audience my object is intended for is anyone or parents who have children who are interested in the sport of football. For football players, there is a 75% chance for concussion in every season. That is a very high percentage and I feel that people should be aware of this when they are deciding to play this sport. The message that the object I created conveys how serious a concussion is in the sport of football, but at the same time I hope to convey how much passion a lot of athletes have for their sport. I feel that my object is very effective because it is very specific in explaining the side effects of concussions. For instance, it may cause concentration problems, or memory complaints, sensitivity to light, hard to sleep, disorders of taste and smell etc. I love the sport of football with a passion and honestly don’t think I could live without it. To me and I’m sure most other football athletes, the sport of football isn’t just a sport, it is more than a game. So I don’t feel like my object is scaring my audience away from football, it merely just lets them know exactly what they are risking what they are getting into by participating in the sport.

            My 3-D genre relates to the other 3 texts that I chose for my previous genre analysis assignment in many ways. They all tie in to the main point of concussion through blows to the head through helmet to helmet hits. There have been many reports to stop the use of helmets or completely ban the sport of football due to so many concussion injuries and the effects they were having on the athletes’ lives. Boot states in his article “Let's not overreact to a handful of tragic injuries and legislate or litigate away a game that means so much to so many Americans.”

            In NFL super star Jamichael Finely’s personal interview about the concussion he received from taking a helmet to helmet hit from a safety. He then talks about when he finally came back to his senses, the conversation he had with his five year old son. “Daddy can you fly out and come home, I don’t want you to play football anymore.”(Finely Jamichael. Personal Interview. 28 Oct. 2013) This explains the effects concussions have on not only the athletes themselves but on their families. Because Finely loves the sport so much, despite the fact that he had this life changing experience he continues to live his dream in the NFL.

            The photographic text that I chose, ties into all the other texts because it depicts another NFL star getting his head smashed between two other professional athletes on game day. This image is really effective because it looks really painful and doesn’t look like he got up by himself after taking that. I have actually been concussed the same exact way depicted in the image here at CSUS. It was my first concussion I have ever received and I hope to never experience it again.

            At first, after drawing up my object I didn’t think the outcome was going to turn out too good. That is because I was going to use a real football helmet and try to figure out a way to cut it open, which I don’t think I would have. But fortunately I was walking through target looking for materials and looked over and saw a piñata in the shape of a football helmet. From then on, I knew this object was going to turn out great. I did have a few challenges in creating this object. The first challenge I had was cutting a perfect square at the top of the piñata helmet. Because I didn’t have a box cutter, which would have made it a thousand times easier, I had to use the normal house-hold knife. I did not feel too safe cutting this difficult object with a house-hold knife but fortunately I pulled through. The second and last challenge I had was forming the air-dry clay into a brain as best as I could. Trying to hold the clay in one hand and forming it with the other was difficult because as you were holding it with one hand, the clay was so soft that one side of the brain would kind of get squeezed together and end up smaller and deformed.

            The grade that I feel I deserve on this assignment is a B+. I feel I deserved this grade because I honestly found a way to complete this assignment in the short time that we had, and my time being even shorter trying to balance the most busy week of this semester that included spring ball with the team, and all the team meetings; and also all of my other classwork including my coms 4 speech that I had to prepare for, for Wednesday. I believe that the quality of my project is really good, and I am very happy with the outcome of it. I had a lot of fun with this assignment and I am happy we were assigned it.

Peer Review: Brett Babigian

The message being portrayed in Brett’s object is that media as a whole is what pretty much helps kids make there decisions on what they want to order at fast food restaurants. His 3-D object design was a hand made television, and on the screen depicts a type of swirl that goes around the screen with a toy spider in the middle. I believe that this object conveys the fact that these fast food commercials are brainwashing the kids into choosing these certain meals because as a child, who doesn’t want a meal that comes with a cool toy in the box. This object is intended for younger kids who are still attracted by toys. This object remind me of when I was younger, when the McDonalds commercial would come on and I would see the happy meal come out with the new Pokémon toys; I used to beg my mother to take me to McDonalds not because I was hungry but just so I can get the toy I wanted. 

Peer Review Prep RA

Description:

To go along with my theme of football concussions, I decided to create an object that depicts how every traumatic incident you get contributes to the development of cognitive impairments and other negative outcomes. To show this, I chose to build a brain inside of a football helmet that showed how each impact to the head could break away at a part of your brain. With an iron rod stuck through the brain, I glued two popsicle sticks to the top of the rod to hang the deteriorated parts of the brain using tooth floss. To attach the tooth floss to the popsicle sticks I hole punch 4 holes in each of the sticks and tight four strands of floss to them. The toothpicks were placed around the top of the helmet with red strips of paper on the tips of them; to indicate that there was an impact that caused the brain break apart.

Materials:

·      Popsicle sticks

·      Iron rod

·      Football helmet

·      Pink Play-doh

·      Tooth floss

·      Hole puncher

·      Red paper strips

·      Toothpicks

Genre Analysis Final Draft

Ja’Brian Blackwell

English 1A, Section 5

Final Draft

Genre Anlysis

      

For the Love of Football

Part B.

       For the 30^th year and running, the NFL has been the most popular sport of America. One of the biggest issues in the National Football League is the amount of injuries that are happening. Of course there is a wide variety of injuries but one in particular is concussions. These traumatic   brain injuries are caused by a jolt or blow to the head that can change how your brain works. To help prevent this so frequent injury, the NFL changed the rules around a bit. These reworded rules prohibit a player from launching himself off of the ground and hitting a defenseless player head to head or in the neck. Wide receivers are statistically known to be the players most vulnerable to receiving a concussion from the defense. In this analysis, I will discuss the differences and similarities between three documents that I chose which all tie in to the debate of changing drastically changing the sport of football due to the frequent injury known as a concussion.

        Of the three documents that I chose, I believe that my YouTube video has the most effective message because it actually shows you the major effects that a concussion may have on your body. In this clip, you actually get to listen to NFL star Jermichael Finely himself who talks about the hit in the game against the Bengals. In this video, while Finely explains what happened to him in the game, snapshots of the hit and him walking after the hit are shown. Here he explains in full detail his exact experience. Finely states that after taking the hit, he tried running to the sideline, but when he looked up all he saw was jerseys and pants, but none of his team had any head or legs. He also stated that his whole body acquired some type of burning sensation. Jermichael Finely, after speaking on his experience on the field, even talks about how this experience affected him and his family. “My son, only five years old told me that he wanted me to find a flight out, during the game, because he didn’t want me to play football anymore after seeing me take the excruciating hit against the Bengals.”(Finely, Jamichael. Personal Interview. 28 Oct. 2013) This shows how football athletes put their health at risk playing this sport, but agree to it because of the strong passion they have for it. A lot of football athletes, including myself, consider this sport “more than a game.”

       The second document I found to be most effective is the photographic text because in this image, it displays a professional athlete that played for the Titans getting his head smashed in between two other athletes running at full speed aiming to take him down. This visual shows how dangerous and how painful taking hits in the sport of football can be. This is one of many ways that professional athletes receive concussions. This athlete in particular, most likely did not get right back up from this collision. It actually looks as if his helmet might have even popped off in the collision.

The men at the professional level are extremely fit and extremely fast. Therefore, concussions are the most common and most serious injury in the NFL. This has been an ongoing issue not only at the professional level but at the high school and collegiate level also. Personally, I feel that the board making these new rules of no helmet to helmet hits is wasting their time. It's not that we football players do it on purpose; it's just the life of football. I agree that it is not a safe sport, don't get me wrong, but that's the beauty of it. You risk getting concussions playing any sport, it just so happens that it is more frequent in the sport of football.

       The document I found to be my least effective is the academic article "In Defense of football." I’m not sure if Max Boot is creditable or not because while doing some research, I came across an article online by journalist Daniel Flynn accusing Max Boot and his research assistant of plagiarism. Both Max Boot and his research assistant both deny that they had ever heard of Daniel Flynn or his work. Thus in this article, Max Boot speaks about how athletes at the college and professional level, along with pop warner and high school continue to be agitated by reports that football is too dangerous to approve of. Many law suits and complaints have been filed for deaths by overheating or other freak accidents. But the main criticism focuses on the impact of repeated hits to the head. Even the hits that don't result in concussions sometimes result in brain disorders that cause mood disorders and dementia. This article is least effective to me because he states some facts and evidence about the sport using just words, his audience still may not get the complete visual of how dangerous the sport is. I used the words “his audience,” because I personally play this sport at an intercollegiate level and have experienced a concussion firsthand, so I already know how dangerous it is by experience. Boots audience may get somewhat of a visual of the effects of concussions using their imagination, but I most definitely think that the audience would get a better feel for how a concussion can effect someone physically and mentally by seeing an actual image or clip of someone actually experiencing this injury.

       Texts of the same genre are not always similar because a genre does not only depend on what in a media txt but also on the way it is constructed. For example, finding the difference between a horror film and a thriller film. They can deal with the same subject matter, and look almost exactly the same, but still belong to separate genres. As in horror films, it takes the audience into a metaphysical place, where a thriller sticks to reality.

        The relation between genres, their message, and its mode of delivery is that at the end, it is aimed at a certain audience for a certain point. For instance, a genre is a category of artistic content, as in music or literature, marked by similarities in form, style, or subject matter. Within these artistic characterizations they are all trying to give out a specific message to their audience. Within these messages, they use a certain mode of delivery, or tone of voice to get their point across. Like I mentioned earlier, no one wants to use the tone of voice that sounds like you are threatening your audience because that wouldn't be the way to persuade anyone, that would be more of manipulation. A genre wants to give its audience a freedom of space so that it is not forcing them to do or feel some type of way that is not in their own interests.

         I don't completely think that the types of texts that we read impact us as individuals because we as individuals are not always interested in the texts that we see, watch or read. Like I mentioned before, you can never persuade anyone who is not interested in what you are saying. Sometimes we watch videos that we are not actually interested in, so therefore I don't believe that the same can be said for the popular saying that goes "You are what you eat." As a society we all still have different interests and feelings for certain things, so I feel that all the different types of texts cannot impact us as a whole.

Part A.

The format for each of the texts is different because they are three different Genres. The academic article that I chose is from a Wall Street Journal in 2013. This article speaks on the defense of football, where it speaks against the many reports that football is too dangerous and should be banned. The format and layout is that of an online article. Boot writes in a passionate tone, letting his audience clearly know that he is a big fan of American football. The writing style he used is a mixture of formal and personal because he uses lots of research but at the same time gave his own opinion about different subjects. Boots intended readers were those who are interested in the topic of banning football because of major injuries. He also gave lots of evidence using quotes from professional football stars themselves. Max Boot’s article relates to my photographic text and my YouTube clip because they all tie to the subject of concussions. The purpose of all three of my chosen texts is to inform the audience on how dangerous the sport of football can be, but not in the sense to throw football under the bus. In the article, Max Boot states “Let's not overreact to a handful of tragic injuries and legislate or litigate away a game that means so much to so many Americans.” In my photographic text, it displays an image of a professional football player getting his head smashed between two defenders. It basically shows how risky and how painful the sport of football can be. In my YouTube text, Jamichael Finely walks the audience through what caused him to be diagnosed with a concussion. After that he also talks about when he finally came back to his senses, the conversation he had with his five year old son. Finely states that his five year old son told him on the phone, before the game was even over, “Daddy can you fly out and come home, I don’t want you to play football anymore.”(Finely Jamichael. Personal Interview. 28 Oct. 2013) He said that conversation he had with his son really touched him because the sport of football means so much to him. The tone he used in this interview was very sincere, and feel like the purpose of this interview was to help raise the awareness of how serious a concussion could be; but also to make a statement that injuries like this happen and that it’s the game of football and it mean everything to some people.