Ja’Brian Blackwell
English 1A, Section 5
Draft #2
Genre Anlysis
For
the Love of Football
For the 30th 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 cause by a jolt or blow to the head that can change how your brain
works. To help prevent this injury from occurring so frequently, the NFL
changed the rules around a little 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 know to be the players
most vulnerable to receiving a concussion from the defense. This injury has
gotten so serious that the NFL board is debating on whether or not to take
helmets away from the sport of football.
Of the three documents that I chose, I think
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. He
says that his five year old son told him that he didn’t want him to play
football anymore after seeing him take the excruciating hit against the
Bengals.
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 I also found an article online by
journalists Daniel Flynn stating that 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 although he states
some facts and evidence about the sport, some people still might not get the
complete visual of how dangerous the sport is. The audience may get a somewhat
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.
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 defense of
football, going against the many reports that football is too dangerous and
should be banned. 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.” 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.
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