Ja’Brian Blackwell
English 1A, Section 5
Final Draft
Genre Anlysis
For
the Love of Football
Part B.
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 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.
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