Last Blog Post!

I believe that Laurence Musgrove's article "The Real Reasons Students can't Write" is a piece of "good" public discourse partly due to its form. W. Ross Winterowd describes different types of form in his article "Dispositio", but Winterowd's concept of recurring images, symbols, and ideas as creating form is a concept that creates form in Musgrove's article. Throughout Musgrove's article, he is trying to persuade his audience that students cannot write for a specific reason without placing this problem completely on the students. He also places some blame on the teachers/professors , and then proposes a possible, yet midly sarcastic solution. However, throught this article, the idea that students writing habits are not up to par and need to be addressed for their benefit is a recurring theme or idea present in the "The Real Reasons Students can't Write", which creates a sense of form throughout.

For my historical-causal analysis, I wish to analyze how the No Child Left Behind Act has affected low-income schools, administrations and students, negatively. I think that my idea for a real form, would have been more effective before Barack Obama won the election, since I am from Illinois and would like to write a letter to a senator as to how this is an important issue that needs to be addressed at the national level because it is a national law. I believe that I will need to construct my article to show the inner-city schools effectively as to appeal to administrators and parents of these schools, as well as appeal to my main audience of middle-income/high-income, generally white parents and administrators of schools and districts that do not deal with the NCLB daily. I would like to introduce the schools and students who deal with NCLB with a sense of objectivity, before showing the negative effects of NLCB. This would help keep the main audience since many people who do not associate with NLCB believe that it is a positive and effective plan. This genre form will need to convince the Illinois senators that NLCB has not been effective on low-income schools, and has, in fact, hurt the schools, students, and administrations more than it has helped.