Critical Reading 1
At first glance “What happened the night Trayvon Martin died,” seems like a unbiased straightforward news article. It accurately displays facts of a case gathered from police evidence, in a short and simple way. However careful word choice and structure points to Zimmerman as being in the wrong. Even though the majority of people feel that Zimmerman is a murderous sociopath that unjustly took the life of a 17 year old kid, this news article should provide a straightforward representation of the facts. The facts should be what people use to form their opinions of a case and not the connotation of words used.
For instance paragraph 13 goes over Zimmerman’s report of having used self defense. The second word in that paragraph, “claimed”, already calls into question Zimmerman’s statement before they have even read the statement. The connotation of the word claimed is negative and makes the statement seem not quite to be the truth. There are a number of synonyms, like statement or report, that have a neutral connotation and would have been just as good.
Another instance of this is the use of the word “teen” when mentioning that “he’d taken his gun out and shot the teen”. Using the victims name “Trayvon Martin” would have been an impartial way to say that Zimmerman had shot him. However the word teen draws an image of a power gap between a man and a teen making Martin seem to be more of a victim.
So in the paragraph mentioning the defendants defense the author uses connotation to make his defense seem to be shaky and to almost demonize Zimmerman.
This post is interesting. I think you could and some of your peers have use a similar strategy to argue the opposite that the article is biased in favor of Zimmerman.
At any rate I’m more concerned here in the close reading and how you’re making your argument. I think you (in classic smart student-ness) have gone full force to make an argument. I am not sure exactly what close reading method you are using because while you definitely engage the text, which is great, you kind of point to two different narrative details and discuss them. What ties the detail together is the fact that you’ve already posited an interpretive claim that these details bias the reader against Zimmerman. The detail of “teen” and the detail of “claim” aren’t inherently connected as a type of rhetorical strategy. Perhaps it generally falls under word choice, but every word f all under word choice.
I point this out not because you don’t make a good case for how you’re reading the word choices but because 1) the assignment was to practice one of the given strategies and 1) while there are different ways to close read, the strategies I have given you have built in logical coherence, so you don’t necessarily have to do as much work in your argument justifying your strategy of argumentation as I think you kind of need to do in your post here.
But to be clear, you’re good at explaining your point and making an argument. You’ve got a good sense for the degree to which you need to spell out your thinking, which is excellent. I think what I want to see in the future though is you thinking a little more about logic that undergirds your argument. How do you picky your examples? What do they have in common? Why didn’t you choose another set of examples? Etc.