IRB Intro #3 "Eat, Pray, Love"

It’s been about three years since I’ve watched Julia Roberts travel around the world on the silver screen. For my third marking period IRB I chose to read Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. A big factor of why I chose this book was because of the movie, but I wanted to read it to see how different the book would be from the Hollywood produced film. The book is a memoir of a woman in her 30s with a broken heart, who decides to devote a year to travel around the world. I’m interested to see how the book will be different than the movie, and how Gilbert will describe her sense of wanderlust on paper. Im excited to read a journal style of writing, which is different than most things I have read before. 

TOW #16 "Towie Fan travels to Syria" (Text)

All over the news have been reports concerning a terrorist group who go by the name of ISIS. The earliest occurrence was in August when a journalist was attacked and held in captivity. After the brutal torturing the group took out a camera and filmed his beheading and sent this gruesome video to the united states government. Since then other kidnapping, hacking, and attacks have occurred in this article I read about a towie fan who travelled to Syria and has a strong insight of what ISIS is like there. Tareena Shakil, a british women ran away to Syria after telling relatives she would be on holiday in Spain. However the life in ISIS held Raqqa was hard and she escaped across the Turkish border. Now Shakil begs her father for forgiveness in hopes for him to take her back home. Currently she is being held in a Turkish detention center, and she just met with her father a few days ago for an emotional reunion.

The artilcle evokes pathos about the living situation by including the brutal conditions like, “'Life is so hard there. There's no hot water, no electricity for hours on end, none of the comforts we are used to in Britain.

'I escaped death so many times. There were bombs coming down on the street where I lived every night. The house would shake. I didn't know if I was going to live or die." (Dailymail.Uk)

The author of this articles purpose was to inform her audience, directed towards those in Britain of the life of those who travelled to join the extremist group. The author Emma Glanfield is a frequent writer on the attacks of this terrorist organization. She establishes her credibility by pulling exact quotes from Shakil and using statistics about the terrorist group.

Emma Glanfield has conveyed her message about the fears of terrorist attacks on britains streets being heightened by informing her readers of the recent events involving them.  

TOW #15 "Outliers by Malcom Gladwell" (IRB)

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell redefines the meaning of success. Success to him can be a matter of luck and the circumstances you are under. Through logos and detailed evidence Gladwell shows his audience what success truly is. To most people it is defined as the story of a true hero creating themselves and achieving against all odds. We love the good rags to riches stories, but this is not always true. 

Gladwell is a psychologist and analyzes the pattern of success and peoples background stories. Establishing his credibility, he sets stage for other psychology books. Gladwell most prominently uses exemplification to show a relation between surrounding environment and peak achievement. In order to clearly show arguments, Gladwell appeals to logos. In an example of why Korean flights crash more than others, he demonstrates how they lack connection. “Klotz: One-five-zero maintaining two thousand Avianca zero-five-two heavy. The captain is clearly on the edge of panic. Caviedes: Advise him we don’t have fuel...Klotz: Climb and maintain three thousand and, ah, we’re running out of fuel, sir” (199). Using this example makes it clear for the reader to see the relationship between crashing and communication.

Through the rhetorical devices, and pattern of a narrative Gladwell achieves his purpose of describing the factors of what success is. The only drawback of how Gladwell describes success is that he discourages people from trying to achieve it. But by making success seem too rare to achieve Gladwell encourages me to defy the odds and achieve.