This week’s write-up is brought to you by Peter McClary and Devante Jones.
Reading for class
Just Mercy
For the class days of August 29th and 31 of 2017 Dr. C asked the class to read the Introduction of Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, as well as Changing Writing Chapter 1 pp 3-14 then pp 15-30 along with Chapter 8 pp 200-204.
For starters while you should have read these pages I’m going to summarize them for you. There are no spoilers, I repeat NO SPOILERS (Maybe). In Just Mercy Introduction Bryan Stevenson is a Law Student who felt completely bizarre while attending Harvard Law School as he knew nothing compared to his classmates. However he stood tall and made it through his first year and shortly after became an intern at SPDC. One day he was asked to go and inform a death row inmate that they did not have a lawyer but that he would not be executed within the year. After his talk with the inmate, Bryan Stevenson saw how rude the guard was towards the inmate and began to think. People of this world are treated to badly for simple things and sometimes even no reason. Children are 
thrown into prison and tried as adults at the at of 12 yet no one appears to be bothered. The introduction first talks about a short piece of Stevenson’s life and what encouraged him to get into the line of work he is in today. It later goes over the faults of the American justice system, such as imprisoning children for life without parole. He talks about privileges and how not everyone gets the the same ones fairly, those who start high up with money and good parents have a better chance to succeed. Yet those who start in the foster care system who have a mindset that no one loves them and are poor and have been to 7 different schools within the past 2 years do not have that great of a chance to become a lawyer or doctor, for example. To sum this up Stevenson knows that the world is not a fair place but can be if people knew the truth about the prison system, how death row inmates are treated and how people thrown into jail are sometimes falsely accused or not given a fair fighting chance. Stevenson knows and he wants to share that.
Changing Writing
This is the changing writing section pp 1-30 (Chapter 1). This will include not much about the actual reading or in general, but more so focused on the basis of PACT analysis. To begin, there are different levels of reading, these include: Skimming, or reading on the surface level to get the main idea, 2nd level being a deeper level for more understanding and digging deeper, but not as deep as the 3rd level where critical reading comes into play and the reader wants to know why the author did this and this. This 3rd level includes PACT analysis. PACT stands for Purpose, Audience, Context, and Text. These are the four fundamentals in any writing piece no matter what. Without PACT these is no reason to write, it’s rather impossible as with every piece of writing there is a Purpose and Text and Context. To explain a bit more, Purpose is the reason for a piece of writing to be written and the way it could potentially change the reader’s beliefs. Audience is the people who the text is written for. All writers target a specific audience and usually base this off the context.
Context is the larger situation and the location of the writing including newspapers, television, or different articles 
and websites. For example if someone is watching shows for children 2-3 years old, the commercials target Audience would be mothers so the commercials would be for diapers, kids toys, etc., but if an ad is placed in a newspaper, it would target older people so the products would be lawyers or people who work with taxes. All of these elements of PACT link in some way. Lastly is Text which can be anything concerning the way something is written to how it is said. It is “a document or other designed object”. In the video above there is information on Purpose, Audience, and Context while giving many examples for that the PACT analysis could be used on to help for more understanding.
Class discussion/activities
At the beginning of class, we had our daily writing, and the topics were “what is social justice? And what issues are you interested in?” After a few mins of writing what we thought, we broke out into groups of 4 and discussed the topic. Dr.C then put the questions on the dry erase board and asked what our groups thought of the two issues. Here’s a photo of the board after we were done adding to it:
We started a class discussion about what we compiled together on the erase board, Dr.. C started the debate with a question, did we miss anything? We did. Somebody said whitewashing, but which began a serious discussion about a group of people that always gets over looked “disabled people.” Did you know what word is used when you discriminate against disabled people, it’s called ableism. Dr. C got more in depth with it and here’s a snippet:
We talked more and more, and we hit on more serious topics from police brutality and immigrants to global warming which is another serious topic that affects everyone equally. We added more to the board which meant we needed another picture just to show the topics we came up with as a class.
Thursday’s class opening was about advertisements, do you remember any ads? Most of the students either chose a serious commercial like driving while texting and others picked a funny commercial. One young lady referenced a Sprite commercial with Vince Staple and how in the commercial he was aware that it was a commercial and used that to make sly comments like “oh turn the label towards the cameras.” Dr.C then asked why do we remember these advertisements, most of us guessed because it was either funny or it impacted us one way or another, then she asked did it work? When you saw that Sprite commercial, did you want to buy a Sprite? The majority of us were indifferent, I mean we like the Sprite, but the commercial didn’t make us want to get up and just buy one. Dr. C said to apply the PACT chart (purpose, audience, text, context) once we did that we had a better understanding of the commercials. Now we tried to apply the PACT chart advertisement in our Changing Writing text
book to this ad. We read and looked at it, and we determined that the purpose was to sell cigarettes to women, the audience was women and radio viewers, the context was around 1940s and they used a radio because it was a prevalent media form during that time, and lastly the text was strange because even though it was a cigarette advertisement, there were no cigarettes in the ad. We theorized that the cigarette companies knew that cigarettes are unattractive, but a white woman in the 1940s with a lovely smile was.
During the end of class, we discussed our homework and an article that was in our school newspaper. The title was “The race problem in U.S. universities.” Read it. Do you agree or disagree? I like it! It expresses a serious issue with universities, I want you to read it for yourself. I don’t want to spoil it, so please, please read it.
