Anker Susan. Real Essays with Readings with 2009 MLA Update
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READINGS
Chapter 44 • Illustration 757
three. Or I could buy a new refrigerator which, for no apparent reason,
has a television set where the kids’ artwork used to be displayed.
8 The culprit of complexifi cation is feature creep, a technological
kudzu
3
that has taken over the gadget near you. Feature creep has led
to what Roland Rust of the University of Maryland calls feature fatigue,
a phrase inspired by the gift of a mouse pad that had been loaded with
everything from a calculator to a radio. The only thing it couldn’t do
was brush his teeth. Maybe.
9 Rust tossed the better mouse pad in the bin and wrote a report
on feature fatigue for the Harvard Business Review. A complexifi cation
guru, he blames engineers who love to load this stuff. And he blames
consumers whose eyes are bigger than their abilities. In the store, he
says, capability is a big deal. At home, usability is.
10 It turns out that getting any new equipment is rather like getting a
new baby. It all looks so easy when you’re in the hospital. But when you
get home, you don’t have a clue what to do with it. One survey showed
that 56 percent of consumers who bought a high-tech device were over-
whelmed by it.
11 Let’s be frank. Our daily lives have become more complicated.
Americans moonlight
4
in the self-service economy — pumping our own
overpriced gas, checking out our own groceries, printing our own pic-
tures. Not to mention picking our Medicare prescription plans and
401(k)s.
5
12 But faced with gadgets test-marketed on 14-year-olds, we now blame
ourselves for being tech-unsavvy rather than blaming tech for being
user-unfriendly. The way I fi gure it, I could have learned Mandarin
6
in the amount of time I spent updating software and hardware over the
past decade. The difference is that I could still speak Mandarin, but the
technological languages of the past three decades are now as extinct as
the Xerox Telecopier.
13 Rust says that his model of simplicity is his automatic garage door
opener. It goes up. It goes down. I don’t have a garage. My model, I
blush to confess, was always the toothbrush. It goes up and down. Of
course, that was before it had a DVD.
14 Now I am sure that somewhere there is an engineer creating a tooth-
brush with an LCD, an MP3 player, and the capacity to instant message
from my mouth to yours. Beware, the feature creep is coming to a molar
near you.
3
kudzu: a vine that is known for taking over the areas it infests
4
moonlight: in this context, to work at a second job in addition to one’s primary job
5
401(k)s: retirement-related investment plans
6
Mandarin: the offi cial spoken language of China
PAUSE: Underline
what Rust suggests
are the causes of
feature creep.
PAUSE: What is
Goodman’s point in
noting these “mod-
els of simplicity”?
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READINGS
758 Part Eight • Readings for Writers
SUMMARIZE AND RESPOND
In your reading journal or elsewhere, summarize the main point of “Night-
mare of Feature Creep.” Then, go back and check off support for this main
idea. Next, write a brief summary (three to fi ve sentences) of the essay. Fi-
nally, jot down your initial response to the reading. Do you fi nd Goodman’s
presentation amusing, or not? To what extent do you agree with her?
CHECK YOUR COMPREHENSION
1. Which of the following would be the best alternative title for the essay?
a. “Modern Technology: Enhancing Daily Life”
b. “A Rant about a High-Tech Toothbrush”
c. “The Complexifi cation of Everyday Life”
d. “Why Do We Buy User-Unfriendly Gadgets?”
2. The main idea of this essay is that
a. consumer electronics are increasingly loaded with extra features
that make them more diffi cult to use but do not contribute to their
usefulness.
b. the daily lives of most Americans have become more and more com-
plicated as we increasingly must perform tasks that others used to be
paid to do.
c. it is likely that in the future people will be able to send instant mes-
sages while brushing their teeth.
d. feature creep, despite its problems, is the inevitable result of modern
engineering.
3. One reason that Goodman is critical of feature creep is that it
a. causes people to pay more for the products they buy.
b. makes products user-unfriendly.
c. has the potential to intrude on people’s privacy.
d. is a model of simplicity.
4. If you are unfamiliar with the following words, use a dictionary to check
their meanings: rant (para. 1); bicuspids (2); culprit (8); guru (9);
molar (14).
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Chapter 44 • Illustration 759
READ CRITICALLY
1. How do you think Goodman expected readers would respond to her
essay? What does she seem to assume about her audience?
2. Does Goodman provide enough pertinent examples to convince you of
her point? Why, or why not?
3. In paragraph 12, Goodman writes about the time she has spent “updating
software and hardware over the past decade.” What does this paragraph
contribute to her main point?
4. Note places in the essay where Goodman uses exaggeration. What is the
effect of this exaggeration?
5. In paragraphs 8, 9, and 13, Goodman refers to the work of Roland Rust
of the University of Maryland. Why does she do so?
WRITE AN ESSAY
Write an essay on the topic of feature creep, focusing on examples drawn
from your experience. First, think about what electronic products you rely on,
how often you regularly use all the features they offer, and how much they
frustrate you. In your essay, you may support Goodman’s opinion, challenge
it, or come down somewhere in the middle.
Kathleen Vail
Words That Wound
Kathleen Vail was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and received a
bachelor’s degree in journalism from California University of Pennsyl-
vania. She has worked as an education reporter at daily newspapers in
Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Virginia, and in 1994 she became an
assistant editor at the American School Board Journal: The Source for
School Leaders. She has been managing editor there since 2006. Vail
lives in Springfi eld, Virginia, with her husband and two sons.
Originally published in the American School Board Journal, “Words
That Wound” focuses on school bullying and its sometimes devastating
consequences.
GUIDING QUESTION
What examples of bullying does Vail give?
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760 Part Eight • Readings for Writers
1 Brian Head saw only one way out. On the fi nal day of his life, during
economics class, the fi fteen-year-old stood up and pointed a semiauto-
matic handgun at himself. Before he pulled the trigger, he said his last
words, “I can’t take this anymore.”
2 Brian’s father, William Head, has no doubt why his child chose to
take his life in front of a classroom full of students fi ve years ago. Brian
wanted everyone to know the source of his pain, the suffering he could
no longer endure. The Woodstock, GA, teen, overweight with thick
glasses, had been systematically abused by school bullies since elemen-
tary school. Death was the only relief he could imagine. “Children can’t
vote or organize, leave or run away,” says Head. “They are trapped.”
3 For many students, school is a torture chamber from which there is
no escape. Every day, 160,000 children stay home from school because
they are afraid of being bullied, according to the National Association
of School Psychologists. In a study of junior high school students from
small Midwestern towns, nearly 77 percent of the students reported
they’d been victims of bullies at school — 14 percent saying they’d expe-
rienced severe reactions to the abuse. “Bullying is a crime of violence,”
says June Arnette, associate director of the National School Safety
Center. “It’s an imbalance of power, sustained over a period of time.”
4 Yet even in the face of this suffering, even after Brian Head’s suicide
fi ve years ago, even after it was revealed this past spring that a culture
of bullying might have played a part in the Columbine High School
shootings,
1
bullying remains for the most part unacknowledged, under-
reported, and minimized by schools. Adults are unaware of the extent
and nature of the problem, says Nancy Mullin-Rindler, associate direc-
tor of the Project on Teasing and Bullying in the Elementary Grades
at Wellesley College Center for Research for Women. “They underes-
timate the import. They feel it’s a normal part of growing up, that it’s
character-building.”
5 After his son’s death, William Head became a crusader against bul-
lying, founding an effort called Kids Hope to prevent others from suf-
fering as Brian had. Unfortunately, bullying claimed another victim in
the small town of Woodstock: thirteen-year-old Josh Belluardo. Last
November, on the bus ride home from school, Josh’s neighbor, fi fteen-
year-old Jonathan Miller, taunted him and threw wads of paper at him.
He followed Josh off the school bus, hit the younger boy in the back of
the head, and kicked him in the stomach. Josh spent the last two days
of his life in a coma before dying of his injuries. Miller, it turns out, had
been suspended nearly twenty times for offenses such as pushing and
PAUSE: Based on
these two opening
paragraphs, what
do you predict that
this essay will be
about?
1
Columbine High School shootings: the April 1999 shootings at Columbine
High School in Littleton, Colorado, in which two male students killed twelve
students and a teacher, injured twenty-three others, and killed themselves
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Chapter 44 • Illustration 761
taunting other students and cursing at a teacher. He’s now serving a life
sentence for felony murder while his case is on appeal.
6 Bullying doesn’t have to result in death to be harmful. Bullying
and harassment are major distractions from learning, according to the
National School Safety Center. Victims’ grades suffer, and fear can lead
to chronic absenteeism, truancy, or dropping out. Bullies also affect
children who aren’t victimized: Bystanders feel guilty and helpless for
not standing up to the bully. They feel unsafe, unable to take action.
They also can be drawn into bullying behavior by peer pressure. “Any
time there is a climate of fear, the learning process will be compro-
mised,” says Arnette.
7 A full 70 percent of children believe teachers handle episodes of bul-
lying “poorly,” according to a study by John Hoover at the University
of North Dakota at Grand Forks. It’s no wonder kids are reluctant to
tell adults about bullying incidents. “Children feel no one will take them
seriously,” says Robin Kowalski, professor of psychology at Western
Carolina University, Cullowhee, NC, who’s done research on teasing
behavior.
8 Martha Rizzo, who lives in a suburb of Cincinnati, calls bullying
the “dirty little secret” of her school district. Both her son and daughter
were teased in school. Two boys in her son’s sixth-grade class began
taunting him because he wore sweatpants instead of jeans. They began
to intimidate him during class. Once they knocked the pencil out of
his hand during a spelling test when the teacher’s back was turned. He
failed the test. Rizzo made an appointment with the school counselor.
The counselor told her he could do nothing about the behavior of the
bullies and suggested she get counseling for her son instead. “Schools
say they do something, but they don’t, and it continues,” says Rizzo.
“We go in with the same problem over and over again.”
9 Anna Billoit of Louisiana went to her son’s middle school teachers
when her son, who had asthma and was overweight, was being bullied
by his classmates. Some of the teachers made the situation worse, she
says. One male teacher suggested to her that the teasing would help her
son mature. “His attitude was, ‘Suck it up, take it like a man,’” says
Billoit.
10 Much bullying goes on in so-called transition areas where there is
little or no adult supervision: hallways, locker rooms, restrooms, cafete-
rias, playgrounds, buses, and bus stops. When abuse happens away from
adult eyes, it’s hard to prove that the abuse occurred. Often, though,
bullies harass their victims in the open, in full view of teachers and other
adults. Some teachers will ignore the behavior, silently condoning.
2
But
even when adults try to deal with the problem, they sometimes make
PAUSE: Underline
the ways that bully-
ing can be harmful,
according to Vail.
2
condoning: approving
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762 Part Eight • Readings for Writers
things worse for the victim by not handling the situation properly. Con-
fronting bullies in front of their peers only enhances the bullies’ prestige
and power. And bullies often step up the abuse after being disciplined.
“People know it happens, but there’s no structured way to deal with it,”
says Mullin-Rindler. “There’s lots of confusion about what to do and
what is the best approach.”
11 Societal expectations play a part in adult reactions to childhood
bullying. Many teachers and administrators buy into a widespread belief
that bullying is a normal part of childhood and that children are bet-
ter off working out such problems on their own. But this belief sends
a dangerous message to children, says Head. Telling victims they must
protect themselves from bullies shows children that adults can’t and
won’t protect them. And, he points out, it’s an attitude adults would
never tolerate themselves. “If you go to work and get slapped on the
back of the head, you wouldn’t expect your supervisor to say, ‘It’s your
problem — you need to learn to deal with it yourself,’ ” says Head. “It’s
a human rights issue.”
12 Ignoring bullying is only part of the problem. Some teachers go fur-
ther by blaming the victims for their abuse by letting their own dislike
for the victimized child show. “There’s a lot of secret admiration for the
strong kids,” says Eileen Faucette of Augusta, GA. Her daughter was
teased so badly in the classroom that she was afraid to go to the black-
board or raise her hand to answer a question. The abuse happened in
front of the teacher, who did nothing to stop it.
13 Head also encountered a blame-the-victim attitude toward his son.
Brian would get into trouble for fi ghting at school, but when Head and
his wife investigated what happened, they usually found that Brian had
been attacked by other students. The school, Head said, wanted to pun-
ish Brian along with his attackers. “The school calls it fi ghting,” Head
says. “But it’s actually assault and battery.”
14 And changes are coming. This past April, fi ve months after Josh
Belluardo’s death, the Georgia State Legislature passed an anti-bullying
law. The law defi nes bullying as “any willful attempt or threat to infl ict
injury on another person when accompanied by an apparent present
ability to do so” or “any intentional display of force such as would give
the victim reason to fear or expect immediate bodily harm.” Schools are
required to send students to an alternative school if they commit a third
act of bullying in a school year. The law also requires school systems to
adopt anti-bullying policies and to post the policies in middle and high
schools.
15 Head was consulted by the state representatives who sponsored the
bill, but he believes the measure won’t go far enough. He urges schools to
treat bullying behavior as a violation of the state criminal law against as-
sault, stalking, and threatening and to call police when the law is broken.
PAUSE: What do
you think of the
point made here
about teachers’
“secret admira-
tion for the strong
kids”?
PAUSE: Think
about a time when
you witnessed bul-
lying behavior.
How did you feel?
PAUSE: Why can
confronting bullies
in front of their
peers be counter-
productive, accord-
ing to Vail?
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READINGS
Chapter 44 • Illustration 763
16 He knows it’s too late for Brian, too late for Josh, too late for the
teens who died in Littleton. But he continues to work, to educate and
lobby on the devastating effects of bullying so that his son’s death will
not have been in vain.
17 “We should come clean and say what we’ve done in the past is wrong,”
says Head. “Now we will guarantee we’ll protect the rights of students.”
SUMMARIZE AND RESPOND
In your reading journal or elsewhere, summarize the main point of “Words
That Wound.” Then go back and check off support for this main idea. Next,
write a brief summary (three to fi ve sentences) of the reading. Finally, jot
down your initial response to the selection. How do your own experiences
with teasing and bullying in school affect your response?
CHECK YOUR COMPREHENSION
1. Which of the following would be the best alternative title for this essay?
a. “Bullying in Elementary School”
b. “The Tragic Story of a Bullied Teen”
c. “The Causes of Adolescent Suicide”
d. “Bullying: A Serious Problem”
2. The main idea of this essay is that
a. educators and policymakers need to realize that bullying has serious
negative consequences and take steps to reduce its occurrence.
b. bullying should be made a criminal offense like assault, battery, stalk-
ing, and threatening.
c. adults who tolerate bullying among schoolchildren would never toler-
ate the same kind of behavior if it were infl icted in the workplace.
d. bullying is common in school settings because teachers, counselors,
and administrators can do little about it.
3. According to Vail, teachers who ignore bullying
a. are afraid to intervene.
b. send the signal that they see nothing wrong with it.
c. believe that parents have the responsibility for getting help for their
children.
d. were probably bullies themselves.
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764 Part Eight • Readings for Writers
4. If you are unfamiliar with the following words, use a dictionary to check
their meanings: endure (para. 2); import (4); crusader, taunted, coma (5);
distractions, chronic, truancy, compromised (6); intimidate (8); prestige
(10); devastating (16).
READ CRITICALLY
1. Evaluate Vail’s opening. How effective do you fi nd it as a way of introduc-
ing her main point?
2. Identify each of the examples that Vail presents. Do these examples con-
vince you that the problem of bullying is serious and widespread? Why or
why not?
3. Consider the statistics that Vail offers in paragraphs 3 and 7. What do
they contribute to the essay? Which other kinds of statistics would you
like to see?
4. In paragraph 12, Vail writes about “blaming the victims.” What does
she mean, and how does this idea contribute to the main point she is
making?
5. In what ways does Vail tie her conclusion back to the opening part of her
essay? What is the effect of this conclusion?
WRITE AN ESSAY
Write an essay developing your own ideas about what schools can do to re-
duce bullying among students. What policies might they adopt, and how
could they enforce those policies? What could be done to stop the bullying
that takes place in so-called transitional areas where students have no adult
supervision? Use examples, either real or hypothetical, to help readers see that
your plan would work.
Illustration: Linked Readings
THE PRESSURE TO CONFORM
Each of the following readings focuses on various aspects of the pressures
people feel to conform:
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READINGS
Chapter 44 • Illustration 765
Kathleen Vail, “Words That Wound” (this chapter, p. 759)
Langston Hughes, “Salvation” (Chapter 43, p. 745)
Malcolm X, “My First Conk” (Chapter 46, p. 776)
Read the selections, and draw from at least one in addition to “Words That
Wound” to write an essay titled “The Pressure to Conform in Our Society.”
You can refer to your own experience, but make sure to use material from
the essays as well.
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766
Caption
45
Description
Each essay in this chapter uses description to get its main point across.
As you read these essays, consider how they achieve the four basics of
good description that are listed below and discussed in Chapter 12 of this
book.
FOUR BASICS OF GOOD DESCRIPTION
1.
It creates a main impression — an overall effect, feeling, or
image — about the topic.
2. It uses specifi c examples to support the main impression.
3. It supports those examples with details that appeal to the
senses — sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch.
4. It brings a person, place, or physical object to life for the
reader.
■ IDEA JOURNAL
Describe a place from
your past (or a family
member’s past) that
you have visited.
Alex Espinoza
An American in Mexico
Alex Espinoza was born in Tijuana, Mexico, in 1971 and spent his child-
hood in La Puenté, a community near Los Angeles. He attended San
Bernardino Community College and transferred to the University of Cal-
ifornia at Riverside, where he earned a bachelor of arts degree in cre-
ative writing. He went on to receive his master of fi ne arts degree from
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