Blog Review on Rafaella's Blog Post

After spending this week reading multiple blog posts per night, one blog post that stood out to me more than the rest was Rafaella Spielberg's blog post on the book, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.  Over the summer I read this book and what interested me immediately about Rafaella’s blog post was her view on why Jay Gatsby’s perspective was not in the book.  Rafaella’s perspective of the author’s choice not to put Gatsby’s perspective in the book  was, “Jay Gatsby’s perspective is excluded to provide readers with a deeper understanding of the story.”  When I read this book, I hadn’t thought about it in the way that it provided the readers more depth in their understanding of what was going on in the book, but after I continued to read Rafaella’s piece, I totally understood what she was saying and why she thought that way.

One way that she did a good job at helping the reader of her blog understand what she was saying was by elaborating meaningfully about her points.  Elaborating is something that I struggle with and Rafaella’s blog post made it more clear to me about how I should elaborate to prove a point.  After every example that she gave, Rafaella elaborated with both her ideas and also more evidence.  This was really good because it made her point seem more valid.  Another thing that Rafaella did that I will try to do in the future to make my writing stronger is that she ended each paragraph by combining all the ideas that she mentioned throughout the paragraph while wrapping it with a really thoughtful sentence about the book.  Her craft and the way that the formulated her evidence and her paragraphs, was extremely strong.  Her technique of organization throughout the whole response made her ideas very clear to the reader.

As I was searching through many blogs to find one that stood out to me, it wasn’t just this one post that hooked me immediately on her page, but all of Rafaella’s posts were intriguing.  For a few minutes I just sat there looking through her posts and wondering what made them more interesting than a lot of other blogs that I had read.  Finally, I realized that her blog posts in general were more thought provoking than many other people’s blog posts.  Other people definitely did have very thought provoking posts, but many other peoples posts were just full of retell of what happened in the book.  Especially in her post for The Great Gatsby, Rafaella used a perfect amount of retell to get the reader to understand the main idea of what was going on in the book.

I agree with Rafaella that Jay Gatsby’s perspective was kept out of the book to give the reader a better understanding of the book, but I only started to agree with her after I read this post.  Even though she wasn’t technically arguing about something, her points and elaborations did a great job at adding towards her view about why Jay Gatsby’s argument was missing.  This post has actually really inspired me to start trying to prove my claim in a more in-depth way.

Link to Rafaella's blog post: http://rafaellasblog22.blogspot.com/2014/11/social-actionindependent-reading-book.html

Critical Analysis on "How Does It Feel To Be A Problem" by Moustafa Bayoumi

In the book How Does It Feel To Be A Problem by Moustafa Bayoumi,  Bayoumi tells different stories about experiences people have had due to being Arab in America.  He wants readers to know that racism doesn’t only happen between black people and white people, racism is a worldwide issue that every single human deals with on a daily basis.  He tells the reader this by teaching us that before 9/11, many Americans didn’t even acknowledge Muslim and Arab existence, but after the attack, our authorities started attacking them and arresting them, because they seemed “suspicious.  An example of this is when one of the characters, Rasha, is kicked out of her home with her family because of their race and religion.  They were put in jail for months and Rasha wasn’t even permitted to contact her friends or school to tell them where she was.  This proves that since 9/11, Arabs and Muslims have been treated like garbage and many Americans aren’t aware of this.

Bayoumi wants to teach readers about how unfairly all people can get treated because of their race or religion, and his goal is to get the reader to feel outraged at the authority system in America and how they are treating people because of their ethnic background and history.  One way that he proves how unfairly Arabs and Muslims get treated is by stating the most horrific facts about how these people got treated.  Bayoumi doesn’t waste his time talking about how Arabs get treated worse in restaurants, he talks about how many muslims got laid off from their jobs after 9/11 because of their race.  Another way that he makes the reader feel infuriated at the way Muslims and Arabs are treated is that he talks about what a big part of the population they are.  Bayoumi says that 20% of Americans are between the ages of 18 and 30, but 30% of ALL americans are Muslim.  By stating this fact, the reader feels like almost they have done something wrong.  There are more Muslims and Arabs in America than Young Adults and it just shows how many people have been affected by discrimination against race and religion.

Bayoumi did a really good job at getting the reader to feel strongly about the topic.  I came away from this book feeling like I needed to do something to make Arabs and Muslims get treated better.  I used to think that white privilege in America was white people getting treated better than black people but I was wrong.  I now know that racism and discrimination against people because of their race happens with every single race, including white.