Outside Reading #1: Editorial paper 10/10/10

Editorial: 10/10/10

“China emerges as a scapegoat in Campaign Advertisements”By David W. Chen. October 10th. 2010.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/us/politics/10outsource.html?hp

In “China emerges as a scapegoat in Campaign Advertisements”, Chen states that Democrats and Republicans are blaming China for America’s economic crisis. He started his first sentence by saying that political parties have found scapegoats: The China. He argues that since the midterm election is coming up, both political parties are using China as a scapegoat to blame the unemployment rates that America currently faces.  Then he lists any examples to support his position.

Most of his examples are direct quotes from people. In one of the examples, he put the quote “China is a really easy scapegoat” said by Erika Franklin Fowler, who is a political science professor at WU (Wesleyan University). He also uses the static data. He uses the data from Pew Poll, saying that “... [Americans] are more and more convinced that China will dominate.”Another example of this is a quote of Joe Steaks, who says that Pat Tommey, a republican rival, “…[is] fighting for jobs-in China.”It seems that political candidates are using China to blame others, thus avoiding the blameless to themselves.

He also uses diction strongly. He decided to put the word “deplorable”instead of unfortunate and use “fraught”instead of stress, thus using more vivid images. Different sentence structures are also used. For instance, he started his first sentence with “with”instead of “Many Americans”. He also does not repeatedly use same words. One of his sentence starts with “In an ad featuring”and other sentence with “…began showing an ad”. He switched the word from featuring to showing, thus avoiding the repetition of words.

This piece’s strengths seem to be various examples, strong diction, and non-repetitive words. One weakness of the piece is Chen’s use of counterexamples. Chen put a quote of Mrs. Boxer, who said that Ms. Fiorina, HewlettPackard’s former chief executive, put many jobs to “Shanghai instead of San Jose, Bangalore instead of Burbank,”and of “proudly stamping her products ‘made in china.’”,   thus countering his example of political parties blaming solely on China. Also, he could have put his own opinions instead of putting various quotes from people. Also, the ending is not quite clear. He ended with Ms.McMahon, a republican, saying that she was not responsible for putting toy manufacturing jobs into China. He could have put something that give everyone something to think about, an universal question, perhaps.

Overall, I think that this paper is good. It has many solid arguments and it flows very well. It is very organized. Thus I made a conclusion that this piece of writing is appropriate for AP essay.