Reference no: EM133678523

You've considered, already, via Reading Response 3, the core issue around, well, the subtitle of our reading "Wok the Dog": What's wrong with eating man's best friend? Or: What's wrong with eating dogs? And then of course, I asked you to consider Saletan's management of the solution. If Saletan's subtitle asks a question, it would of course be disingenuous for Saletan not to at least attempt to answer the question, or at least complicate the question.

So, in this Discussion, I wonder if we can, as a group, zero in on the beginning of this essay, this bowling pin that Saletan has thrown in the air and promises to catch. I don't want us to address necessarily wether he catches the pin -- whether he answers the question of if it's okay to eat a dog. But rather, how he throws the pin.

In Orlean's essay, she hooked us with humor and Biff and the word, perhaps, "bitch," while Gladwell hooked us with a storytelling quality, and Vlahos hooked us with active voice, short sentences, that rhythmically resembled the bounce of a dog (subject+verb, subject+verb, subject+verb). And in these essays, there's a promise made, then, to return to these points -- to humor (Orlean), to the characters in the story, to Milan especially (Gladwell), and to Max as a representative of something (Vlahos).

Here, then, is how Saletan begins his essay. How he throws a pin in the air and sets up an expectation in the reader's mind comes via paragraph one, where he provides context for the issue at hand via a hyperlink to another conversation on the same topic, one of heightened intensity: "Nine months ago, Frame Game grossed out its readers by tackling a mounting controversy in newspapers and state legislatures: the ethics of having sex with dogs. In that column, Frame Game asked 'why, if it's wrong to rape animals, it's OK to kill them.'"

Readers see that there is something gruesome we ought to consider, not because we are dog lovers -- but perhaps because we are dog eaters, or even -- other-animal-eaters. The essay immediately asks: are we okay with our current habits? Or further: are our current habits evil?

Saletan then begins the second paragraph with greater context; there, we readers see Saletan's awareness of larger issues going on in the world; he writes, "In case you've been distracted by the war or the recession, here's where the dog fight stands [...]."

What's going on here is that Saletan is taking an issue that could seem a little inconsequential compared to larger events in the world -- what we eat and don't eat and how we care for animals may not seem so important during war time and how we care for people -- and then he is elevating this issue to equal intensity, immediately. He's making space for his topic. He's elbowing in.

For Discussion: What do you think of his tactic? Do you think Saletan's made this question of eating animals consequential given what else was (even, is) going on in the world at the time this was written? And, if you've ever felt your own writing topic (for an assignment or otherwise) to be inconsequential or small in comparison to The World's Problems, how have you elbowed your way in? What methods would you choose to make what is meaningful to you meaningful to others in the very beginning of your work?