Task 12. Read the two ltEs below. What motive was behind writing those letters?

I. Giving an Edge to Children of Alumni

Jonathan Zell

Legacy preferences are a red herring because elite universities use them only when it serves their institutional interests. They will be used, for example, to help the children of wealthy alumni, who are then expected to increase their annual contributions to their alma mater. But will they be used to help the children of poor or noncontributing alumni?

The only guiding principle behind the admissions policies of the elite universities is that these policies must allow them to accept – and to reject –whomever they desire. Therefore, until these universities are required to admit students solely on the basis of merit or to use affirmative action policies only to help truly disadvantaged applicants, outlawing legacy preferences by itself will change nothing.

Those with the cash and the connections will always have the advantage¹.

The New York Times, October 4, 2010

II. Childhood misery

My parents separated when I was three and thereafter I began to wet my bed nightly (In floods, Weekend, August, 21). At eight, I was sent to a Quaker boarding school. My mother did not tell the school. My misery, despair and embarrassment as night after night I tried to pretend something had been spilt may be imagined. One day my father came to see me. As we sat together, he said “I hear you have been having some trouble. I found praying helped me.” As a child I used to kneel by my bed each night to say my prayers and now added “Please Jesus help me to stop wetting my bed.” The prayer was answered: the bed-wetting stopped. I am now 83 and have been left with two thoughts. First, extraordinary gratitude to some power I cannot now accept or comprehend as simply as when I was a child. Second, an image of the misery endured by countless generations of children tormented by this problem.

Name and address supplied,

The Guardian, August 26, 2010

Task 13. Read the two letters again, and observe the difference between them. What arguments does the author of first letter put forward to drive his message across?

Which letter appeals to you? Why?

Unit 7 print media: revision

Task 1. Read the article below, determine its genre.

Police must come back out and reclaim our streets

The death of Jenny Ward is a modern British horror story.

The plot line is by now horribly familiar: a gang of teenage yobs is allowed to rule the roost in a neighbourhood and becomes more and more emboldened.

A vulnerable person is singled out for particular harassment. Finally matters build to a crescendo and the innocent person dies.

In Mrs Ward’s case it was a death straight out of “Lord of the Flies”¹. A trap was set for her by the feral pack of youths that had been taunting her. A manhole cover was removed from her driveway. She plunged down the hole and her cries for help went unheeded for hours.

After being rescued she was hospitalised for a month before going to live with a relative. But her spirit was broken and she died from a blood clot on her lung soon afterwards. This episode illustrates the extent of Britain’s public order crisis. It shows why we need our police back out on the streets and behaving as no-nonsense police officers instead of glorified youth workers.

Maintaining civilised values in our public spaces should be the top priority for law enforcement agencies. But very often at present it appears to be just the opposite. The unrestrained anti-social behaviour of a minority is the number one issue for millions of voters, massively impacting upon their lives.

But none of the main political parties is on top of it. Labour targeted yobs with ASBOs but neglected to properly enforce them. The coalition wishes to abandon them but does not appear to have anything to put in their place.

Britain is crying out for a major national figure to emerge and fight for decent people and against the tide of yobbery.

The Daily Express comment, September 25, 2010

Task 2. What stylistic means in the article above convey the author’s emotions? Are they different from texts of similar genres but published in quality press (see Texts A and B in Unit 6).