- Take few notes on the daily activities that transpire in your neighborhood, and ask yourself, is my neighborhood safe? For starters, the demographics of various cities most likely describes the safety of a neighborhood. Take Camden, Newark or a predominantly “Black” neighborhood for example. We all know these cities are viewed as crime-infested cities. If you were to walk down the street in one of these neighborhoods you are most likely to clench unto your belongings.
- Burglary, theft, rape, murder, these are all crimes faced by our society. Yet our law enforcement proclaim how safe our societies have become. With high arrest rates, and all we can still find cities with high crime rates, and unhospitable atmosphere. This begs the question, “Are our cities becoming safe as our law enforcers proclaim it to be?”
-
Follow
Following
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
Counterintuitive 
Your openings are bold, kinGGkunta,which indicates your willingness to tackle tough material without flinching. That’s admirable. Now, let’s work on getting your arguments under control.
FIRST OPENING.
Sentence 1 (S1.)
I’ve mentioned that Rhetorical Questions are very dangerous because they surrender control of your argument King. In this case, because I don’t know yet what you intend to prove, I can’t tell which answer would suit your purpose better. That should never be the case.
Now that we have two observations, we can guess that you wanted us to conclude that our feeling of safety or danger depends on the demographics of our own neighborhood. That’s a good strategy that you should employ MUCH MORE directly.
This is only half of a claim. You’re establishing a pattern in S1 and S3 of not making complete arguments.
Again, you’re not connecting the dots for us, King.
Now that you’ve reached the end of your paragraph, it’s clear you had one claim to make: We feel threatened in “black” neighborhoods. Your first challenge to consider the “daily activities” in our own neighborhoods doesn’t figure into that claim. But it could. And your overall argument would probably be much more effective if it did.
What if you had set yourself the bigger challenge of demonstrating that—whether it corresponds to reality or not—our sense of personal safety is a reaction to stereotypes about the ethnic makeup of our neighborhoods.
Or, are you working on something more subtle here? For example, that “official crime rate statistics” are the source of those misleading crime rate statistics? Maybe even more subtle, when police make it their business to arrest more people in a neighborhood, that drives up the crime statistics, which in turn creates the impression that the neighborhood is more dangerous?
Now THAT would be a Strong Opening!
Does that analysis help you see how dense and complex a single paragraph can be?
LikeLike