Practice Opening – mossmacabre

Posted on September 9, 2021 by mossmacabre

Polio: Eradicating an Old-School Virus in the Modern Day

When was the last time you were concerned that you might catch the deadly Poliovirus? If you are an American citizen, you’re most likely in the fortunate position of having never worried about it at all. Such was not always the case. Known most commonly as “Polio”, the illness once ravaged the United States, peaking at almost 60,000 cases during the Polio Epidemic of 1952. After the release of the vaccine in 1955, the country has been virtually polio-free. The same cannot be said for other countries around the world. In Nigeria, the spread of malignant misinformation about the danger of vaccines has left the citizens vulnerable. Starting in 2013, Muhammad Ali Pate, Nigeria’s Minister of State for Health, believed he could cease the spread of Polio amongst his people, but a long history of ignorance and violence stands in his way.

This entry was posted in Practice Opening 2021. Bookmark the permalink.

3 Responses to Practice Opening – mossmacabre

  1. davidbdale says:
    September 19, 2021 at 7:59 pm

    I’m not sure how you first captured your keystrokes, or how you pasted them into this post, MossMacabre, but it took some doing to get the text to display in the blog this way. See if you can paste just the text into the field next time, not the formatting. Thanks.

    I’ll return later to provide Feedback. Just cleaning up some maintenance issues at the moment.

    I’ve created an Author category for your username.

    Like

    Reply
  2. davidbdale says:
    September 21, 2021 at 3:47 am

    This is quite good, Moss. It starts with a strong opening and tracks a clear path without deviating. It makes an important distinction between countries that accept vaccination and escape disease and those that resist it and suffer. It’s clever, too, in that it doesn’t overstate its first premise. It says simply, the vaccine appeared and the disease disappeared. Disinformation prevents that simple result where it appears. Matter-of-fact, nonjudgmental.

    A few notes.
    1. We resist Rhetorical Questions in this course, nearly to the point of banning them. They almost always fail as a strategy compared to bold, clear claims because they give readers a chance to answer wrong. You’ve handled yours well, but know that they are dangerous and that I will advise against them.
    2. We do not use the 2nd person for anything in academic writing. It divides the writer from the reader, while what we want is to build camaraderie.
    Both can be avoided with little effort.

    Americans born since 1960 have never had to worry about catching the dread poliovirus.

    3. Your claim that “misinformation has left the citizens vulnerable” implies an end to the misinformation.
    4. You miss an opportunity to say HOW Mr. Pate thought he could end the scourge.

    Whether you elect to revise this post or not, I expect you to respond, to let me know you respect the feedback process.

    Like

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s