Tuesday, December 23, 2008

A Shrine For a Friend Who Made a Starbucks a Village

A.) The article is about a man who visited the local Starbucks every day and made a huge impact on the other customers there. He was apparently homeless and the aritcle talked about how after his death customers came in a created a memorial for him on the chair he always used. The article shows how through his everyday acts of kindness to everyone, just by talking to them he changed thier lives, and they wished they could have done more for him.

B.) I think this article is really touching and it shows that there are certain people in this world that seem insignificant but once you get to know them and once they are gone you realize just how important they were to you, and how much they affected your life in a positive way. The way the article is written using a lot of quotes applies to our journalism class because Mr. Ayer is always telling us how important quotes are and from a multitude of different sources. It also shows that by the way you write something it can make people view it in a certain way. If the article had been written in a different way, then it might have made people think he was just a bum that came into the store every day and bugged people. But because of how it was written it caused readers to view the man as very nice and showed that he had a positive impact on these people, and helped bring them together.

C.)The questions that I am left with are will the chair stay in the store forever? What does the family of the man think of this article and situation? How did he come to be homeless if it talks about his previous family? The kinds of articles I would like to read next are either human interest pieces or straight up news. That way we can see different ways to write articles that can keep readers interested and work on figuring out new ways to write our journalism articles.