The Onion Weekend Review: A Rhetorical Analysis

According to its website The Onion, America's Finest News Source, is an award-winning publication covering world, national, and local issues. However, upon reading one of its articles or watching one of its weekend reviews, its easy to tell that The Onion is in fact a news satire organization. Primarily, The Onion reports already reported news with a satire spin, using its own actors to mimic interviews. Upon watching Airline Pilot Begins Initial Decent Into Madness, the first thing I noticed is that The Onion picks titles that are the most interesting, not necessarily the most related to the overall topic or main story. The main points covered in this review were the current struggles within the US government, specifically within congress. The review uses many caustic remarks and irony to poke fun at the problems within congress today.

The first bullion in the review states "The nations psychiatrists are deeply concerned with the five percent of Americans who approve of congress".  This review was released shortly after the end of the government shutdown which negatively affected millions of Americans and was generally seen throughout America as a failure by congress. It pokes fun at the fact that congress has an approval rating at all after being unable to avoid government shutdown while trying to agree on a budget. 

The first satire news story in the review covers the debt crisis and what is being done to avert America defaulting on its debts. It opens up announcing that white house officials have released the schedule of several key "shoutings" between the president and congressional leaders. This introduction of the schedule using the word shoutings instead of debates relates to its first bullion, referencing congresses lack of ability to debate and instead slide into arguments and shouting. It goes on to say that both sides are optimistic about the upcoming rounds of shouting and that they could also include a significant amount of yelling, a small number of shrieked party slogans, and even a short period of incoherent grumbling. The first statement enforces the satire used in the beginning of the story, arguing that congress is not debating, but is instead fighting, but that congress members are unaware of this fact. The second statement pokes fun at congress members using every opportunity they can during their debates to promote their party; and the third simply brings attention to how most of congress is probably upset with is own inability to get things done in a timely fashion.

The Onion also uses an actor for a fake phone conversation where he acts like white house press secretary Jay Carney and says "As always, President Obama is eager and ready to sit down with leaders across party lines shout his political views directly into their faces, and has expressed optimism that they will then scream back at him in kind..." This once again enforces that congress is unable to get things done, however this time it brings the president into the story. It is meant to show that nothing is going to get done as long as each party is shouting their views into each others faces rather than sitting down and talking things out more reasonably.

The review also touches on other unrelated topics, however its satire on the failures of congress were the main story within this weekend review. Overall I believe that The Onion does a great job of condensing news stories into satire filled spin offs that still somewhat accurately relay the news. I do not believe that The Onion would be useful or even funny at all if the viewer was not aware of the news stories that it references, as there is little to no explanation of the actual news, just poking fun at it with a funny, and possibly more open minded view. For a report on the government, the report seemed to be completely bipartisan, making fun of of both parties equally. Because of this, I think that anyone who enjoys comedy and has mostly open minded views would both enjoy and take something away from watching this, and other The Onion Weekend Reviews.

The First Draft

Everybody has heard of the first draft. While possibly one of the most dreaded parts of writing, it is easily the most important. Aside from the stray and admittedly poor undrafted student essay, and possibly many of the blogs scattered throughout the internet; Every substantial piece of writing you've ever read is at least in its second draft, with many of them in their 3rd or greater draft. Any composition or English teacher will tell you how important a first draft is; However, most students labored with the task of creating them for an assignment, probably having turned in first draft essays as their final and getting a decent grade, will ask why they are important. William Zinsser's Simplicity and Anne Lamott's Shitty First Drafts both share their authors view on both what it means to write a first draft, and how important a first draft is. Although written very differently and for two completely different audiences, both essays explain why first drafts are needed and how they become final drafts.

Simplicity is written in first person with an almost lecturing tone. When reading it, you feel as if your sitting in a classroom listening to your English teacher explain to you how you need to write your first draft. It's not that the paper doesn't have interesting points, just that the writing is so bland one might fall asleep while reading it. Shitty first drafts, on the other hand, is written in first person in a very comic tone. It's written in the same way one would speak, so the reader feels almost as if the seemingly very eccentric Anne Lamott is telling you the story first hand.

The main difference between these papers is that Simplicity is a paper about what your final draft should be about once you have written and distilled your first draft, whereas Shitty First Drafts explains what the purpose of your first draft is. Zinsser starts his paper explaining how American writing is full of clutter. He refers to the clutter as "the disease of American writing" and goes on to explain that many people have a hard time reading their way through any of the various memos, brochures, and instructions we are faced with every day. Shitty First Drafts starts by explaining that almost nobody likes writing a first draft, so you aren't alone if you feel the same. Anne says that she knows several great writers who make a lot of money from writing and clams that none of them sit down to write and feel very confident about what they are writing.

Simplicity concludes with explaining how the writer should remove clutter as they move through each draft of the paper, making sure that they don't include any unnecessary information. The entire article is written much in line with its title, simply. Shitty First Drafts, however, has two more parts to it. The paper moves on to explain how first drafts shouldn't be given much thought. She explains that the first draft isn't supposed to be written for anybody but yourself, and it is simply a place to get all your ideas together before you begin writing your other drafts, and eventually, your final. At the end, in direct contrast to Zinsser's philosophy, the paper takes a turn almost completely off topic, talking about how she has found ways to quiet the voices in her head telling her that what she is writing in her first draft isn't worth typing, and that she should quit while she is ahead.

While both of these papers explain the importance of a first draft, Simplicity is written with collage students, teachers, or accredited writers in mind and Shitty First Drafts is geared more towards the general public, or a high school student writing a paper. For this reason, I believe that both papers are important for their respective audiences and written well with them in mind. At a college level I would have to say that the points covered in Simplicity are more relevant to my writing. However, I feel like I am more able to connect with the points in Shitty First Drafts. In my opinion, a truly great writer will use the methods covered in both papers. Writing everything you can about a subject first, and then distilling it to its most basic, important, and informative points, should make for a very good paper.