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Summary Of William Raspberry's The Price Of Low Expectations

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William Raspberry is a late American public affairs columnist, author, and professor who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for his columns in The Washington Post. Raspberry’s style is distinguished by specific-to-general organizational structure, rhetorical questions, engaging ideas and events, strong appeal to his credibility and open-ended conclusions. Raspberry’s columns “Our Lost Community”, “Two Storms, Ample Warning”, and “The Price of Low Expectations”, demonstrate his everlasting style on society. Raspberry often opens his columns with a specific problem relating to today’s society. By providing relevant information, the reader can instantly be drawn in and connect with the argument. In the introduction of “The Price of Low Expectations”, Raspberry brings to attention the imprisonment and custody of black men being “under half of all young black men in the District of Columbia were in prison, on parole or probation . . . In Baltimore one in five black men aged 20 to 30 was in custody”. Likewise, “Our Lost Community”, addresses the lack of community our country has been having since Hurricane Katrina. Raspberry uses these situations to give a specific example of the topic he’s about to address. In addition, before transitioning from his introduction, Raspberry uses emotionally provocative sentences such as “numbers like these are no longer a surprise”and “we can’t count on each other” to further indicate his position while also grabbing the reader’s

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