Matthew
Haulot
Jen
Fleischer
English
1A, Section 5
3
March 2014
NASCAR as a Sport
Many people say that NASCAR is not a
sport; well it is in many ways. From the technical aspects of the car and
physical aspects of being the driver, NASCAR is arguably more of a sport than
baseball or football. A
writer from the University of North Carolina talks about the history of the
sport and how far it has come. Racing is probably the most underrated sport out
there and a picture from a race in Bristol, Tennessee shows that with a packed
house and forty-three roaring cars. There are so many different types of
writings about NASACR, including news articles, newspapers, magazines, books,
videos, and even websites, which I will discuss later on. All of these types of
writings have their own strengths but I have picked the three that give the
best perception, an academic article, a photograph, and a website. In
the following essay there will be examples of what makes NASCAR a sport and how
the drivers are considered athletes. Also there will be different texts examined that look at how these
different genres of text differ from one another. Different documents have
different meanings but the key is to find those documents that have the best
information and can leave an image or idea in your head, those are the ones
that will tell you most about your topic.
The first of three genres of text we
will look at is called, The Most Southern
Sport on Earth, by Dan Pierce. The tone of this article is informative. It
talks about how NASCAR got started and how it has progressed over time to
become one of the fastest growing sports in the world. The great thing about
the article is that the language is easy to follow. Being previously
knowledgeable with all this information it was very easy for me to follow but I
found it so easy that even
if I wasn’t educated on the information it would still be easy to understand.
One thing that makes this article so easy to follow is the way that Pierce uses
images to show the history of the sport. The visual images that he uses puts a
great picture in the readers head that it almost makes it impossible to forget
what he is trying to say. Daniel S. Pierce is a professor at the University of
North Carolina. This makes Pierce very creditable and something else that gives
him even more credit is the fact that this is not the only piece of writing
that Pierce has written on NASCAR. He has written two other books, one being
called, Real NASCAR, and the other
being NASCAR vs. Football: Which Sport Is
More Important to the South? Just the fact the Pierce has written two other
books on the same subject shows that he is not only dedicated to the topic but
also well knowledgeable about the topic. An example that Pierce gives is how NASCAR did not have
any organization when they first started. Track owners and promoters
said they would increase
track safety and increase the track conditions but never actually did
them. Compared to today this has changed one hundred percent. Pierce also talks
about how the men who started NASCAR made it what it is today. Men like Bill
France Sr. and Red Vogt started to make the rules of NASCAR that are still followed
this day. The main message of this article is to show how far NASCAR has come.
From being completely unorganized and not having any rules to changing it
around in one meeting. The purpose of this article is just to show the
transformation over the years and to educate people on the rich and exciting
early years of NASCAR.
The next document is a photograph from Bristol Motor
Speedway at nighttime. The picture was taken by Walter Arce who is also
very much like Daniel Pierce in the way that he primarily focuses on only
taking pictures of NASCAR. Walter Arce is an action sports photographer showing that his main
interests are sports and NASCAR being one of them. The layout of this photo is
taken with the idea that you can see everything that is going on around the
track. It gives you a full perspective and full understanding of the track. Like
Pierce’s article this photograph has a tone. The tone of this photograph is
chaos. Look at it, forty-three cars in a packed stadium, you can basically hear
the roar of the cars just by looking at it. Unlike The Most Southern Sport on Earth, this photograph does not contain
a language or even a
specific writing style. The intended viewer is somebody who likes
racing, somebody who
The final piece of text is the
NASCAR.com website. The layout of this website is very modern. The website is
constantly updated and has so much information available on it that its too
much to take in at one or even two sittings. The tone of NASCAR.com is very
academic. There are writers that only write for the website and are constantly
scribbling down new articles on the latest race or the new news that is
happening in the NASCAR world. This website is very similar to Pierce’s
article. They both talk about the history of the sport with the only difference
being that they discuss different time periods. They are both meant to educate
the reader and inform them on the topic. The intended readers are people who
follow NASCAR and want to get more information on it. The NASCAR website has
many different writers but the main three are David Caraviello, Brad Parrott,
and Reid Spencer. They have written hundreds of articles for NASCAR and have
been doing it for years. There credibility goes farther than Dan Pierces and
Walter Arce. The evidence that these three writers provide is about the latest news; for example, the
most recent articles that will be on the website are about the past weekends
race. They will talk about the winners and the big moments that happened
throughout the weekend. The message here is clear, the idea is to keep the fans
involved and always let them know the latest information. The purpose of the
website is not like the purpose of Pierce’s or Arce’s work, instead the purpose
is to keep people informed and to try and draw new fans in by telling them the
most exciting news they can give them.
In order for a text to be effective
or persuasive it has to be filled with all sorts of details and facts. This is
important because a big deciding factor between a persuasive and non-persuasive
text is gaining trust in your readers. If the reader trusts what the author is
saying it makes everything more believable. For example in Daniel Pierce’s, The Most Southern Sport on Earth, he
gives so much detail starting with his first paragraph when he describes Bill
France loosening his tie and saying
that he put the “fear of god” into his employees. This sentence in the
opening paragraph makes me as a reader believe that what Pierce is about to
tell me is good information. Pierce later goes on to tell us about how racing
in the south really got started with young men working in mills and factories
just trying to survive. The reason why a photograph can be so effective is
because it can mean something different to anyone who looks at it; only the
photographer knows the real meaning behind it.
Out of the three documents I have
gathered I have found that Daniel Pierce’s, The
Most Southern Sport on Earth, to be the most effective. The other documents
are persuasive and fulfilling but not as much as this one. The big thing that
makes Pierce’s message so effective is that he looked at the beginning of
NASCAR and all the problems that Bill France Sr. had to sort out. Pierce talked
about how France stripped drivers of all their winnings and points and
disqualified drivers for minor rule violations. “As drivers increasingly
complained about France's iron hand, they also realized that many of his
decisions benefited them” (Daniel
Pierce) is a quote that shows how Pierce knows the history of the sport
and that makes him a more effective writer and makes the article that much more
effective. Another factor that makes this article effective is that it covers a
wide range of topics.
It talks about the early history of the sport and how it got started to how
France created a union for the drivers and crews. The document that has the
least effective message is the photograph taken by Arce. The thing that makes this the least effective
document is the fact that it is just a photo and cannot tell you anymore then
what you can see.
I
chose three documents that couldn’t be anymore different from each other. One
is an article that talks about the history of NASCAR while the other source is
a picture that shows what NASCAR is like and how it looks; while the final
source is a website that talks about what is happening in the sport today. All
of these documents are different from each other and focus on a different
topic. The reason why these documents differ from each other is because there
is such a broad range of subjects under the main idea of NASCAR. For example if
Daniel Pierces article on the early days of NASCAR were to randomly start
talking about this past weekends race it would not make sense. That article has
one main idea and that is to talk about the early days.
A
text has three main components to it. The first component is what the topic of
the text is about. This is what the text will be covering and what the text
will be talking about or what the main idea of the text is. The second component is what it
says. This is what the text is trying to say or what the message is. Every
piece of writing has a message that it is trying to tell to the audience. This can be an
informative message, a persuasive message, or an argumentative message. Depending
on what the message is will determine on who the audience is and how the
message will be delivered. If it is an argumentative message the delivery may
be stricter and tone while an informative message may be more lay back and
tranquil.
The
type of texts that people read can tell all sorts of things about them. If a
man reads a garden magazine and another reads a car magazine you can tell a lot
about them. Reading expresses who you are and what you like to do. Just by looking
at somebody reading a book or a magazine you can tell what he or she are like
and the type of person that they are. Also by reading different texts you can
get a different view on topics and you learn from what you read. Reading is
what gives us our knowledge so saying, “You are what you read”, is a perfectly
acceptable statement.
Finding
the right articles and resources or any document for that matter is hard. It
takes time; you can’t just pick out any and say its good enough. The three
documents I found took time because I didn’t want to find one that said the
same exact thing as one that I already had or have one that was completely off
the topic I was trying to cover. Daniel Pierces, The Most Southern Sport on
Earth, gave me a view of
the past and left me with everything I needed to know when I was finished
reading. Reading is incredibly important because it broadens your range of
knowledge and opens your mind up to new things. You may look at one topic of
books and think that they are all going to cover the same thing strictly based
on the fact that they are all about the same topic, but once you open them up and read and
analyze what they say, you
realize that they all have different meaning to what the meaning really is.
Works Cited
Daniel Pierce. “The Most Southern Sport on Earth.” NASCAR and
the Unions. 7:2. 2001. March 3, 2014
David
Caraviello, Brad Parrott, and Reid Spencer. NASCAR.com.
NASCAR. Web. March 3, 2014
Walter
Arce. “Bristol Motor Speedway.” 123RF. Web. March 4, 2014
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