Nishant Prakash

Prakash 1

Prof. Matt Wilson

Writing 2
6 December 2015
Parents are locked in an endless battle to combat the apathetic qualities of television.
What if television is not all bad? These good TV shows have brought a new method of discovery
to the young mind. The young mind learning process predominantly exists in the classroom. This
setting bombards the mind with tedious exercise, drills, with a rigorous schedule. Such a boring
method of learning is not most effective in bringing out the passionate side of learning. For me
my passion through my high school years was science, specifically psychology. But it was not
school that fostered this love for science and how things worked, it was the show Cosmos, hosted
by Neil Degrasse Tyson. This show was formatted to put the fascination first, and use that as a
hook to have the viewer pursue a deeper understanding. This deeper understanding is
emphasized in school as something distant, forever out of the grasp of a student. This echelon is
where the experts exist, in their own closed off discourse community. This community is difficult
to break into, and for many students is a wall dissuading them for attempting to become part of
the community. This is especially true in the field of psychology. Psychology builds a wall
around its experts, blocking the general public out. These fields need to be given freely to the
public, to kids, in order to create new initiates who will further the field. For this goal, TV could
be a perfect medium.
To begin, one has to look at what the overlying issue with the Scientific article, as a
genre, is. The main issue is that the genre is written with the assumption that the audience are
already experts in the field. This means a reader, in order to fully understand the article, must be
well versed in the jargon as well as the guiding concepts of the field. In the passage of Staddons
article discussing reversible behavior he describes the phenomenon with,

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reversible behavior, that is, behavior in which the steady-state pattern under a
given schedule is stable, meaning that in a sequence of conditions, XAXBXC, where
each condition is maintained for enough days that the pattern of behavior is locally stable,
behavior under schedule X shows a pattern after one or two repetitions of X that is
always the same. (Staddon 1)
Reading the passage, one can grasp how dry it would appear to a teen who has five days a week
of the same kind of language for six hours straight. If this were given in a dense paper, the young
mind will lose interest, due to the dry, and rigid format. Authors do not bend to accommodate an
audience that is below them in the community. Unlike these authors, the writers of Cosmos make
an effort to bend and mold a concept to be preferential to a larger audience. I worked to do the
same.
I first had to take a dense paper and isolate what I wanted the audience to take away.
What I wanted was for them to observe the phenomenon, and then want to find out how it
worked later. The tool for me here was Zinnsers Simplicity. The concept of concision became an
important convention in my scripting. Zinsser discusses the reader, calling him, a person with
an attention span of about twenty seconds. And that He is assailed on every side by forces
competing for his time. He stresses the importance of knowing the audience, and how to limit
ones language to increase the effectiveness of the piece to convey information. With my
audience I had to tailor my writing for a high school student.
My script centers around the Skinners Box, in which Dr. Nick walks the crowd through a
single run of positive reinforcement. I referred to one of our class reading, Writing with Pictures
by Scott Mcloud for this. As a comic this piece displayed, through a visual medium, the
importance of framing and audience. I had to think about the framing of the information I was

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presenting. I am targeting teens, they dont care about formality. If Dr. Nick were to be dry and
formal with the teaching it would be off putting. To avoid this, I had to make Dr. Nick a special
member of the discourse community. He acts as a sort of liaison between the outsider and the
experts. While a member of the community, he steps down to the level of the outsider in order to
bring them in. The prefix of Dr. immediately gives Dr. Nick a special level of credibility, while
his informal attitude and manner give him a more personal connection to the audience. Along
with the expert I felt I needed a person he could talk to, representative of the audience. This
representation became a co-star who was the same age as the viewer, but with the same level of
experience, in order to bring the viewer into the discussion, he was the vehicle in the scene for
the viewers questions. This is the classic dynamic which provides a person, in the community,
for the viewer to relate to.
This visual concept allowed me to strip the concept down completely. And present it with
accommodations for the high school student. Before I demonstrate the Skinners Box I define the
key words and concepts needed. I am allowed to do this because of the informal format, and the
visual component allows me to display these. Even in the demonstration I am able to remain very
simplistic, because I am walking the audience through a visual process, Dr. Nick can focus on
concisely describing the operant conditioning process. This leads thinking in a way that
encourages further exploration via personal investment.
We have a massive generation of children who we say are being lost to TV, but why are
we being complacent about it? There is no way a video can replace a classroom, but that doesnt
mean it is useless. When I looked at the sky and the vastness that is space, I couldnt look to my
classes to show me what these were. But I could watch Neil Degrasse Tyson, and his ship of the
imagination take me close to the daunting topics without being intimidated.

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Works Cited
Staddon, J. E. R., and D. T. Cerutti. "Operant Conditioning." Annual Review of Psychology Annu. Rev.
Psychol. 54.1 (2003): 115-44. Web. 17 Nov. 2015.
Mcloud, Scott. Writing With Pictures. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.
Zinnser, William. Simplicity. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.