Never write about a place until you're away from it, because that gives you perspective

~ Ernest Hemingway

If you are going to take some advice on writing, you should take Mr. Hemingway's. Hemingway spent years traveling throughout Spain, Africa, Cuba, France and Italy. Based on his own experiences, his stories are filled with vivid descriptions of these places and the people that inhabited them.

In class we talked about what forms or creates our perspective. Some of the examples we came up with included:

family, religious beliefs, peers, the media, our education, what we have seen and experienced, where we are from, and our values. All of these factor in to how we form an opinion.

With all that in mind, I put these two newspaper headlines on the board about the same event, "Hell Freezes Over" and "The Chokes on Us". I wanted you to try and figure out what event the headlines referred to. Some of the guesses included the stock market crash and the attacks of September 11th. In 6th and 7th periods, the classes figured out what I was referring to, the 2004 ALCS. Those headlines were from two New York newspapers. If you were not from New England, or did not experience that series, it might have been harder to guess it was about the Red Sox.

I also wanted to point out how the newspapers did not even mention Boston or the Yankees in the headline, but we still knew what it was about based on our experiences. Since the headlines were from New York we agreed that the article do not imply that the Red Sox won the Pennant but that the Yankees lost it. The Boston newspapers would have a different headline with the attention being on a Red Sox accomplishment not a New York shortcoming.