BEAM and Descriptive Outlining
This week in class, I learned about the acronym BEAM. BEAM stands for Background, Exhibit (example), Argument, and Method. All these have to do with certain types of articles.
According to the class PowerPoint from Wednesday, background is “when the writer accepts a source’s claims as fact.” Facts can come from government data, results of a study, or information from a trustworthy news source.
Exhibit/Example is when a writer interprets or analyzes a source they are treating like an exhibit. An example of this could be a poem where the writer establishes meaning for an audience.
Argument is exactly as it sounds. It is when the writer confirms, argues, improves, or extends the claims of a source in some way. Writers create argument sources to show why the exhibit analysis matters.
The article talks about how women do a lot of the work around the house and men “do only a fair share of the work.” It links to other articles, some of which are also written by the author who wrote this one. The other articles are also about comparing the workload around the house of men and women and they all have a lot of visual aids. Some of which are charts and others are pictures. I find it a little awkward how the author of this article put in links to other articles that she has written. Most of the linked articles go towards background information and what the author is trying to argue. Two of the articles the author linked in her writing don’t even work. They don’t even open.
I also learned about descriptive outlining. According to the class PowerPoint from today (Friday), descriptive outlining is “a strategy that can be used to more deeply understand what you’re reading, but also can be useful to you as a writer” (slide 3).
Descriptive outlining allows one to lengthen one’s knowledge of what a text says into how it is working (what it does). In terms of what a text “says,” it basically summarizes the information by paragraph. In terms of what a text “does,” basically just describes how a certain part of the text works within the full text.
I also learned about examples of sections of a text. There are four. One offers an anecdote (story) to illustrate a previous point. Another introduces a new reason for taking in a policy. Next, could provide statistical evidence. This could be a chart or other graphic with numbers or graphs. Lastly, a section of text could summarize a section from earlier in the article or writing piece.
In class today, we skimmed through another article, but this time we were given a chart that was broken into three sections. The first section is for the paragraph number. The next one allowed us to scan each paragraph and summarize it. The last section of the chart was where we wrote what that paragraph does.
The article basically talked about how black women spend a lot more than white women on beauty products and when working, they are often racially profiled and don’t get as many benefits as white workers.
