Purposeful Summaries-phoenixxxx23

It seems counterintuitive that humanity has decided that it is capable of taking lives indiscriminately, like an earthquake, with a shot from a piece of iron. While most of the people died from the nature disaster, a fifteen year old girl named Fabienne Cherisma was killed by police in Haiti after a massive earthquake. She was killed with a bullet to the head after taking paintings from a wrecked shop in downtown Port-au-Prince

But this tragedy would have gone unnoticed if photographers rushing to get the best shots for their job had not taken pictures from the scene. The girl’s name – Fabienne means “bean grower” in French, and it is paradoxical how a person, like a plant, emerges from a seed and grows through the earth, living a life until it withers. This is the natural process of renewal of nature, but when a person decides that he is capable of tearing out all the roots in one blink, all that remains is a heartbreaking photo of a little girl lying on the cold ground. And when one is able to feel this chill on the skin through the screen of a phone, then the dilemma about the moral qualities of photographers moves into the background. Only the eternal dilemma of life and death remains.

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1 Response to Purposeful Summaries-phoenixxxx23

  1. davidbdale's avatar davidbdale says:

    This is unique and powerful, Phoenixxxx. To judge it on its own terms, I will have to ignore that it doesn’t actually communicate very well the nature of the incident. For the most part, that’s allowable and does your own agenda no damage.

    But that we can’t visualize the scene of the photographers gathered around her body, that we don’t know for sure she was dead when they framed their pictures, that we don’t know their photographs went on to win big journalism prizes . . . in all of these lapses you’ve left material untouched that could have deepened and enhanced your summary.

    This grades very nicely on its own merits, but there’s plenty of room for improvement if you elect to revise it by putting back some of what you took out for the sake of rhetorical flourish.

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