Blog State 8. Colleague Commentary

     Natasha Ahmed, a grad student at UT, wrote in her latest blog 3peat: Perry's Political Problems about the mistakes that Perry made and what we can learn from them.

     Overall her blog page is well designed and her article is fairly well written, grammatically speaking. There are a few parts however she fails to elaborate on. For example, the first line is that "in 2000, Perry found his silver lining." I'm not entirely sure Ahmed articulates the concept of a silver lining which is defined as "a consoling aspect of a difficult situation." If becoming the governor was the event that she metaphorically identifies through the silver lining comment then I would ask: what was the difficult situation for Perry at that time to say that being given governorship was a small but important "silver lining." She may have been referring to his having been the only governor elected to 3 full subsequent terms. In either case the article doesn't clearly elaborate on what exactly the bad situation or silver lining was.

     In the remainder of the article the one thing I am clear on is that she does not care much for Rick Perry. As a fairly neutral person on the matter  I have no particular bias that would cause me to view her article through any type of pessimistic lens. Even in neutrality however it is hard for me to side with her persuasive argument for a few reasons. There seem to be several slippery slopes (claims+claims without proof), conjectures, and outright speculation with little reference or support. Furthermore, the use of line strikes,  consantly changing font sizes and colors is a bit uneasy on the eyes and would cause question these stylistic elements. Do they serve a purpose? are they a distraction from an argument that could be supported more thoroughly? The blog looks nice, but such stylistic elements don't seem to really add much to the point of persuasion.