Amateur Family review

Joshua Nicholls

3/18/2012

English 1101

Chabon Exploratory Writing Assignment

“Amateur Family”

            “Fanboy gets tossed around a lot these days, but two of my children are female, and fanchild is not a word, and the term was originally coined to describe and deprecate a kind of mindless, by-the-greasy-handful consumption of popular culture, uncritical, automatic halfway to zombie.” This is one of the reasons why the term fan doesn’t work for what Chabon wants to get across about the concept of amateurism for fandom. He writes that he doesn’t think there is a perfect word for the kind of people he has raised his children to be. He does however go on to say that “amateur” is a word he could possibly use to describe him and his family. I think he gains a lot by use amateurism. If he just said him and his family was amateur I might think differently about it. Then the way he explains it, that fan is based around and used a lot with ESPN and sports pages. When you think about it that way fan doesn’t really fit his nerd family. When he explains amateurism I think he gains a lot. If he would have used fan he think he would have a lost a lot of respect. 

Amateur Family review

Natalie Beech 

English 1101   

  I choose Joshua’s because it is the complete opposite of what I said. He said, “He does however go on to say that “amateur” is a word he could possibly use to describe him and his family. I think he gains a lot by use amateurism.” But I disagree because I said amateur is related more to sports and fan in my opinion is related to anything that someone enjoys to collect or follow. With the word amateur it is related to money in my opinion.

  Another part of his writing that caught my attention is when Joshua said, “When you think about it that way fan doesn’t really fit his nerd family. I can see  what Josh is saying that Fan is more sports related but I think that amateur is more sports related. In Michaels writing it is difficult to decide if “fan” or “amateur” is better to use. I think neither of them are the correct word to use. I think that they have so many  different people relate these words  to different meanings that it doesn't define this essay at all.