Here is the article which I am going to analyse:
Louder Than Anything You Can Say
I teach economics at UNLV three times per week. Last Monday, at the beginning of class, I cheerfully asked my students how their weekend had been. One young man said that his weekend had not been so good. He had his wisdom teeth removed.
The young man then proceeded to ask me why I always seemed to be so cheerful. His question reminded me of something I'd read somewhere before: "Every morning when you get up, you have a choice about how you want to approach life that day," I said. "I choose to be cheerful."
"Let me give you an example," I continued, addressing all sixty students in the class. In addition to teaching here at UNLV, I also teach out at the community college in Henderson, 17 miles down the freeway from where I live.
One day a few weeks ago I drove those 17 miles to Henderson. I exited the freeway and turned onto College Drive. I only had to drive another quarter mile down the road to the college. But just then my car died. I tried to start it again, but the engine wouldn't turn over. So I put my flashers on, grabbed my books, and marched down the road to the college.
As soon as I got there I called AAA and arranged for a tow truck to meet me at my car after class.
The secretary in the Provost's office asked me what has happened. "This is my lucky day," I replied, smiling.
"Your car breaks down and today is your lucky day?" She was puzzled. "What do you mean?" "I live 17 miles from here." I replied. "My car could have broken down anywhere along the freeway. It didn't. Instead, it broke down in the perfect place: off the freeway, within walking distance of here. I'm still able to teach my class, and I've been able to arrange for the tow truck to meet me after class. If my car was meant to break down today, it couldn't have been arranged in a more convenient fashion."
"The secretary's eyes opened wide, and then she smiled. I smiled back and headed for class." So ended my story.
I scanned the sixty faces in my economics class at UNLV. Despite the early hour, no one seemed to be asleep. Somehow, my story had touched them. Or maybe it wasn't the story at all. In fact, it had all started with a student's observation that I was cheerful.
Deepak Chopra has quoted an Indian wise man as saying, "Who you are speaks louder to me than anything you can say." I suppose it must be so.
This is a short story about attitude. In my school times, my teachers always say that, "Attitude is everything", this sentence is from the then Chinese national soccer team coach Bora Milutinovic who first led the Chinese soccer team to enter the World Cup finals. Milu instilled this core thought to all team members, stressing the importance of attitude, which just happens to coincide with the author's thought of this article. Indeed, we may not have the right to choose what kind of things will happen, but we can choose to go with the attitude of how to face them.
In the article, the author described a small matter in his life, just like what we have written in "A Day in my life", an extraordinary sense which comes from the ordinary life. When the author found that the young students he taught were always bothered by various "troubles" in their lives and not happy, he gave the class a vivid lesson by telling a real experience in his life: facing the anchor of his car halfway to school, the author did not complained about his bad luck, but was grateful that the car did not break down far away from the school so that he did not delay the normal job. The author used real dialogues, as well as first-person narrative, making readers feel more about the author's positive and optimistic attitude towards life, especially the obstacles in life.
People all have their own positions in society, they struggle to pursue their dreams, but sometimes what they pursue may not meet the material requirements.They have to do it for some practical reasons though it may be something that they do not want to do. We must work hard, study hard for a foothold in society, we are constantly on the run, it is easy to get tired of the it and become querulous. Reality is not that cruel and frightening as it said. If we face everthing with a roseate attitude, life will show the most brilliant side to us.
The author used concise language to express the central idea of the article cogently, the title of this article is Louder Than Anything You Can Say, the author wrote the source of the title at the end of the article, so readers can have a better understanding of the further main idea based on the impression they got from the former part of the article. The mode--emphasis on narrative - refining on the core which the author applied in this article often appears in such kind of educational articles. We should not only understand the importance of the attitude which the author wanted to reveal to us in the article, but also learn something about this mode of writing in order to apply it into our writing.
Louder than anything you can say, be louder and louder.
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