...Nowadays, there is an idea of poverty of ambition, people want to drive fancy cars and live a luxurious lifestyle but don't want to work hard to accomplish these things. Everyone should try to realize his or her full potential. Throughout Barbara Ehrenreich’s book, Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting By in America, she sets herself up for failure. Most people, no matter what the job of the moment, see it as a way to get ahead later. By starting the experiment with the intention to fail, hence the name “on not getting by in America”, Ehrenreich sets herself up with a self-fulfilling prophecy. This self-fulfilling prophecy/bias is present throughout her whole experience causing her experiment to become tainted with flaws. Ehrenreich did not try...
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...Barbara Ehrenreich starts her experiment off somewhere near her hometown which ends up being in Key West, Florida. When she first arrives, her priority is to find housing, which she does for $500 a month and almost thirty miles away from her potential employment. Soon after arriving in Key West, she finds herself waitressing at a restaurant called Hearthside. While working there, she continues to have daily conversations with her customers and coworkers who easily open up about their at home situations, and you can tell she starts to feel for them. Working there for a while, Ehrenreich realizes that she is in need of a second job so that she will be able to keep up with her house rent. She begins work for another restaurant named Jerry’s, where...
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...Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of Nickel and Dimed, is a passionate writer. According to her personal website, she was born in Butte, Montana in 1941 to a family that were blue-collar workers. Her father was a miner and through tough work he went to get his degree from Butte School of Mines. From then on, Ehrenreich and her family traveled to various locations in her childhood. When she was in her mid-teens her family reached a middle class status and she was able to attend Reed College in Portland, Oregon. That’s where she studied chemistry, but then decided to study physics instead. Ehrenreich made it to grad school at Rockefeller University. There were a couple of times when she switched from various majors, but in the end, she ended up in molecular biology and she received her Ph. D. In 1970, with the birth of her first child, she suffered a political as well as a personal transformation. In the sense when she questioned the prenatal care that she received from the hospital clinic that she was in. Ehrenreich, then became herself involved with the “Women’s health movement”, where woman can have...
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...In the chapter from “Nickel and Dimed” written by Barbara Ehrenreich, low class jobs are discussed as well as the entrapment in them. People working minimum wage jobs deserve to experience a decent standard of living. The jobs they do are necessary. We may think of them as jobs for people with nothing else going for them, but in reality we do need those people working there. Her experiences working menial jobs reminded me of my job at Walgreens. I started working there as a cashier or a “customer service associate” then began working in the cosmetics area basically cleaning things the whole time as a “beauty advisor”. The people would give fancy names menial jobs to make them see more important when in reality you could train a monkey to work there. If you were to have one person to sell the alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs and to help customers find things, you could have monkeys working at the register and cleaning everything....
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...I think Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed is thoroughly written in a descriptive style that informs the reader about predicaments in the lives of low-wage workers. Her purpose in this memoir is to investigate the life of working in an “unskilled labor”, as she is in fact an upper-middle-class journalist. One of many issues had to deal with health. In the book, Ehrenreich says “After two days of minor [skin] irritation, a full-scale epidermal breakdown is under way...I wake up realizing I can work but probably shouldn’t, if only because I look like a leper. Ted doesn’t have much sympathy for illness, though; one of our morning meetings was on the subject of “working through it” (87). It’s really not fair that people would rather go to work...
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...Nickel and Dimed In Barbra Ehrenreich’s novel Nickel and Dimed she gives you a play-by-play analysis of her life as a low-income working. She is setting out to reveal whether it is possible to be a single parent, with a low-income job, and kids. She feels the best way to do this is not to just spit out the already published statistics, but to go on a little adventure and actually becomes a person with a minimum paying job. Nickel and Dimed is her whole experience as an unskilled worker first-hand. And in what I would say is the thesis of the novel, Ehrenreich exemplifies exactly what she is trying discover; how does anyone live on the wages available to the unskilled? The argument is simple. Can you live on the salary of a low paying job?...
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...In “Introduction: Getting Ready” from Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich, she describes the experiment she performed in order to expose the conditions of living on minimum wage as well as accredit herself with the prerequisites for reporting on the subject. The introduction of Ehrenreich’s novel, Nickel and Dimed, was written with the intent to inform the audience of some background information that supports the rest of the book. One of the important ways she does this is by providing statistics and facts about the lives of those living on minimum wage. She does this mostly in the beginning of the intro: “were the roughly four million women about to be booted into the labor market by welfare reform going to make it on $6 or $7 an hour?”(1). In this sentence not only does she mention the sheer amount of people who are forced to live on minimum wage, but she also states the low amount that these women are being paid. By telling the audience this information she can convince the reader that the low class workers of America are not being paid enough. By using data to argue this point she is using the rhetorical device logos in her introduction....
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...RESEARCH and WRITING CUSTOM EDITION Taken from: Writing Research Papers: A Complete Guide, Eleventh Edition by James D. Lester and James D. Lester, Jr. To the Point: Reading and Writing Short Arguments by Gilbert H. Muller and Harvey S. Wiener ISBN 0-558-55519-5 Research and Writing, Custom Edition. Published by Pearson Custom Publishing. Copyright © 2006 by Pearson Custom Publishing. Taken from: Writing Research Papers: A Complete Guide, Eleventh Edition by James D. Lester and James D. Lester, Jr. Copyright © 2005 by Pearson Education, Inc. Published by Pearson Longman, Inc. New York, New York 10036 To the Point: Reading and Writing Short Arguments by Gilbert H. Muller and Harvey S. Wiener Copyright © 2005 by Pearson Education, Inc. Published by Pearson Longman, Inc. Copyright © 2006 by Pearson Custom Publishing All rights reserved. Permission in writing must be obtained from the publisher before any part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system. All trademarks, service marks, registered trademarks, and registered service marks are the property of their respective owners and are used herein for identification purposes only. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 ISBN 0-536-97722-4 2005240359 AP Please visit our web site at www.pearsoncustom.com ISBN 0-558-55519-5 PEARSON CUSTOM PUBLISHING ...
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