Post 12

Mirabelli definitely begins his article, "Learning to Serve: The Language and Literacy of Food Service Workers," very differently than most authors. The first word of his text alone is very different, as he begins it with a website address, "Bitterwaitress.com." The first paragraph goes on to talk about that website as a popular website which has links to gossip about things like celebrity behavior in restaurants, chefs and restaurant owners, accounts from famous people who were once waitresses, as well as customer related horror stories. Then, Mirabelli goes on to talk about a section of the webpage that is titled "hate mail" in which email criticisms are followed by rebuttals from waitresses. A lot of these hate mails portray waitresses are ignorant or stupid. Mirabelli includes a sample piece of hate mail in his article in which the author of the hate mail is portraying all waitresses as stupid, and that they are only waitresses because they are too unintelligent to land a "real" job. I think Mirabelli's way of beginning his article really gets people interested in reading the rest because a lot of people can relate to it. Many people have been servers themselves (who I believe was Mirabelli's intended audience) or have experienced others being blatantly rude to servers (who could have also been his intended audience). I think his first paragraph really stirs up a lot of people's emotions and makes the readers engaged, wanted to read more,, which I think was his purpose of starting his article this way.