Black and White

I do not feel that Black and White exploits these true life experiences, but rather uses them to help point out the significance that race plays in our lives. I think by using these true situations Volponi makes the novel more creditable and demonstrates that white the book is fiction, situations like this really do happen in real life. I think that Volponi's experiences on Rikers Island proved to be some of the most valuable for him as well as this novel. There he noticed that most of the inmates were black or hispanic, thus giving him background from which to base Marcus's character. I think since Eddie was really the more guilty of the two, Volponi is making a statement that some of these inmates may have also been being punished for crimes in which they did not commit. The novel plays up racial and social class by giving evidence that because Eddie was white and more wealthy is the reason he was able to get off so much easier than Marcus. I think Volponi is playing tribute to these people from Rikers Island because he calls into question their guilty, just as Marcus's was in the book. This novel points to the ideas that the inmates at Rikers Island may not have had the means in which to defend themselves due to money, or that stereotypes against blacks and hispanics influenced to their conviction. In reality the inmates may have been innocent or simply just made a mistake despite the good people that they really were, like Marcus and Eddie.

Comparing Children and Adult Fiction

I felt that Through Children's Eyes? by Paul Thompson was an interesting study comparing the different word and grammatical differences between children and adult imaginative fiction. The study was also broadened to include newspaper articles in order to compare these differences to a different type of literature. The data found in the article suggests that the similar words are commonly used in both children and adult literature. However, I also feel this information is not extremely useful because the most common words were very basic, mostly consisting of pronouns and articles. It is very difficult to write a sentence without these types of words, so it proves very little as far as differences.
I think the real differences would be with the vocabulary, with adult fiction using a much broader selection of words. The comparison of the parts of speech did help to improve this aspect of the study because it showed that adult fiction used more adjectives, which would greatly add to the complexity of a sentence. On the other hand though, when comparing the most common adjectives between the two, almost all of the same adjectives were used in children and adult fiction.
It it also worth noting that newspaper articles use similar words as well. Only when looking at the adjective comparison did newspaper articles differ greatly. This is most likely due to having a different subject matter than fiction.
The article stated that this research "should help to shed light on the kinds of patterns
in language which younger readers may need to learn about as they progress
through their schooling." Overall I felt this study showed that the linguistics used in children and adult fiction are very similar, and therefore, a change in schooling is not necessary. Since they two are similar it seems to me that a child should be able to transition easily from children's literature to adult literature without many difficulties.