If authentic leaders “understand their own values, place followers’ needs above their

Works Cited Bromwich, David. “Whitman’s Assumptions: “Song of Myself,” in Leaves of

Works Cited

Bromwich, David. “Whitman’s Assumptions: “Song of Myself,” in Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman.” Social Research, vol. 85, no. 3, 2018, pp. 503-519. ProQuest, https://ezproxy.pgcc.edu/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.ezproxy.pgcc.edu/scholarly-journals/whitmans-assumptions-song-myself-leaves-grass/docview/2130843424/se-2?accountid=13315.

Whitman’s Assumptions: “Song of Myself,” in Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman

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Whitman’s Song of Myself is one of the most original poems in the English language, and the evidence of an impulse utterly new in the American version of English. Its greatness comes from an idea of the self that is energetic, variable in its moods, and endlessly accessible to experience. The language of the poem—from declaration to catalogue to prayer—strives to afford a correlative to such personal qualities. The proof of its success comes with the sensations of reading and rereading the poem itself.

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something must have changed in walt whitman when he heard ralph Waldo Emerson in his lecture on “The Poet” utter the words, “America is a poem in our eyes” (Emerson 1957, 238). A poem is something made with a purpose, and valuable beyond the limits of its maker. America had to be made, too—no country ever left so positive a record of its making—and America has always been a distinct place. For Whitman, it was also an idea: he says of himself, “I resist anything better than my own diversity,” and one might say the same of his country. When he wrote Song of Myself and added line to line, each suited to the measure of the whole, he held in constant view this analogy of person, place, and idea. As he would put it in the preface to Leaves of Grass: “An individual is as superb as a nation when he has the qualities which make a superb nation” (Whitman 1959, 24).1 The reverse is even truer for Whitman. A nation is as superb as an individual when it resembles a free-spirited person. He had resolved, as he said again in his preface, to address his reader in “the dialect of common sense.” This meant that he would traverse the country and its variegated scenes without a pretense of status or authority: “I tramp a perpetual journey.” The past remains to him as familiar a terrain as the present—”And as to you life, I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths”—but his design is never antiquarian; he speaks of many traditions, in the idiom of a folklorist, even as he shuns the pieties of tradition. “The past and present wilt.… I have filled them and emptied them, / And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.”

Song of Myself has several distinct modalities: invitation, characterization, catalogue, prayer, and rhapsody or sheer exclamation. There are also moments of teaching, of testifying, of self-rebuke or the answer to an imagined rebuke by others: “Be at peace bloody flukes of doubters and sullen mopers.” But the sections most dramatic and at the same time most personal occur in two kinds. First, Whitman solicits the reader directly, in the opening four sections, and again in his farewell in the last five sections (which themselves constitute a renewed invitation that is more detached and surer than before). Second, he confesses to the reader the perfect identity of his body and soul, as he understands them, and his confession is proved by two extended records of erotic experience or fantasy. These episodes, which occur in section 5 and sections 28–29, would take a separate essay to interpret fully; but the first is plainly an instance of desired touch and ecstatic consummation, the second rather of an undesired touch—an assault on body and soul in which the poet comes to feel betrayed by his own instincts, as well as by persons and forces outside his control. His desire to “merge” with others is risky, and it goes against a deep and contrary instinct: “To touch my person to some one else’s is about as much as I can stand.” Nevertheless, the touch that can quicken to a new identity is what makes life worth living.

The opening lines of the poem invite us to share the irrefutable good of the physical world: “I lean and loafe and invite my soul, / I lean and loafe at my ease.… observing a spear of summer grass.” Even here, it is more than observation, a “spear” of grass being more than a blade (and “blade” was already a metaphor). Nevertheless, Whitman is sure enough of the invitation to ask for our agreement: “what I assume you shall assume.” There follows a celebration of the poet’s bodily senses and their interplay with the world:

The smoke of my own breath,

Echoes, ripples, and buzzed whispers.… loveroot, silkthread, crotch and vine,

My respiration and inspiration.… the beating of my heart.… the passing of blood and air through my lungs,

The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and darkcolored sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn,

The sound of the belched words of my voice.… words loosed to the eddies of the wind,

A few light kisses.… a few embraces.… a reaching around of arms,

The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag,

The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hillsides,

The feeling of health.… the full-noon trill.… the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun.

(13–21)

The mixture of sensation and action (the play of shine, the wag of boughs, the embracing and reaching around of arms), together with mere physical process (respiration and inspiration) and the apparently erotic disposition of nature itself (loveroot, silkthread, crotch and vine), all set the scene for Whitman’s uninhibited self-expression: “The sound of the belched words of my voice.” With himself as the test case, he offers a promise of health to the reader:

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,

You shall possess the good of the earth and sun…. there are millions of suns left,

You shall no longer take things at second or third hand…. nor look through the eyes of the dead…. nor feed on the spectres in books

You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,

You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.

(25–29)

“I have heard what the talkers were talking,” says Whitman, “the talk of the beginning and the end, / But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.” He is the poet of “inception,” and this discovery leads to the first of his many hymns to life:

Urge and urge and urge,

Always the procreant urge of the world.

Out of the dimness opposite equals advance…. Always substance and increase,

Always a knit of identity…. always distinction…. always a breed of life.

(36–39)

The figure of a child is now brought forward—a child who by the nature of his body can hardly imagine what death would be—and he asks an unanswerable question. He addresses Whitman, that is, in Whitman’s language without knowing it, and the poem replies with another series of questions:

A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;

How could I answer the child?…. I do not know what it is any more than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,

A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped,

Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?

Or I guess the grass is itself a child…. the produced babe of the vegetation.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,

And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,

Growing among black folks as among white,

Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

Tenderly will I use you curling grass,

It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,

It may be if I had known them I would have loved them;

It may be you are from old people and from women, and from offspring taken soon out of their mothers’ laps,

And here you are the mothers’ laps.

This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,

Darker than the colorless beards of old men,

Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues!

And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.

I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,

And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.

What do you think has become of the young and old men?

And what do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere;

The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,

And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,

And ceased the moment life appeared.

All goes onward and outward…. and nothing collapses,

And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

(90–121)

This wonder-making passage forms the entirety of section 6—the only section of Song of Myself that hardly suffers if read as a separate poem— and it has the shape of a religious consolation, freed from religious belief. We are bound to something wider, longer, deeper, greater than ourselves without knowing what; and certainty, if we could have it, regarding the nature of our connection with a world of endless process would add nothing to our substance or solidity.

All life connects with other life—this is the belief that infuses Whitman’s tentative fancy of the grass as “itself a child…. the produced babe of the vegetation.” Knowledge of death and the pathos of death are likewise present, without being made an invitation to sorrow, in his saying to the grass, “It may be you are from old men and mothers, and from the offspring taken too soon out of their laps.” The grass springs equally from the deaths whose “leavings” will make new life, and from lives unrealized that grope toward fulfillment in other forms or bodies. The beautiful uncut hair of graves “transpires,” passes through the breasts of young men, and yet it remains “dark,” obscure in the meaning it gives and withholds. The dead, Whitman testifies, “are alive and well somewhere; / The smallest sprout shows there is really no death.” Why, after all, should something as common as grass have life if life were not pervasive and everywhere a blessing? The sublimity of the answers “fetched” by the poet in response to the child comes from a mystic connection between the darkness of human origins and the inscrutability of death. For death, like birth, “is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.” The pressure of Whitman’s argument—it is a theodicy without a god—amounts to saying simply that without death there cannot be a value in life. We care for life only because we are creatures who live between birth and death.

A continuous surprise of Whitman’s genius is his ability to place side by side, in contrast and montage, scenes of terrible shock and violence and his own casual absorption in the fluidity of experience. The effect is daring and fresh, every time we see it, and it is unique to Whitman. This, for example, near the start of section 8: “The suicide sprawls on the bloody floor of the bedroom, / It is so…. I witnessed the corpse…. there the pistol had fallen”—followed by (with just a line-space to signal a transition) “The blab of the pave…. the tires of carts and sluff of bootsoles and talk of the promenaders”—and then, in key with the violence even as it resumes the average unending “blab of the pave,” the notation of a street brawl:

The meeting of enemies, the sudden oath, the blows and fall,

The excited crowd—the policeman with his star quickly working his passage to the centre of the crowd;

The impassive stones that receive and return so many echoes,

The souls moving along…. are they invisible while the least atom of the stones is visible?

What groans of overfed or half-starved who fall on the flags sunstruck or in fits,

What exclamations of women taken suddenly, who hurry home and give birth to babes,

What living and buried speech is always vibrating here…. what howls restrained by decorum,

Arrests of criminals, slights, adulterous offers made, acceptances, rejections with convex lips,

I mind them or the resonance of them…. I come again and again.

(151–59)

Such moments have an experimental quality, as of the testing of uncertain evidence, the photographing of a protracted moment to see how it will fix when developed. One may notice in this instance— and it is typical—that Whitman himself appears as a spectator in two ways: he wonders what is happening; and he looks on for the sake of looking. He is an aesthete, drawn to such moments for reasons that need no explanation; “I mind them or the resonance of them.” The moment, in short, will resound in memory as he listens to it again, and he will come to similar scenes for their resonance.

His more stationary pictures recall the daguerreotype technique, which was new in Whitman’s generation and in which he shares an obvious pleasure. There is the marriage of the trapper and his bride, “a red girl”; and the assistance given to a runaway slave; and in a longer take, the 28 young men who bathe by the shore, “all so friendly,” watched by the handsome young woman, “all so lonesome,” through the blinds over her window. Yet it is wrong to think of Song of Myself as a record of the quest for sensations—however new and kinesthetically charged. Whitman is looking to find himself amid all the externalities, and his curiosity builds up momentum within the work of the self-portrait. So in section 13,

My tread scares the wood-drake and wood-duck on my distant and daylong ramble,

They rise together, they slowly circle around.

…. I believe in those winged purposes.

(230–32)

The lines of the catalogue that follow, all set off by the word “And,” are a disclosure of joy that needs no defense: “And the mockingbird in the swamp never studied the gamut, yet trills pretty well to me, / And the look of the bay mare shames silliness out of me.”

Admirers and distrusters of Whitman line up fairly reliably according to their like or dislike of his ethic of “acceptance.” It is an acceptance of experience, as such, in its miscellaneous flow:

The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum a confirmed case,

He will never sleep any more as he did in the cot in his mother’s bedroom;

The jour printer with gray head and gaunt jaws works at his case,

He turns his quid of tobacco, his eyes get blurred with the manuscript;

The malformed limbs are tied to the anatomist’s table,

What is removed drops horribly in a pail;

The quadroon girl is sold at the stand…. the drunkard nods by the barroom stove,

The machinist rolls up his sleeves…. the policeman travels his beat…. the gate-keeper marks who pass.

(266–73)

The lunatic removed from his mother is a piercing detail, a recollection of suffering that is irremediable, and it combines strangely with the sawing of limbs by the anatomist and the slave auction; yet all these are placed with the common glimpses of men at work: the printer, the machinist, the policeman, the gate-keeper. Whitman himself is a gatekeeper of sorts, marking all who pass in the continuous series of crossroads that is his poem. The long and characteristic section closes with a beautiful plainness: “And these one and all tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them, / And such as it is to be of these more or less I am.”

Whitman’s keenness to assimilate experience adopts a posture of questioning the reverse of what we find in Socrates or Montaigne. He assumes, rather than declining to assume; and the emphasis seldom falls on possibilities neglected; it commits him to an aggressive affirmation of the physical now:

Who goes there! hankering, gross, mystical, nude?

How is it I extract strength from the beef I eat?

What is a man anyhow? What am I? and what are you?

All I mark as my own you shall offset it with your own,

Else it were time lost listening to me.

(388–92)

The same section 20 concludes with magnificent matter-of-factness,

My foothold is tenoned and mortised in granite,

I laugh at what you call dissolution,

And I know the amplitude of time.

(419–21)

“Amplitude,” placed so, is a technical and abstract word, which (like “resonance”) takes on a sensuous character that is hard to account for. Half the genius of Whitman in Song of Myself is to have found the range for the fitting of such a word to a line of verse. The miracle of these transformations becomes part and parcel of his contract with the reader—a gift we are amazed to have been promised in advance. Along with the generosity of a prodigal inventiveness comes a sort of frontier boast that marks him as one of the roughs: “Washes and razors for foofoos…. for me freckles and a bristling beard.”

Whitman’s embrace of the body is not to be mistaken for an ease of commerce with other bodies; and in sections 28 and 29, the halfway point of the poem, he urges and simultaneously repels the unseemly touch, the unwanted encroachment that is sure to embody a trespass on what he calls “the Me myself”:

Is this then a touch?…. quivering me to a new identity,

Flames and ether making a rush for my veins,

Treacherous tip of me reaching and crowding to help them.

(618–20)

Here, most revealingly, having seemed to accept the embrace, Whitman will turn on his admirers and retreat like a hunted thing: “They have left me helpless.” But it is characteristic that his disappointment and dread of a touch too near should be followed immediately by rhapsodic praise of nature.

It is here that we find such astonishing hyperbolic lines as “I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars,” “And the tree-toad is a chef-d’ouvre for the highest,” “And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,” “And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels”—until the declarative catalogue of marvels gives way in relaxation. We are at the start of section 32: “I think I could turn and live awhile with the animals…. they are so placid and self-contained.” Why animals and not people?

They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,

They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,

Not one is dissatisfied…. not one is demented with the mania of owning things,

Not one kneels to another nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,

Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth.

(687–91)

This is one of the few passages in Song of Myself that give a hint of Whitman’s revulsion at the sober middle-class ethic that was coming to dominate American life, the cult of good behavior that assures respectability. He would write out his criticism after the Civil War, in his great prose work Democratic Vistas; the interesting point in section 32 is how much of the blame is placed on institutional religion. This is a background we are meant to feel, too, when he writes much later in the poem, “I am not curious about God.” Plainer words of emancipation were never spoken in the nineteenth century.

Amid the sequence of tableaux that make section 33 the longest, one finds a heroic account of fortitude at sea, of desperate passengers on a sinking steamship comforted by a captain who outlasts a storm and keeps them encouraged; and the spectacle allows Whitman to say (what would seem in character for no one but him), “All this I swallow and it tastes good…. I like it well, and it becomes mine, / I am the man…. I suffered…. I was there.” He will also say, soon after: “Agonies are one of my changes of garments.” The declaration cannot help being read as an allusion to the utterance Ecce homo, associated with the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, and the lines therefore make a claim that must be exorbitant for anyone who is not a human divinity.

Having gone so far, Whitman goes further in the next line: “I do not ask the wounded person how he feels…. I myself become the wounded person.” Readers trained in the therapeutic routines of humility can be trusted to challenge the arrogance of the announcement. How can Whitman know? But this should be preceded by a harder question: What does he mean? Or to put it in his terms: What is he assuming that he now wants us to assume? You can only take on agonies as a change of garments if the agonies are not your own. Whitman will admit as much later when he reproves his fancy: “That I could look with a separate look on my own crucifixion and bloody crowning!” It is a different thing to look on the suffering of others with the knowledge that only accident has separated you from that fate. It is not then a case of saying, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” The grace had better come from oneself; and it will be known most by an outgoing sympathy that kills self-satisfaction.

The largest occasion of such sympathy, in a conventional dramatic setting, occurs in Whitman’s retelling of the “old-fashioned frigate fight” in section 36:

Formless stacks of bodies and bodies by themselves…. dabs of flesh upon the masts and spars,

The cut of cordage and dangle of rigging…. the slight shock of the soothe of waves,

Black and impassive guns, and litter of powder-parcels, and the strong scent,

Delicate sniffs of the seabreeze…. smells of sedgy grass and fields by the shore…. death-messages given in charge to survivors,

The hiss of the surgeon’s knife and the gnawing teeth of his saw,

The wheeze, the cluck, the swash of falling blood…. the short wild scream, the long dull tapering groan,

These so…. these irretrievable.

(926–32)

Here the crucial word is “irretrievable,” and the preceding lines of agony have made the word a benediction. The agony was theirs, and could never be his; and when Whitman goes on to say “I resume the overstaid fraction,” he is quietly correcting himself. I am one person after all. I can think beyond death, and that is a chief purpose of my poem; but these deaths are a thing to themselves.

If there is something approaching self-aggrandizement, a hyperbolic posture of empathy in Song of Myself, section 38 marks its definitive withdrawal. It also commences the most thrilling march to a premeditated ending in all of English poetry outside Paradise Lost:

Somehow I have been stunned. Stand back!

Give me a little time beyond my cuffed head and slumbers and dreams and gaping,

I discover myself on a verge of the usual mistake.

(955–57)

But what, for Whitman, is “the usual mistake”? The entire poem has been and will continue to the end as an adventure of faith, a thrust and gamble of inventive energy untethered by prudence. The usual mistake is inseparable anyway from the usual strength that comes from his exorbitance, the same impulse that led Emerson to say in “Self Reliance”: “I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation” (Emerson 1957, 150). And so Whitman resumes the overstaid fraction, the more-than-one now becoming only one; at the same time, he crosses the verge of his usual mistake: “The corpses rise…. the gashes heal…. the fastenings roll away. / I troop forth replenished with supreme power, one of an average unending procession”— and so, this most average and aristocratic of poets lights into the final movement of his symphony.

“A call in the midst of the crowd, / My own voice, orotund sweeping and final”—he will answer the call that starts section 42, just as if he knew that it came from us, in the certain knowledge that we will respond. Whitman testifies to an immersion in scenes of human action that derives from the same compact as his immersion in the record of suffering:

Ever the old inexplicable query…. ever that thorned thumb—that breath of itches and thirsts,

Ever the vexer’s hoot! hoot! till we find where the sly one hides and bring him forth;

Ever love…. ever the sobbing liquid of life,

Ever the bandage under the chin…. ever the trestles of death.

(1061–64)

The fantastic daring of the sequence of mixed metaphors—or are they metaphors?—can prevent our recognizing the doctrinal sense that the passage must carry for Whitman. “The trestles of death” are a kind of bridge, but they are also a transition, a summoning to a further journey; death and life being mingled even here, as they are when a wound begins to heal: “Ever the bandage under the chin.” He goes on to generalize the capacity of the future to furnish itself out of the materials of the present day: “Every condition promulges not only itself…. it promulges what grows after and out of itself.” Promulges— so awkward a verb, but indispensable—looks as if Whitman invented it in cahoots with a jour printer hired for the purpose. The word assimilates, disperses, and rearranges the otherwise unamalgamating particles of promulgate, promote, urge; and if it ever before had quite the meaning Whitman assigns to it (which differs by a shade from “to publish or proclaim” and “to set forth, declare, or teach publicly”), the Oxford English Dictionary is unaware of the fact.

Section 48 delivers a final summary of Whitman’s anti-Gnostic morality and the unshrinking acceptance of the body that goes with it. He proposes a design of redemption by living to oneself, and the acceptance of sympathy as a natural function and not a duty:

I have said that the soul is not more than the body,

And I have said that the body is not more than the soul,

And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s-self is, And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral, dressed in his shroud.

(1262–65)

So the penalty of the lukewarm, the punishment of a life of narrow sympathy, is not the everlasting torment imagined by the religions but simply the fact that one has not lived. One is like a man who walks in daylight hooded and shunning the light.

That commandment on sympathy will be enforced by the shape of Whitman’s concluding dialogue—a last experiment in address and exclamation, with an imagined partner and an answer that must be left to conjecture. Near the start of section 51, the poet hails an unnamed creature: “Listener up there! Here you…. what have you to confide to me? / Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of even.” This is the only time we have seen him stop in the middle of a sentence (“Here you …”) and begin again with a hope of closer contact. The listener is evidently the spotted hawk who will appear in the concluding section 52; or maybe it is the reader: a reader hovering above the poet now, and not sitting among the pupils at his feet (“Eleves I salute you”). Speaking to the bird and equally to us, Whitman declares: “I too am not a bit tamed…. I too am untranslatable, / I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” This farewell separates him into material constituents—air and earth chiefly, since they belong to the routine of his daily promenades:

I depart as air…. I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,

I effuse my flesh in eddies and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,

If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,

But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,

And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,

Missing me one place search another,

I stop somewhere waiting for you.

(1327–36)

Just as the poet has found us (supposing we have followed him this far), so we are sure to find the man who made these words and was made from them. Anyone who has walked with this poem unshrouded will see him eventually. Or we will discover him under our bootsoles; it comes to the same thing.

All great poets in some way deserve to be called thinkers. As Shelley said of Wordsworth, they awaken thought from sense. But there are certain poems that seem to inhabit an original thought—as Paradise Lost does, for example, with its argument on the relationship between law, conscience, and individual freedom. Still rarer, perhaps, is the poem that exemplifies a thought from line to line, that makes us feel that its thought is consubstantial with the texture of the verse. Song of Myself belongs to this category for its thought about democracy—the morale and (by implication) the politics of democracy. Where we expect the idea of equality to call for a performance of reciprocal actions, Whitman answers with a profound belief that “opposite equals advance”: there can be an equality that comes not through reciprocal duties, but by way of the asymmetry of persons, unpredictably multiplied and divided. We may think of the democratic self as marked by “identity” with itself, but Whitman doubts that this can be the ultimate sense of “what I am” (see Kateb 1992, 240–66). Not identity but incorrigible variety is what one finds if one is able to look inward without fear of reproach: “Do I contradict myself ? / Very well then…. I contradict myself; / I am large…. I contain multitudes.”

This thought and its miscellaneous embodiment in the urgings, the catalogues and narrative illustrations of the poem, suggest that the self that Song of Myself celebrates, “Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,” the “simple separate person” it introduces and makes us know, is to be valued above all for his representative adequacy. He is proud up to the point of that equality, for nothing less will do, and nothing more. Democratic adequacy does not imply an identity or reciprocity between unlike persons. That should go without saying, but Whitman displays its truth so as to render it unforgettable. How many readers have noticed the divergence between the second line of the poem, “And what I assume you shall assume,” and a line near the end: “You will hardly know who I am or what I mean”? This difference marks a progression, a refinement, as he sees it, of his intimacy with the reader. If he began as preceptor, and we as apprentices, poet and reader at last have become opposite equals advancing.

David Bromwich

david bromwich is Sterling Professor of English at Yale University and the author of Moral Imagination (2014).[supanova_question]

Joane Vasquez English 122 7/22/2021 3-2 Assignment The author’s claim is that

Joane Vasquez

English 122

7/22/2021

3-2 Assignment

The author’s claim is that there is different english that she speaks with different people, specifically her mother and the way society has looked at her differently. Throughout the essay the author consistently brings up how she grew up with different types of english and while growing up she felt ashamed of the way her mother had broken english. The author wants her audience to understand there are many different ways english can be spoken and those who speak it differently should not be embarrassed or looked down upon just because it is not the same as another’s.

I did not identify any new key points, the one’s that still stand out to me are her talking about the different english she uses depending on who she is around. The next one is where some people would be able to understand her mother and others could not understand a single word of her broken english. These key points have not changed for me because each time throughout her essay when she explains an experience she and her mother had it always leads back to her mothers broken english and the way others view her.

The authors target audience are individuals who speak broken english themselves or have family members that don’t speak english fluently.

On page 2 in the last paragraph the author describes how she felt growing up with her mothers “limited” english. This is a good example of making a connection to the target audience because they can relate to her on a more personal level or experience if they have felt the same way before.

The author’s claim is strong because she is able to go in detail about her experiences and feelings towards “broken” english.[supanova_question]

Apple Air-Aids 3-2 Milestone One: Elevator Pitch Apple Air-Aids Janine Varga Southern

Writing Assignment Help Apple

Air-Aids

3-2 Milestone One: Elevator Pitch Apple Air-Aids

Janine Varga

Southern New Hampshire University

Air Aids Elevator Pitch Script

Introduction: Description of the Product and the Target Market

           The Apple Air-Aid are the newly invented device for individual who has a hearing impairment. The device can connect through Bluetooth to other digital devices such as your smartphone, iPad, iPhone, and computer. This producer has been developed in a design that mimics the Air-pods. Therefore they can be utilized in amplifying music or your phone call to make them easier to hear. The devices amplify sound for everything and pair with any of your devices to assist with hearing emails and messages. In general, the fundamental goal of Air-Aid is to help those encountering hearing impairment. It targets to help more than 48 million people in the U.S.A who have a hearing impairment and other people worldwide who may be suffering from the same problem. Individuals across all ages have hearing loss due to various factors. Some may be born with the problem, while others may experience a hearing decline as they age. The market size for these Air-Aids devices is expected to rise with the promise technology such as adding Bluetooth features to various types of Air-aid. Therefore, this device will benefit a broader population globally.  

How the Product fits the overall strategic plan and mission of the company

Apple has experienced significant success since its foundation in 1976. However, despite the company experiencing success in the design and development of its products and services, little has been done to meet people with hearing challenges. As a result, the integration of air aids to apple’s products fits well with its vision as it exemplifies the idea of leaving the world a “better than we found it.” Also, the Product fits well with the company’s mission of providing personal computers to people in all 140 countries in the world. Therefore, by giving people with hearing disabilities the ability to interact with personal computers such as phones, the company will be achieving its set mission. 

 Additionally, since Apple is a well-established company, it can produce quality air aids that can be used to reach a more extensive and comprehensive market that is inclusive of individuals with hearing disabilities. Similarly, the company can integrate the air aids products with its vast array of iPods, iPads, and iPhones, among many others. Hence, air aids’ products fit the company perfectly and provide the company with a new target market for increased profitability while achieving its goal of leaving the world a better place.

Justification based on numbers

The hearing aid market is projected to experience a rise in revenue. The hearing aid market is estimated to be about $8 billion in 2019 (WIRE, 2021). Furthermore, it is projected that 20% of Americans will be over 65 years by 2030 (Balachandran & Amlani, 2019). Therefore, due to the growth of the elderly in America and the world as a whole, the projected number of people living with hearing disabilities is set to increase. Therefore, the market and revenue for hearing aids are set to increase globally potentially. The market size of hearing has been large even though there was a decline of 28.1% in 2020 (Hearing Aids Market Size, Share & Growth: Report, 2021- 2028]. In the 2020 fiscal year, Apple had a revenue of $274,515, reflecting a profit of $57,411 million. I the company gains a market of at least 25%, it would anticipate revenue of nearly $1.62 billion.

 Also, with Apple’s increased usability, air aids can become one of the biggest brands for the elderly and those living with hearing challenges. For instance, the ease of connecting it with other Apple products will make air aids have projected revenue of over a billion dollars in less than five years. Also, with the projected increase in hearing aids revenue by 8% annually, it will offer the company a good return on investment over ten years. Hence, due to the availability of credible and reliable information on the business’s potential, it will be prudent for Apple to consider investing in the hearing aids market.

How the Product enhances the mission

Apple’s stock prices have been increasing consistently over the last five years. Therefore, the addition of a product that captures a new market would potentially increase the company’s profitability. The charts, statistics, and data represented in the yahoo finance website on apple shows that the company is among the most profitable companies in the world (“Apple Inc. (AAPL) Stock Price, News, Quote & History – Yahoo Finance”). Therefore, the company can achieve significant profitability if it starts a new product as it will be riding on its success in other markets, such as selling products and services to its large customer base worldwide.

Similarly, air aids products will enhance Apple’s mission. Also, the products will enable the company to relate and achieve relevancy among the young and the elderly. Hence, the company’s overall products will be interlinked for individuals with hearing disabilities as they will be able to use other company products with ease. As a result, the company will achieve its goal of providing computing services to all the countries globally and reach as many people regardless of their physical capabilities as it can.

References

Apple Inc. (AAPL) Stock Price, News, Quote & History – Yahoo Finance. (2021). @YahooFinance. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL?p=AAPL

Balachandran, R., & Amlani, A. M, 2019. Service-Delivery Considerations of Direct-to-Consumer Devices in the New Age of Rehabilitative Hearing Healthcare.

Hearing Aids Market Size, Share & Growth: Report [2021- 2028]. Hearing Aids Market Size, Share & Growth | Report [2021- 2028]. (n.d.). https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/industry-reports/hearing-aids-market-101573.

? https://onlyassignmenthelp.com/index.php/2021/11/28/nsg-complex/ [supanova_question]

3-1 Small Group Discussion View the video on how to handle a

3-1 Small Group Discussion

View the video on how to handle a difficult conversation regarding a dress code issue. For your first post, use these questions to analyze the video:

What did you observe?

How did the supervisor handle communicating with the employee? What was the employee’s reaction?

What did the supervisor do well?

What could the supervisor have done differently?

In your opinion, what should have happened?

To complete this assignment, review the Group Discussion Guidelines and Rubric document.[supanova_question]

3-2 Assignment: Leadership Map Overview Leadership maps are a valuable reflective tool

3-2 Assignment: Leadership Map

Overview

Leadership maps are a valuable reflective tool for emerging leaders. They help leaders develop self-awareness and a growth mindset while revealing areas of opportunity for improvement. In this assignment, you will review the results of the self-assessments you’ve completed throughout the course as well as reflect on your perceptions and biases. Then, you will create a leadership map using a presentation tool of your choice. Your leadership map will also help you complete Project Two, due in Module Eight.

Prompt

Use a visual presentation tool of your choice to create a map of the traits, skills, and strengths and weaknesses you have identified about yourself as a leader. You are encouraged to use the results from course resource assessments, such as the Big Five assessment, to guide your reflections.

Use the example below to see what a leadership map might look like.

A text-only version is available: Leadership Map Example Text-Only Version Word Document.

Specifically, you must address the following rubric criteria:

Personality Traits: List your key leadership personality traits based on self-reflections and relevant assessment results from course resources.

Communication Skills: Identify strengths and weaknesses in your communication skills.

Leadership Style: Identify the leadership styles or approaches you relate to most closely.

Career Goals and Development: Identify your professional goals and opportunities for career and leadership development.

Guidelines for Submission

Submit your visual map as a PDF file. You may use the tool of your choice to design your leadership map. Example tools to consider using include the following:

Microsoft Word

Prezi

Canva

Visio

BUS 210 Module Three Leadership Map Example Text-Only Version

Concept map diagram of My Leadership. The outline is as follows:

Personality Traits

Open

Introvert

Agreeable

Usually stable under stress

Highly conscientious

Communication Skills

Excellent written skills

Fear of public speaking

Avoids conflicts

Active listener

Leadership Style

Democratic

Servant leader

Career Goals

Major in marketing

Focus on social-media marketing

Become an entrepreneur

Become a charismatic leader[supanova_question]