Mike Rose's The Mind At Work

Welders Equal Philosophers Consider the idea that a welder deserves the same intellectual respect as a philosopher. If you have conformed to society’s standards of what jobs require the most intellectual activity, then this idea might seem irrational and intriguing. On the other hand, people such as Mike Rose, author of The Mind at Work, would claim that this idea is true and even defends it in his book. Rose is a firm believer that the modern world has undervalued blue-collar workers. It is common for people to criticize vocational schools and advertise for four-year colleges, and that is what provoked Rose to take a stand. He argues against this idea and pushes for more respect for vocational students. He wants us renovate our ideas about

This is due to Rose using plenty of descriptors in his writing, and sometimes may seem repetitive. For example, the first sentence of the passage says “To vitalize that imagination, we need to rethink our notions about mind and work, but also reassess long-standing notions and seemingly self-evident distinctions among levels and kinds of knowledge.” In this sentence, you might have realized the words reimage and reassess. These two words are synonyms, meaning they have the same meaning, yet he used both words in the same sentence. Another repetition occurs when Rose says “notions about mind and work” and “long-standing notions and seemingly self-evident distinctions among levels of knowledge.” The only difference between the two is that the latter is more descriptive than the first. The reason Rose may do this is to first put the idea in your head that certain notions need attention, and then goes into detail. Essentially, Rose is saying, “Specifically, the notions about mind and work that need to change are the long-standing notions and seemingly self-evident distinctions among levels of knowledge” (Rose). However, that sentence there is lengthy and does not flow well. The way Rose put it in the text is much more concise and clear. Although Rose’s sentence may have seemed repetitive, it was not, and in fact its second portion was complementary to the

As the words “cognitive operations” were used by Rose to show that blue collar workers deserve the same intellectual respect as four-year university graduates, the long complex sentences that Rose used also were formed for the purpose of showing the intellectual ability of blue-collar workers. Rose using complex sentences is supposed to resemble that the blue-collar workers are also complex and intellectual. If Rose were to use more simple sentences, then he would discredit himself. Some would argue that he had to make his writing simpler for the blue-collar workers that read his writing. For those reasons, he had no choice but to use complex language skills in the