The Feral Child Feature Story Review

Overview:

I read the Pulitzer prize winner feature story The Feral Child and it was about a girl that was neglected and was locked in a room, with only a few things. She was treated badly and the conditions she was in were very bad; the room was infested with cockroaches, and she was surrounded by her own filth. She was also very uneducated and didn't understand things kids her age should have known, and she is what scientists call a feral child. The authors argument was stating that the girl they found was a feral child, and feral children are kids that grow up with little interaction and how that is a wrong way to treat people. The author shows what makes a child become a feral child and he went through the story of the young girl and how far she has come since her abuse. The author also talks about feral children and what they are and how they got to be the way they are, the author uses other sources about feral children and he gets accounts from witnesses who saw the girl. The author also uses this story about the young girl as an example of a feral child.

Strengths and Weakness:

The articles strengths are that it has an example that explains what the story is about and it gives good details. Another strength is that the article has many different sources having definitions dating all the way back to the Holy Roman Empire and the most recent source which was 1970. A weakness in the article is that the feature story jumps around too much, there are sources from long ago and then it jumps right back into the story about the young girl, and because the feature jumps around a lot it gets confusing and hard to understand.

Conclusions:

The author concludes the feature story by going to the present to see how the young girl has developed and changed, it talks in detail about how far she has come and while she isn't where other kids her age are she has learned more than they thought she would. The story also ends with what consequences the mother is facing because of her abuse towards her daughter.

Summary:

The article was a very well written feature story and it supported all the main ideas of defining a feral child and showing the different cases of them and how rare they are. The article follows the story of a young girl who was a feral child and her mental growth was stunted due to her harsh conditions. the points were very significant because it showed what can happen when kids are treated poorly and how they deserve the best treatment. The evidence is very convincing because there are so many different examples and cases that show all the different feral children and they are all spread out through different time periods which shows how the have always existed and there have always been a few cases. As a videographer I will use the strengths that I found in the article and can apply those to my future work if I chose to go into convergence as my main focus. I can use what I learned about the format of feature stories and use that to make my work better. While the feature story is very well written there are terms in the article that are more difficult to understand and some prior knowledge is needed just for the basics or what a feral child is and how they become feral children. Overall the feature story is written extremely well and while it is slightly confusing at times everything is explained well and it has details to help you picture the girl's living conditions.

http://www.pulitzer.org/winners/lane-degregory