W14: Shanice Grocia Topic Refinement

In developing a pitch, I think it definitely helped in refining and deciding a topic to do. Before my pitch, my topic was; “What are reasons producers and authors of books use Ebonics within their works when such a heavy controversial background surrounds the language?” Ebonics is a term that was coined by a 1970’s psychologist, and attempted to define African American English. However, in researching, I discovered that my question was way too broad and needed to be narrowed down and improved.

I think doing a ‘practice pitch’ is a great way to know if a topic is too broad or possible not something that quite interests you. The ‘pitch’ could be an extremely useful pre-writing exercise for other assignments.

That is how I came up with my new show idea, “Does a name indicate future criminal behavior?” A better targeted question to analyze and explore.


A snippet of my podcast transcript:

As a follow-up to the Freakonomics podcast, “How Much Does Your Name Matter?” I decided to focus on another issue, “Does a name indicate future criminal behaviour?”  

The work of Levitt and Fryers’ discovered that the name a person holds does not directly correlate with their economic standing. However, the research I found suggests that a name does in fact relate to how people are perceived in society by:

1. Whether or not they will be offered certain jobs 
2. The initial start and chances of juvenile behaviour. 

In the study, “First Names and Crime” The authors, David Kalist and Daniel Lee stated that young citizens with less popular names could be more inclined towards crime because are treated differently by their peers, making it more difficult for them to form relationships (Kalist, Lee 2). Meaning it is not the name itself that is a problem, but rather the reaction and social environment that surrounds that name. 

But bringing it back to my question, “Does a name indicate future criminal behavior?” can stem outward and connect to  an issue within a community that is similar to racial profiling but instead can more or less be ‘name profiling’.