Heilker and Yergeau

Summary
Paul Heilker and Melanie Yergeau use their article to bring light to autism. They both discuss the importance of speaking of autism as a rhetoric and something that needs more light shed on it. The article aims at those who have little knowledge on autism and who want to learn more. It is also can be seen as how one can take the knowledge they do have on autism and how to present this information to other people.

Dialectical Notebook

Response	Quotation
I hate that this still isn’t fully understood, it affects so many people, I wish that they could understand better why exactly this happens to people.	“Although autism will be diagnosed in more than 25,000 U.S. children this year, scientists and doctors still know very little about the neurological disorder.” (261)
Everything is going to help spread the awareness about this disorder.	“Every text about autism in the ever-increasing barrage of public discourse on the subject – every news story, every memoir, every popular magazine article, every website, every journal article (including this one), every television broadcast, every blog entry – every public text on autism is begging for a rhetorical analysis.” (262)
I have worked with many autistic children so reading this just made it so much clearer.	“The National Institute of Health defines autism as ‘a spectrum that encompasses a wide range of behavior’ but whose ‘common features include impaired social interactions, impaired verbal and nonverbal communication, and restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior.” (262)
I like that there is an example of how it helps because it was hard to grasp exactly where they were trying to go with this.	“Understanding autism as a rhetoric helps me understand Eli’s longstanding habit of radically shifting the topic of conversation without warning and without transition, without signaling the shift.” (264)
I like how the authors made sure to continue to incorporate the part of the rhetoric in the article.	“ But a rhetorical perspective offers us new, different, and more useful ways of thinking about at least some autistics’ silences.” (266)
This shows how rhetoric can be seen in a different light	“Conceiving autism as a rhetoric, as a way of being in the world through language, allows us to reconstruct what we have historically seen as language deficits as, instead, language differences.” (269)

Thoughts
I really enjoyed reading this article. Back home I taught a little girl with autism how to swim a few times a week and reading this made me think of her the whole entire team. I have also done research on autism during high school for a series of projects and I never thought I would see it portrayed in a literary way.