What is rhetoric?

What is rhetoric?  Now that we have gone through many exercises helping us to use rhetoric to strengthen our arguments, this is much easier to answer.  Rhetoric is the way that words and ideas are expressed in an effective manner, to make the author’s point as clear as it can be.  There are many means of which rhetoric can be used, like speech, writing, through pictures, and so on.



                  At the beginning of the semester, we defined rhetoric as “the art of effective expression.”  I believe that this is still a nice definition for rhetoric. This definition is shows the full essence of what rhetoric means - it is clear and concise, meaning that it gets the point across well.

As the course evolved, we made the definition of rhetoric turn more towards argumentation and how effective argumentation is essential if you want what you are fighting for to be persuasive.  We learned about ethos, pathos, and logos, which are the different appeals to an audience. They have been useful for when we are crafting our arguments, to realize that we must take into consideration who our audience is and the most effective way to reach out to them.  This was useful in both writing and Fight Club.   In writing, we were writing with a larger audience, and had to anticipate that.  Something that really showed this was the blog post about the attacks on New York City on September 11th. We had to think about how writing an essay about September 11th would be perceived according to the audience that would be reading it. In Fight Club, we had to deal with a person who was directly and immediately going against the point of view that we were actively trying to get them to agree with.

As I am procrastinating to write this, I am sitting at the SEC Championship game, of The University of Florida versus The University of Alabama.  The two slogans for these teams are "Gator Bait" and "Roll Tide."  As I'm sitting here waiting for the game to start, I am thinking about how these are two good examples of rhetoric. Although this is an unconventional way of looking at rhetoric, I think that is a good example. With regards to both, these two slogans are known nationwide, and I would make the bold assumption that most Americans know what these two mean and what they are referring to. These two universities have used their large presence in the sports world to make themselves known to an entire nation.   The two slogans are simple, yet very effective and impactful. They have used these two words, and have turned them into something that have changed a nation. I think that this is a really good example of rhetoric and shows how the definition is useful.

In conclusion, I think that the first definition of rhetoric that we saw was the most accurate one that we have come across in the semester, and provides for the strongest meaning of the word.

Multimedia Project

https://www.flickr.com/photos/136450133@N04/albums/72157661890993325/with/22808162684/

Research Paper Rhetorical Analysis

              The in-class essay, while it was useful if we were writing shorter research papers, I think that this research paper and in-class essay were too different in magnitude for it to be an accurate representation of how writing the research paper would be.  It was like writing sections of the paper, not the entire thing.  I think having done an earlier draft would have been helpful.  Personally, I changed my topic from the first annotated bibliography to the next assignment, so I think that if we had started the research earlier, then it would have been easier to have a firm hold on the topic that we wanted to write about.  I also think that reading the resources like Strunk & White would have been more useful to read at the beginning of the project.  It would have been helpful to have their tips kept in mind while initially writing the paper rather than looking if you did everything that they said after the majority of the paper was done. 

                  I think that writing a couple shorter papers would have been useful also.  It would have been better with preparing how to make an effective argument.   Fight Club was useful in preparing how to argue, but if we had written a paper, it would have better prepared us on how to write out an argument in a format that is different than speaking. 

president should step down? fight club

Pro- student should have asked the president should step down
- he wasn't helping the students in the way he could have been
- obviously the student body was angry with him so therefore they should be able to ask him to step down in order to make a strong point that they are angry and fed up with his lack of help (express themselves)
-  if he didn't believe it was a huge issue then the student should definitely have asked him to step down because it was clearly effecting his students
-  student are allowed to ask whatever they want, they did not force the president to step down.
- People felt so strongly about him stepping down that the football team wasn't going to play well and people were going to starve themselves until the president stepped down.

Con- he should not have been asked to step down
-  they could have expressed that they need his help without asking him to step down
- not all student asked him to step-down
- he has done other things that have benefited Mizzou (he became president for a reason)
-  it is not ONLY the president that could have or should have been helping the students
- they could have asked him first why he wasn't helping, he could have believed that it was not an issue and explained why.
- not realizing how much they are harming themselves(not eating) and therefore the president almost had no option but to step down.

Disparity in Women as CEO's and political leaders

Pro:

• Women tend to value team efforts more than men, they're more generous
• bring more harmony which results in better results for the company because people will be treated more fairly since they wont feel threatened because of the teamwork within the workforce
• they won't be replaced, they will just be given the higher level jobs
• advantages to gender diverse workforce because it allows for a more diverse customer base
• since men and women have different view points, they can better problem solve because of the different types of views
• debt in america - when more women work, the economies grow, and if you include more women in the political arena, they can better understand what women want 

Con:

• if you look at any statistic, the amount of women in the workforce and politics is increasing every year
• no action needs to be taken because the problem is working itself out
• most of the people in leadership positions are starting to die out and will have to be replaced by the younger generation
• there are more women in college now 
• every year there are more women in political positions, eventually they are starting to run for the most high powers
• they are becoming more strong-willed on their own
• people are starting to have different ideas about patriarchy 
• prime minister from Germany has been doing a good job

9/11 - Blog Post Continuation

9/11

September 11^th, 2015

Tragedy is a hard thing to write about.  The writer needs to be aware of the topic as well as the audience.  They do not know who will be reading their paper, and in the case of 9/11, someone who was directly affected by the attacks may react differently than someone who has no relation to the attacks except for being an American.  The writer also has to show extensive knowledge about the subject.  To get a fact wrong in an article about a tragedy would be extremely insensitive to the victims, as well as the rest of the people affected. 

                  How one writes about tragedy also changes with the level of understanding that the audience holds.  For example, when explaining a death of a family member to a child, a parent is likely to be more simplistic in their explanation, as opposed to when adults are speaking to each other, the person who is explaining will go into more depth, telling how the person died, and using more complex terms. 

                  The September 11 attacks are still a very touchy subject for a majority of people in the United States.  They had effects that are still seen prominently today.  I do not remember anything from that date in 2001.  My memories are false memories, ones that I think I remember, but they are really just from stories that I have heard or news specials that I have watched.  My memory of 9/11 is not one that happened on that date, but one that happened a few years ago. While traveling in New York City, my family and I got into a taxi, whose driver was in the Twin Towers during the attacks.  He had written his story and had copies of it in the backseat of the cab.  He talked to us about what happened that day, and it was a chilling experience to meet a person who was directly affected by the tragedy. 

                  Tragedy is a tough subject for anyone, and addressing it takes time and patience. 

                  As someone who was barely alive when the September 11^th attacks occurred, it would be extremely difficult for me to write about it to an audience of people primarily from New York City that were living in the city when the attacks occurred.  If a New Yorker were writing to other New Yorkers, they would be able to better express the feelings towards the event than I would, because they lived through the attacks and most likely share many of the same feelings towards 9/11.  Writing to an audience primarily from Iraq would also be very difficult.  As an American, it would be easy to feel like my words were more skewed towards the American side of what happened.  It would also be important to realize that every single Iraqi was not involved in the terrorist activities, but only a few.  It would be imperative to not victimize every Iraqi for what happened in New York City fourteen years ago. 

                  In every case, it would be useful for the author to try to be as impartial as possible.  That would make for a fair article for anyone that was reading it, where no one group or person would feel that they are being singled out or blamed for what happened.  It would be important to be sensitive to both sides of what happened.  Only if the author were to know that their article was going to a particular group of people where the other side would not read it would it be okay to put some bias in the writing.