Project 5 - Rhetoric in Text 2

As I discussed in my previous post, an author's use of rhetoric in his/her piece is a useful and subtle way of influencing the reader's thoughts/opinions on the topic being discussed. Rhetoric refers to the authors word choice.
In class, we read text 2, which was a CNN.com article titled: "Sharing vs. Your Privacy on Facebook." This article discussed the issue of privacy settings on Facebook. The article tells us something that many people who use Facebook may not know. It argues that applications on Facebook can look at your personal information that you display on Facebook. The article wants to do its best to prevent applications from looking at Facebook users' personal information by increasing awareness of privacy settings. Many people who use Facebook are not sure of how to use the privacy settings properly, which makes it easier/possible for applications to look at your personal information. Through the author's use of rhetoric, the article seems to encourage a lack of trust between Facebook users and the Facebook system/company.
For example, the author uses the word "hide" in the sentence: "Facebook provides pages of instructions on how people can tighten up their privacy settings to hide their personal information from other users and outside applications." By using this word, the author encourages the lack of trust that Facebook users should have with other Facebook users and outside applications of Facebook. When the author suggests that you should "hide" your personal settings, it implies to the reader that you should keep your personal information a secret to protect yourself from some outside danger. Another word that the author includes in the article to produce the same emotion of distrust is: "sensitive." This word is used in the sentence: "No application can access a user's most sensitive data." The term sensitive is used to describe the emotional connection that people have to their personal information. When something is referred to as "sensitive," it means that it may be a touchy subject that can lead to distrust towards other. People usually want to protect people/items that they are sensitive about, so a guard is put up around them on that subject. Therefore, referring to this issue as "sensitive," establishes the idea that the privacy issue on Facebook causes distrust.

Project 5 - Rhetoric in Text 1

Authors use rhetoric in their pieces in order to grab the attention of the reader and get their point across. A form of rhetoric that we discussed in class that is commonly used by authors is word choice. By incorporating certain words in their piece, an author can provide the reader with small hints that lead to the understanding of the author's view on the subject. Word choice can also be a good persuasive tactic to sway the minds of the reader into thinking a certain way about the topic being discussed in the piece.
When analyzing the CNNhealth.com article entitled "Mom won't be forced to have C-section," it is evident that the author, Elizabeth Cohen, incorporated examples of rhetoric through her word choice throughout the piece. For example, Cohen chose to include a quote from Joy that includes the word: "flabbergasted." The quote reads as follows: "I was a bit flabbergasted, because that seemed rather extreme." So, in this quote, two words actually stand out to me: "flabbergasted" and "extreme." These two words cause the reader to sympathize with the Szabo family because when Joy says she is flabbergasted, she means that she is shocked and appalled at her local hospital's new code. Also, when she describes it as "extreme" readers can understand the position that Joy has on the issue involving her and her local hospital, and the readers may be swayed to believe that same thing. Even though, Cohen did not use these words in her own writing, since they were found in a quote by Joy, she still chose to include this quote out of many other quotes that she could have used. Thus, it suggests that Cohen saw the strength that this quote had by using words such as "flabbergasted" and "extreme," and decided to include them into her article in order to allow the reader to feel sorry for Joy and the Szabo family in attempt to get the reader to side with them.
A word that I found in which the author uses herself (not a word in a quote) is the word "devastating." This word suggests that the author has an emotional attachment to the topic discussed in the article and she is trying to sway the reader to think a certain way on the matter. In the context that the word "devastating" is used in is actually supporting the hospital's new code. However, it does not matter which side the author is attempting the reader to sympathize. We are simply analyzing how an author can use words to create a bigger impact on the reader and allow the reader to gain an emotional connection to the topic in which they are reading about. That is what rhetoric is all about. Elizabeth Cohen successfully used subtle hints to pull the reader in emotionally by using strong, meaningful words such as, "devastating," "flabbergasted," and "extreme."

Project 5 - Text 1 Analysis

During class on Thursday, March 25, we took a look at three selected concepts from Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life. The first concept discusses Certeau's ideas of production and re-production/consumption. He says that production is creation, while re-production is more like consumption or the recreation of something. Secondly, Certeau describes his key concept of poaching. According to Certeau, poaching involves taking bits and pieces of a product and re-using them in a different context or re-creating them to fit one's motives. In a way, poaching is similar to the process that we went through in writing our research papers for project 3; we took the information that we researched and re-phrased the information to incorporate it into our papers without plagiarizing. The last concept that we looked at was distinguishing between tactics and strategies. Certeau says that a strategy is based on a "proper" place and a base of "will and power," while tactics are more temporal and not rooted.
In order to apply de Certeau's key concepts, we read an article from CNNhealth.com titled "Mom won't be forced to have C-section." This article discussed an issue between a woman named Joy Szabo and her local hospital. Joy has decided to give birth to her fourth child at a hospital that is 350 miles away from her home and husband, due to the fact that her local hospital will only deliver her baby by C-section. Even though Joy successfully delivered her third child vaginally after having a C-section for her second child's birth, her local hospital has a new code that does not allow women who have previously had a C-section to deliver a baby vaginally. The hospital backs up their decision by claiming that there are several health risks involved in giving birth vaginally after having had a C-section for a previous birth. However, Joy's argument is that she had a vaginal birth that was very successful after she had had a C-section previously. Therefore, Joy does not believe that the claims that the hospital is making about health risks are that accurate or as serious as the hospital is suggesting. However, the local hospital still refuses to allow Joy to give birth to her fourth child vaginally; thus, Joy is forced to travel 350 miles away to a hospital in Phoenix that will allow her to give birth vaginally. The article is written in a way that seems to support the mother (Joy) by using pathos in order to create sympathy. However, at the end of the article, many readers still tend to side with the hospital. This connects to de Certeau's concept of tactics and strategies. In the case of this article, the hospital is using strategy because it is a place of high power that uses statistics and facts to provide evidence for why it established the new code. On the other hand, the Szabo family illustrates tactics because Joy provides one story/example (her own) to back up her opposing viewpoint against the hospital's code. That is not as powerful as the strategy that the hospital uses by providing statistics and facts from multiple birth cases in order develop the new code on not allowing vaginal births after mothers have previously had a C-section. Thus, the article on CNNhealth.com successfully illustrates de Certeau's third concept of tactics and strategies.

Project 4 Analysis

The purpose of project 4 was to recreate a project from this course (ENG 101) using global revision. Global revision occurs when you change something on a larger, more broad scale. For example, global revision may consist of changing the overall purpose, audience, forum, and/or genre of a piece. In other words, global revision seeks to alter the "big picture" of a piece.
I chose to revise my narrative piece from project 1. As a refresher, the topic that I wrote about in this piece was my trip to Vienna, Austria and Budapest, Hungary. When thinking about how to globally revise this narrative piece, I thought that I might change the format of the paper into the form of a website. The website that I made for project 4 can be found at the web address: http://eng101project4.weebly.com. In order to create a website, I used the program: Weebly. When making my website, I decided to format it so that the homepage corresponded with the introduction of my narrative, and then I made separate pages/links for the different ideas that I discussed in my paper. Starting with the homepage, I simply dragged and dropped the introduction paragraph from project 1 onto the page. In order to make the page more appealing and colorful, I incorporated actual pictures that I took while on my trip to Vienna and Budapest. When deciding how many pages to incorporate and what should be included on each page, I went through my project 1 paper and read paragraph to paragraph to see what the main ideas were that I discussed. Originally, I thought I might just make a page for each paragraph of my paper. However, as I went through my narrative, I realized that sometimes the ideas that I presented in one paragraph would continue into or connect to the ideas in the next paragraph. Therefore, I ended up separating my ideas from my narrative paper into six main ideas that I turned into pages on my website. I titled the pages based on the overall idea that was being discussed. These titles include: Preparation Details and My First Flight to Europe, The First Day in Austria, On the Road to Budapest: Experiencing Exchange Rate Differences, Budapest,Hungary, Experiencing Hungarian Culture through Food, Music, and Fellowship, and The Last Night. Each web page includes two to three paragraphs from my narrative. Finally, for my last page on my website, I simply dragged and dropped my concluding paragraph onto the web page. I entitled the last page: Conclusion/Reflection.
This new format of transforming my narrative paper from project 1 into a website is an example of global revision because I altered the genre and target audience of the piece. The genre of the piece was altered because I changed my piece from print text to website form. This alters the audience of my piece because the people who may use the computer/Internet to read and find information may be different than the people who may only use printed forms of text to find information. The Internet and use of websites for information is becoming more and more widespread as society develops into a technologically advanced, digital world. Therefore, by posting my paper in the form of a website, I made it possible for people who may not go around reading printed papers to come across my paper and enjoy reading it and learning about the experience of travelling to different countries with different cultures.

Analysis of Project 3 - Research Paper

The project 3 research paper objective was to be able to understand and use primary and secondary research in order to construct a well-written research paper in MLA format. We were allowed to chose any topic we liked, so I decided to chose a topic near and dear to my heart: the effects of alcoholism and how to reduce the occurrence of this disease. This is a relevant topic because college is often the age when most people/students begin to experiment with and abuse alcohol which can end up developing into the serious, life-long disease of alcoholism. I have also had experience dealing with this disease in my family, so the topic captured my interest. As I conducted my research for this paper, I mainly found the information that I used in books from the library or Internet sources. During the research process, I made it my goal to answer my research question: "How does alcoholism affect the alcoholic and those around the alcoholic, and why/how can the occurrence of the disease be reduced?" Through the research that I found, I decided to focus the main points of my paper on the negative physical impacts that alcoholism has on the alcoholic, drunk driving, and the affects that alcoholic parents have on the emotional and psychological well-being of children of alcoholics. As I put all of my research and knowledge into paper form, I also made sure to include the modes of rhetoric, such as ethos, pathos, logos, and exigency/kairos.
My research paper successfully portrayed the rhetoric devices of ethos and logos through the research that I conducted. I made sure to use recent and credible sources and cite the sources internally as well as in a works cited page; thus ethos is found in my paper. It is important to include the rhetorical device of ethos in a research paper because the reader wants to know that the information that they are reading about is true and reliable. Logos was also present in this paper because I incorporated a lot of facts and statistics about alcoholism based on the research that I did. The rhetorical device of logos is necessary to use in a research paper because the goal of a research paper is to inform the reader of a topic by using evidence of facts to back up your claims. Pathos, the emotional appeal, was used in my paper because I talked about the negative impacts that alcoholism can have on others. For example, I used phrases such as, "alcoholism can also effect the innocent bystanders" or "the affects that alcoholism have on children of alcoholics is devastating." I mainly used this form of rhetoric when discussing drunk driving and the affects that alcoholism has on children of alcoholics because the point I wanted to get across to the reader is that alcoholism impacts a lot more people than just the alcoholic themselves, and that is why it is such a terrible and widespread issue in society. Finally, exigency/kairos kind of goes along with the pathos that I used in my piece because I constantly reminded my reader of the negative impacts of alcoholism throughout the piece. Therefore, I was trying to tell the reader that alcoholism is a dangerous and unfortunate disease to have. My goal was to prevent the reader from developing alcoholism by informing them of the many negative impacts that the disease causes.

Journal - Global vs. Local Revision

The main difference between global and local revision is that in global revision, there is a more significant change between the two drafts. Global revision occurs when you change something on a more broad, larger level, such as revising the purpose or main concept of a piece. On the other hand, local revision is changing a smaller, less significant detail in the piece while the overall purpose/concept remains the same. For example, the example of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger that we heard in class represented global revision because the music videos for each sample that we saw promoted completely different concepts. The first video of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger was by the original artist Daft Hands, and the video of the hands spelling out the words of the song provided a unique message. However, in the second video of the same song remixed by Kanye West, you could still hear the basic influence and melody of the original song by Daft Hands, but the concept and style of the song and video was completely different because it took on a more rapper/gangster feel to the overall purpose.
The examples of Apologize that we listened to in class represented local revision because the overall purpose and the videos remained the same in each version. The thing that changed was the sound of the song based on the instruments that were being used. Therefore, this represents local revision because only a specific detail (the sound of the song) was altered, rather than the entire overall purpose of the song.

Journal - What Makes a Good Thesis

A thesis statement is a brief summary of the goal/purpose of your paper. It allows the reader to understand that every point/argument described throughout the paper will justify a specific overall idea. In order for a thesis statement to be strong, it must include both a statement of fact and opinion. The thesis statement should serve as a guide for the reader to follow as they continue to read the paper. It is most common to include your thesis statement as one sentence in the introduction paragraph in order to introduce your main purpose of your paper. However, thesis statements may be longer than one sentence and located in a place other than the introduction, depending on how the paper is organized. It is very important to have a strong, clear thesis statement because if the thesis statement is weak, the reader will not have a clear understanding of what they are supposed to learn and pay attention to while reading your paper.

To better illustrate my ideas of what constitutes a good thesis statement, I came up with two thesis statements that I consider to be strong:

1. The emission of fossil fuels causes a negative impact on the environment by producing air pollution.

2. Bungee jumping is a dangerous practice that should not be continued.

The first example represents a strong thesis statement because it includes a statement of fact and opinion. This sentence tells the reader that the paper will discuss how the emission of fossil fuels effects/relates to air pollution, which is the statement of fact. It also includes a statement of opinion because it tells the reader that the author believes that the impact is negative. Therefore, the reader can expect to read about claims as to why the author believes that the emission of fossil fuels and producing air pollution are negative impacts on the environment. The second example also represents a strong thesis statement because it includes the two properties of a good thesis statement (statement of fact and opinion) as well. The statement of fact in this sentence is that bungee jumping is a dangerous practice. The statement of opinion comes in the second half of the sentence when it says that it should not be continued. Therefore, from this sentence, the reader is able to understand that the paper will discuss the dangers of bungee jumping and reasons for why the act should not be continued.
These short, clear thesis statements are important guide for the reader that leads to a much better understanding of the idea that the author is trying to get across. A good paper should always teach some kind of lesson, and a strong thesis statement allows authors to do just that.