Blog #3

The Summary and What to Take With of Two Passages

      The essay, “Shitty First Drafts” by Anne Lamott is basically an informational piece about what you should be thinking in your first draft. The first draft isn’t about getting to perfection, rather tackling the objective of writing itself. This draft is more of an ease into the activity of your paper and not as daunting as just doing the paper flat out on the first sitting. All you really want in the first draft is to be descriptive, and break the ice of the paper.

        In Richard Straub’s “Responding - Really Responding - to Other Students’ Writing,” is about what it says, responding to someone’s paper. When judging a first draft of a paper, compliment people once, for each critique you give them. Also when judging a paper, don’t judge it with the author in mind, because no one gets better when you let things slide because of how your opinion of that person is. You should always judge a paper equally, and as if you were talking to the person in person and not as a teacher would.

          After reading both of these passages, I can take two main things from them. Don’t dive into projects, but take them by steps, and don’t let things slide just because you know who they are. If I do these, I can use them to tackle difficult tasks easier, and give everybody fair and equal opportunities.

         The biggest quote I get from Lamott’s essay is, “Now, practically even better news than that of short assign­ments is the idea of shitty first drafts. All good writers write them.” This tells me that it’s ok to fail and that I shouldn’t expect perfection from myself right out of the gates in anything because even the best people at things take perfection in steps and not dives.

         The quote that spoke out to me in Straub’s piece is, “Try to focus your comments on a couple of areas of writing.” This quote can relate to anything that combines multiple things together. For instance driving, you need to teach someone how to start a car with a clutch before you can actually teach them to drive. I can relate that to writing because there are many steps that I can focus on one at a time to get better at writing.

Sources:

  Richard Straub's piece:

http://www.loribethdehertogh.com/101/Spring13/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Responding-Student-Writing.pdf

  Anne Lamott's piece: 

http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/english/wwwroot2/ta/hyperteach/pdfs/shitty.pdf

Blog Entry #2

Rory Sutherland’s “Life Lessons from an Ad Man”

As Rory Sutherland describes normal steps he sees in advertisement and reasons for advertisements portraying what they say. Rory said social media has potential to add value to something and I agree with that. If someone sees a star wearing a certain clothing brand, people are more likely to want to wear that clothing brand, thus making that clothing brand worth more. This is the rhetoric tools of Pathos because the clothing brand uses star appeal to help get their name out.

Rory mentioned interface in his video and is true too. He talks about examples of this in his video like the potato having one way where it failed because it was not presented in the right way, and the way where the potato was made into a very common food in Germany. Interface also affects the way people experience web based writing because if a website does not attract the reader, then they’re less likely to talk about the site and they won’t be spreading the word making less people hear about the site.

After watching this video, I learned a couple of things about rhetorical strategies used in advertising. One example is making something that you are arguing against, and make it go hand in hand with something that the general public does not like. Rory mentions an example like Turkey trying to stop people from wearing the veil by relating it to prostitutes. Another example that Rory referred to was ads that think outside the box to give something a new look. An example was Shreddies stopped advertising their cereal pieces as squares and started showing them as diamonds and did not change anything about the cereal at all.

References:

Rory Sutherland’s video, “Life lessons from an ad man.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXneozZwJR0

Aristotle Book I Part II

    The three modes of persuasion that Aristotle refers to in Rhetoric Part II of Book I are personal character of the speaker. The second is putting the audience into a certain frame of mind. The third mode of persuasion is the apparent of proof. The modes relate to writers today and are the guidelines writers should follow when persuading someone in things like pollution and effects towards global warming, and to things like politics. The character of the writer is very important, because no one will believe someone who lies and won’t admit to things that they’ve done in the past. The second mode tells us that we should focus on the audience we are speaking to. If you are trying to persuade a business man, you’re going to want to focus towards different aspects than if it were a farmer. The third mode is important to writers today because if you don’t have proof to what you say, then no one will take your reasons seriously.

     A term from Rhetoric that I saw is enthymeme. Enthymeme is the conclusion of your argument that includes the major and minor premise, or reasons why your reason is right. An example of this is we should drive electric cars because gas cars give off exhaust that ruins our atmosphere.

     After reading all of part 2 by Aristotle, it made me realize things about writing for persuasion. One should not make this more difficult than what it is. For example, you know the audience that you are writing towards, so you don’t need to put in every little bit. In persuasion, it’s allowed to assume that people know the most basic stuff if you project the piece of writing to the right audience. For example, Aristotle talked about the Olympics and that he could assume that people knew what the winner got, which was a crown back then, and could leave that information out of his writing.

Sources:

1. http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/rhetoric.1.i.html

2. http://rhetoric.byu.edu/figures/e/enthymeme.htm