Analyzing Rhetorical Situations

In order to explain to a friend what rhetorical situations are and what rhetorical analysis is, I would start with rhetorical situations. Very simply I would tell him or her that rhetorical situations are situations in which by the manner in which information is presented, different viewpoints can be taken on the situation. For example, we talked about the rhetoric surrounding Ferguson, but there is rhetoric surrounding nearly all media or works of art. Different viewpoints are taken on different situations and works of art depending on how the situation is presented. Rhetorical analysis is something completely different. Rhetorical analysis is being able to analyze how the situation is rhetorical through means of "writer, reader, text, and medium". Rhetorical analysis is being able to distinguish how each of these things is used to form an opinion on the genre.

When writing and resounding to things online, I think I most often appeal to Logos. I am a very straightforward person and I have always liked things cut and dry. (I love math and physics for example). But I just find it much easier to write when I put forward an argument and defend my argument reasonably with evidence. And while I think that credibility of a writer is important as well, for example just by nature I take readings more seriously when a notable person has written them. But still, I think that I mostly appeal to Logos and a well constructed and defended argument.

Based on a definition from online, Kairos meant "the supreme moment". And I think the article pretty much uses "The Kairos of Blogging" in that definition. Going hand in hand with the definition, the article talks about the problem with this supreme moment. People are becoming more and more public with what was once private. That is the author's main problem with blogging. He acknowledges that there are different kairos and especially different genre as we humans evolve, but he thinks that this evolution of genre into a more public world is a bad one. I don't necessarily disagree with the author's concerns, but I do think it is necessary to let evolution take its course even when it comes to technology. For example (and a cheesy example), people thought it was weird and were concerned when women started to show more skin when they dressed, but now it is the norm. It is human to be concerned about our changing world but we must not intervene because eventually it will just become norm.

I think voyeurism is important to how we understand writing or reading because we must read wilst considering who the intended audience is. Voyeurism brings about rhetoric regardless of the community a reading or writing was intended for.

Questions:
1) When was this article written?
2) What were the points of giving the details about the statistics of household computers and how many people owned cell phones? Just to back up the rising of internet and blogging?
3) What is meant by "but it was adopted so quickly and widely that it must be serving well established rhetoric needs."?

Right off the bat, (time 3 minutes to 11 minutes) the congressman (I do not know his name yet because I am watching as I respond) uses a combination of guilt and Logos (logic) to basically ridicule Obama and his stimulus package. He uses the numbers of 7% unemployment jumping to 10% unemployment as a logical justification for the failure of his stimulus package. He also tries to make President Obama feel guilty by giving a true life example of someone saying "there just aren't enough jobs". Because Politicians can look at numbers all day long and argue about them, but they don't truly know what it means until they see the face of someone suffering. This is the congressman using pathos, evoking sadness in Obama. Now, watching a bit further, I can see that the Congressman "left unsaid" the data that trickled in AFTER Obama's economists had made their predictions about jobs after the recovery act. Obama defends himself by saying what was unsaid by the congressman, and that is that a large number of lost jobs were out of Obama's hands because his policies were not in affect yet. He also uses logos saying that the notion that "I would resist a package that would cost half as much and produce twice as many jobs is absurd" because it makes absolutely no sense, he just could not find credible economists who would back up such claims (ETHOS).

At time 42 minutes, Tom Price from Georgia talks about "What he should tell his constituents when they are offering reforms and ideas for Health Care, but Obama's administration keeps on saying the Republicans are offering nothing". What he fails to point out, as President Obama points out, is that their offerings are simply ideals that everyone wants, but they are not providing a funded, layer out process to make such things happen. Obama says it is simply impossible for everyone to have health care for free and that their needs to be a laid out process to make reforms possible.

As the debate/question answering goes further... The questions become more of jabs than real questions.

My blog presents itself as a light hearted way to complain about and poke fun at so many silly things that we find funny on the internet and silly things that go so viral. The author, Charlie Hatton says "Also, the picture (of a cat) is apparently over a year old. Part of me feels good that I avoided at least one stupid picture of a stupid cat for so long." He is partly amazed that it has taken over a year for some silly picture to reach his eyes, but even though it is just a silly picture, he is almost proud of himself for it. He is proud that he hasn't fallen prey to "what the cat represents online.", that being "the quintessential indicator of someone who's doing the internet wrong" for over a year. And yet even though he has defined that this cat is silly and the indicator of someone doing the internet wrong, Charlie still laughs when he sees it.

I think the ideal audience for my blog would be middle aged, middle class people. Charlie is not condoning the cat picture, but he is still laughing at it when he happens to come across it. And although he does not mention anything about children being too into the internet (and probably stupid cat pictures like this) (which is what I think), he does mention the opposite, which is that the older generation is much less prone to come across something like this considering that grandmothers show other people "when they've first discovered the interwebs". And even though Charlie does not say anything about the younger generation, he does say that he is "not going to start spamming out photos of cats with captions like "WHO'S A BEBBEH KITTEH?!'". So Charlie is the middle percentage, not the one who will willingly search for cat photos, or the one who doesn't know how to open their browser, but the middle aged, middle class, working male or female who will happen to see a stupid cat photo every once in a while.

There are not many comments on my blog as it is fairly new, but i found another blog with a similar tone and for which I thought the audience it was directed to was the same. For the most part, from the comments, I can deduce that the people reading this blog are middle-aged people who have a moderately cynical view on life. One of the commentaries states "I couldn't get my VCR clock to change this weekend. I don't even know where the manual is and will probably have to Google it and hope it's online. Bitches." It seems like this blog (and the cat blog) is directed to people who have a respect for and who value simplicity and passive-aggressively get angry at anything that gets into their way.

I think my web comic works with its audience because it relates to them very well. Similar to Louis CK, I think this blogger (and also comedian), Carlie Hatton, uses the small stresses of his everyday, very normal life, fuel his humor and his commentary. Charlie connects to his audience by writing about things that are very common in everyday life and putting his cynical, comic spin on it. Perhaps the best way to relieve the small stresses of a middle-aged person's everyday life is simply seeing someone else either suffer or deal with the same problems, which in a really sick way is something that every human finds funny, especially when they have gone through those struggles themselves.

1) First, Gee breaks down literacy into the every day knowledge of literacy, reading, what he defines as "Most basically being able to interpret print." But not only to be able to interpret what the words mean, but how they are embedded in a discourse. He says "reading outside of a discourse is like reading in a vacuum."

Later, he says that being able to use powerful literacy is being able to use literacy to control (or to work with and define or to function with) various discourses in cultures. Basically, to sum it up in my words, Gee defines literacy as not only being able to read and write in respect to various discourses, but to be able to adequately use words and structure to influence and work with discourses.

2) This reading did not so much change my view of literacy, rather it deepened my understanding of literacy and put into words in a more developed way what I thought literacy was to begin with. If someone were to ask me what literacy was, the first thing that would pop into my mind is "the ability to read and write." But what Gee does so well is explains that to be literate (or to read and write) is only important and meaningful, and perhaps even powerful, if it influences and is taken into context with a specific discourse, viewpoint, or group of people.

From the beginning, Ong's argument is that view that literacy is something that is as everyday as tying a shoe (in an advanced culture) block a true understanding of what writing is. Then, throughout the rest of the reading he goes on to say what he thinks writing really. (The title even gives it away a little bit).

Two quotes that sum up Ong's argument:

"Functionally literate persons, those who regularly assimilate discourses such as this, are not simply thinking and speaking human beings but chirographically thinking and speaking human beings."

"Our literate world of visually processed sounds has been totally unfamiliar to most human beings, who always belonged, and often still belong to this oral world."

“You’ll either come back to this car as a state champion, or a runner up.” That is what I said to myself before the state water polo game my senior year of highschool, just as I had said to myself before the state championship game a year earlier, in which I returned a champion. I turned off my car just as my song from the team CD, “R U Mine?”, by the Artic Monkeys, ended. I got to the game early enough to watch the whole 3rd place match, but can’t remember 1 second of that game. The only thing I could think about was how Parkway West was the only team in the state that could beat us, and that they very well could. After barely winning two close games against them earlier in the season and not scoring in either of them, it was fair to say that I was nervous. But after our pregame speech and 20 minutes of warming up and shooting, once the first whistle blows and once I pushed off the lane rope to try and win the first swim off, my nerves were numbed to focus and adrenaline.

My main story will take place around “The call” that happened with around 1:30 left in the game, but during the game, I remember after my first goal thinking that this was “my game” because I scored it so early. I remember just before my second goal thinking that we really needed a goal to turn the game around. I remember setting on Grant Keisling, thinking that he was going to overpower me because he was stronger than me, but as the ball was coming towards me in the air shrugging off of him picking up the ball and skipping it into the goal. I remember watching Joe Shaughnessy score out of two meter and thinking about how he had had such good games against parkway west and was going to help us win this game.

During the call, (which is basically just a horrible call that the refs made that they later admitted was incorrect), I remember not knowing what was going on. I had scored, and they had an official timeout after. I didn’t commit a foul, what could be going on? I watched from the water as the head referee went up to my far-from-calm coach and told him “we have to redo the play” because the clock hadn’t been running… I was angry because they took a goal away from me, but even more angry because now we were still down one goal with 1:30 left on the clock… I was furious for my team. I sat there treading, stared at the head referee and simply said “Really?” to which he replied “lets go” with a hand gesture signaling me to go to offense and set up. After 1:30 seconds scoreless and after watching the goalie miss save our final shot and watching our last pass go over our players head and hearing the final buzzer go off and hearing the whole parkway west section along with their players go crazy, I simply sank. I went underwater holding my head screaming “Fuck!” repeatedly. After about 30 seconds underwater, I swam to the side and climbed out of the pool, tears already beginning to form in my eyes. I got out and the first thing I received was hugs from alumni telling me how great of a game I had played. After the game, I remember hearing my coach tell me how proud he was of us as me and the other seniors sat together and wept. He told us how he wouldn’t want any other group of people to coach, and after that, came up to me privately and told me that he would miss me.

Touch- shrugging of my defenders when scoring, feeling the ball in between my hand and forearm before scoring the goal that was taken away. Hugging alumni, shaking hands with the other team, hugging my coach, hugging my parents, hugging of the friends and parents that came to watch upstairs.
Vision- watching the ball sail over our player on the last pass of the game. Watching parkway west celebrate. Looking at the scoreboard after the game “Congratulations state champions parkway west longhorns.” Seeing on the scoreboard “SLUH-13 Parkway West-14.”
Hearing- Hearing the final buzzer go off. Hearing the ref talk to my coach saying “We have to redo the play.” Hearing the ref say “Let’s go” to me. Hearing my teammates cry. Hearing my coach say he would miss me.

The more I think about this, maybe I could write this paper on how sometimes even though you are literate in a discourse, you cannot control a discourse.

Good dialogue lines:

"Everything tastes like licorice. Especially all the things you've waited so long for, like absinthe."

"I'll love it. I'll love it now but I just can't think about it. You know how I get when I worry."

"And we could have everything and every day make it more possible."

"Come back in the shade."... "You mustn't feel that way."



I like Hemingway's style of writing because I like how he will have a really long sentence and then immediately counter it with a really short sentence to change up the tone. It is very easy to read because of this because it has nice flow.

I couldn't find a full article really on water polo that would be relevant, but I could find an excerpt from one that had to do with some research and could be useful to my writing process.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/10413200490437886#.VFlo0ofCnKA

My article is simply trying to prove a theory. And that theory is that self-talk in the pool helps water polo players perform better. Experimenters (it doesn't really say who) test players ability to shoot precisely under normal conditions, and then to shoot precisely after self-talk groups talked them up. In both of the two groups experimented on, the results were that the players were more precise after the self-talk. And in a similar experiment, both groups increased their power (the distance they threw the ball) after they were given motivational self-talks.

Although I am not writing about water polo research or anything like that, this article can help me at least add some detail to my story, and talk about it in a literate fashion to describe what gee and ong are doing for me. For example, in the parts where I talk about me "talking to myself" before and after a goal and how my mind was only on the game, I can pull in parts of this article and I can talk about I was actually really helping myself prepare for this game. I was hyping myself up. This could lead to even a greater build up to the end of the story, or I could analyze this in a whole separate part of the story (the two pages I will be writing) and talk about water polo as a discourse (Gee) and the further mastery of it by self-talk.