Rhetorical Situations and Analysis

While I do not consider myself a writer, I do consider myself a reader. I devour books like no other, but I was not always this way. As a 7th grader I was diagnosed with Mononucleosis, or mono for short, and was quarantined for almost three months. During my medically induced isolation I had few things to occupy my time, and reality t.v. only goes so far in entertainment. My grandmother brought me the 7th Harry Potter book, The Deathly Hallows, and I was smitten. Before I had hated reading with a passion, but as I had nothing else to do with my time, I learned to adapt. The pathos in the book was compelling to me on an emotional level.

Thus began my love affair with the written word. Since then, I have become a beta reader for two main online fan fiction web sites. What I find is that my writers tend to combine a mix of logos, pathos, and ethos. Just as equally, when I write online, I use a combination of all three. I would explain rhetorical analysis to a friend as a work that takes apart a text that is considered to be non-fictional. It takes apart the text, and analyzes how the text works with ethos and logos while the reader is reading. Rhetorical situation tends to be a more one on one work.

Kairos- the right or opportune moment for something to happen.

Voyeurism in reading- I think that we all need a voyeuristic side, especially when it comes to writing and reading. When an author is able to use tongue and cheek reference that the audience gets helps to connect the author and the readers. What may be considered inappropriate in an academic setting might be considered entertaining and witty to those looking for a light read.

Weblogs were considered to be a trend, until they caught on and did not release their hold on social media and interaction. Nearly everyone has either visited a blog, or subscribed to one. The possibilities are endless when using the world wide web. However, my concerns are: Who can see the blog, and how many people can see the blog.

3 Questions
Is there a follow up piece to this article?
Why is it okay to devalue those that we hold dear, like former President Clinton, yet we make others famous for their indecent acts? *cough Kim Kardashian cough*
What purpose do blogs untimely serve society?

Before the debate has even begun, the use of pathos is employed in the form of the story of the little boy. It is used to draw in the emotions of the audience, to sway how they see the situation that is about to unfold before them. On the first question both logos and ethos are used in the forms of backing up statistics and appealing to the reasoning behind a "failed" stimulus package.
The response that the President gives back is a combination of pathos, logos, and ethos, with a large focus on logos. He slowly but surely unwinds the question that was presented to him. And as he does so he poses a question that is loaded with logos and pathos.

The questions are often times just a blanket statement. In regards to one specific spot, the question is posed whether or not the President would be opposed to across the board tax cuts. The Presidents response is, "...What you may consider across the board tax cuts could be for people who are making a billion dollars...I may not agree for a tax cut for Warren Buffet...". The question was a broad spectrum question, that could be twisted many different ways.

Paul Ryan asks a question about the budget, and then tells the President that they have "given him the [tools] to fix the budget", but the President digs deeper into the question on budget by saying that he does not want to cut the funding for the children and for the troops(pathos). He responds that he would like sit down and hammer out the details with the budget committee(ethos). While Ryan tries to use a combination of logos and ethos, he is not a confident enough speaker to ensure that his statements are taken the way he wants them.

At about 38:33 the President changes the game. He appeals to the audience. He says, "...This is part of what has happened to our politics. Where we demonize the other side so much that when it comes to getting things done, it becomes tough to do." He appeals to the emotion state of the audience. Then he says that hes having fun, and the whole room laughs and claps.

Throughout the whole debate the banter between the president and those posing the questions all have the same undertone. They use a combination of ethos, logos, and pathos to capture the audience and persuade them to their side.

In oral culture we give personification to inanimate objects. We use words like "cute","lively","handsome" and so on to describe trees, houses, rocks and all kinds of other things we see in every day life. They can help us to describe what we would have originally struggled with. However there is a down side to oral culture. When it comes to history, lets say to the Native American tribes, the spoken word was the only way of documentation for centuries. "Everybody, or almost everybody, must repeat and repeat and repeat the truths that have come down from the ancestors." Without this process, the how fabric of some nations and cultures would be lost forever. The simple solution would be to write it, the history, down. But with writing down the history, taking documentation of the stories, something is lost. It is easier to take down notes via writing, but something is lost when the information is not heard. As stated in the last paragraph of part one, " But to say that language is writing is, at best, uninformed." In writing down the stories, we lose the rich, vibrant culture.

Amber Peterein
Pre-write
10/17/14
I stepped up onto the platform and walked my way over to the podium where I would give the speech that would set up the foundations for the rest of my high school career in Youth in Government. The room was filled with well to-do and higher up, the people that Hollywood tries to impersonate at high class functions. They were all well dressed, but in a conservative manor, such a way that said “I have money, enough to be secure enough to where I don’t have to wear gaudy jewelry or shopping mall designer.” The room was white, large enough to fit over almost three hundred people, and yet felt small enough to where I could have delivered my speech without the aid of the microphone. The walls were broken by large crème sheer hanging tapestries that had lights behind them, which gave the room a soft glow. The only other source of light in the room was the ceiling. Completely made of glass, the dinner attendants could look up and view the night sky and twinkling stars.  
The overwhelming smell of flowers, clean and crisp, filled my nose as I took my first breath to begin my speech. I had meticulously spent months writing this speech, every word handpicked and rewritten and changed and changed back again. I lost more sleep worrying about this speech than I had when I began my freshman year of high school. I stressed over how to being my speech, how my flow would go, if I would pull a Aubrey Posen (Pitch Perfect) and lose my dinner over those in the first few tables. Almost six hundred eye’s turned to me, and in that moment, that split second, I froze. My entire mind was blank, a clean canvas, and the speech I was about to deliver would be the paint I would color the canvas with. Another breath. One more. And it all came to me.
“I am extremely nervous,” I said to the room, “Not because I do not know what to say, but because there is so much to say. I have a whole speech written, here it is.” I held up the pieces of paper that I had spent hours memorizing, “I know every word in the speech, but I also know that what I want to say to you will come from my heart.” I took the papers and turned them over, where my father had written a few simple words ‘A good speech starts with a joke’. It was the encouragement I needed to start.

"I feel fine," she said. "There is nothing wrong with me. I feel fine."

"Dos cervezas," the man said into the curtain.
"Big ones?" a woman asked from the doorway.
"Yes, two big ones."

"They look like white elephants," she said.
"I've never seen one," the man drank his beer.
"No, you wouldn't have."

I like the way the conversation is halting between the man and the girl. There seems to be an underlying tension that effects both of them. They both seem to be avoiding something, but since they never actually specify what it is, we as the readers are left even more out of the loop. Hemingway does an excellent job of keeping the readers hooked the entire time they are reading.