I entered Wayne State University this year as a transfer student in my sophomore year. I just recently changed my major from biology to nutrition. I plan on going into Optometry school after I graduate. I was born and raised in Pakistan the first 6 years of my life. After moving to America, it took us about a year moving around until we finally settled in Farmington Hills, MI. I came into the country knowing very little English. Surprisingly quickly, though, I was able to become a fluent English speaker. Growing up, I loved to write poems and short stories just as much as I loved to read. In middle school, I wasn’t able to take an extensive English class because it was a charter school and it wasn’t very well put together. In high school, though, it was much better and I was exposed to more challenges. During senior year, I took AP English to challenge myself further and become an improved writer, as I knew it was a necessary skill. It was due to that class that I felt somewhat prepared coming into English 1020. However, I was still very nervous. This was a college course after all, which meant that it was definitely going to be more intense than what I was used to.
I turned out to be correct. This course was definitely a challenge but I learned a lot and I can apply what I learned to my future writing pieces. I think my weakest point in writing that I improved on was sentence structure. Every time I transformed my rough draft to a final draft, I edited the sentences. I have a bad habit of elaborating too much on certain points to the extent that it becomes repetitive. Other times I tend to be too wordy. For example, in my rough draft for project one I wrote,
“The ad displays a teenager going through a scenario in his/her life and it is difficult to tell what is being advertised until the very end when there is a short narrative or the “Above the Influence” symbol appears. This sort of ad layout keeps the audience’s attention all throughout because of the suspense of what the ad is trying to get at. By the end, it clearly labels the good and bad choices, in a way that is actually appealing to its viewers through the music, setting, and the people used throughout the brief 15 to 30 seconds.”
After reviewing, I realized this part was way too wordy. In my final draft, I reduced it to “Each ad highlights a teenager going through a scenario in his/her life. Although it’s difficult to tell what each ad is about in the beginning, it reels you in at first glance through the catchy music, setting, and the young people used throughout the brief 15 to 30 seconds.” A logical flow is important to every essay and sounding too wordy takes away from that flow. Of course, I’m not perfect at this yet, but I can tell that I have definitely improved during this course. I was also able to obtain a clear grasp on the three major rhetorical appeals: ethos, logo, and pathos. For example in project one, since I wasn’t very familiar with these terms, I didn’t elaborate much on them. I wrote “This ad effectively displays the use of ethos as a rhetorical strategy. The people in the ad are not much different from the audience with respect to age and social situation which makes them relatable to the audience.” This was the only rhetorical appeal I mentioned in the whole essay and did so in a single sentence. In project two, I can see improvement because I dedicated two separate paragraphs explaining the use of logos and ethos developed by the author. Learning these rhetorical strategies is beneficial to me because I can now analyze texts, movies, and ads in ways that I wouldn’t have been able to before.
Mass media and its audience have quite a complex relationship. In fact, it can be even considered unhealthy. The media has control over its audience through use of strategy, deceit, and persuasion. In Braindead Megaphone, author George Saunders discusses the reality that we face with the mass media, which he refers to as the “brain-dead men with megaphones.” He claims that our nation had “dumbed-down” to such an extent that, when faced with post 9-11 times, we were unable to clearly judge the morality of the situation that we were getting into, namely the War on Iraq. News of the war suddenly appeared all over the media and this was the part when truth and rhetoric began to clash. The use of good or bad rhetoric has significant consequences on society. During the time of War on Iraq, the message that the powerful brain-dead men relayed with their megaphones was far different from what truth and moral judgments would have suggested. In response, the audience was swayed by the media’s words and fell into the pit of stupidity. This would be a form of “bad” rhetoric. Illogical reasoning was fed to the nation through the use of media and created an essentially irresponsible war. In Braindead Megaphone, Saunders says,
“Our venture in Iraq was literally a failure, by which I mean a failure of imagination. A culture better at imagining richly, three-dimensionally, would have had a greater respect for war than we did, more awareness f the law of unintended consequences, more familiarity with the world’s tendency to throw aggressive energy back at the aggressor in ways he did not expect.”
Thus, our nation’s use of bad rhetoric ultimately threw us into recession.
It is said that a true rhetorician does not need to be well-educated on the matter at hand; rather, he simply needs to know how to effectively manipulate people’s thoughts with words. In this sense, truth doesn’t necessarily matter. Rhetoric fully lies in persuasion skills. Perhaps that’s the reason our nation got away with the catastrophic war with the nation’s support. From this, we can conclude that our media is a true rhetorician. So how about putting those skills to good use? Here’s an idea – let’s try to analyze matters responsibly, humanely, and intelligently before presenting it to the rest of the nation. That way, we might be able to create a just nation.
Coming into the course, I was not very familiar with the term “rhetoric.” Our first readings on rhetoric were quite confusing for me to understand. However, with continuous analysis of the different uses of rhetoric from there on out, I was able to see how it is applied and how to apply it myself in everyday life through media, books, and various arguments.
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