Blog post 2 English composition

 
                                                                     Issue 2

In the second issue of this book it primarily focused on the working of Frederick Douglas. Douglas is a man who escaped slavery wrote about the state of the country and his life. In the comic they analyzed his work into four category's writing style, imagery, implicit message, and ethos.

His writing style would involve him using certain words to get a point across. In the comic they quote his book quite a bit and break down what he is saying. When they put up a quote from his book that read " It was a moment of the highest excitement I ever experienced." they pointed out why he said highest instead of a similar word like greatest. The reason being it "evokes an elevation in status" he was a slave and now he is free which gives him new heights in possibilities. Imagery is something you see very often in his writing and can also be seen in the other examples for other analytic devices. Instead of saying he was lucky to escaped slavery he said "I said i felt like one who had escaped a den of hungry lions." this makes the text much more interesting and still tells you the same information without having to be so direct and plain. An example that works well for implicit message and imagery is when he compares the men who try to capture black people and sell them into slavery " as the ferocious beasts of the forest lie in the wait for their prey."  the imagery is comparing them to animals which put a picture of these men in your head and the implicit message is slaves were also seen as animals and he was doing the opposite and comparing them to animals. He used ethos because he was a person who people wanted to hear from on topics. It is stated in the book that he was "concerned with his authority as a speaker" and he was asked by many on how he felt to be free in New York. with all of these things put together you are able to interpret the text much better than before and you can construct arguments to support his stance among other things. They also talk about how when you break apart a text and put it back together with our own ideas we have something called synthesis. Synthesis goes hand in hand with Analysis. In regard to Fredrick Douglas we can use analysis to breakdown his text in multiple ways but when you combine it with synthesis you start using more than one source. It is said that his book has more than one edition so you would have to scan each copy and synthesize them. Illustration also play a part in synthesis, in his first edition of his book the picture of him drawn did not portray him in a away he preferred. In a later edition he got a new picture that was actually complete and more professional and he looked much more confident.  

Blog Post 1 English Compostion

In the introduction of the book it is giving us a comic book type style and is breaking the fourth wall to tell u about some concepts. Since it is in the title this is mostly about rhetoric and in the comic it says "Our primary goal is to help you think about how writing occurs in different situations, in different forms, and in different spaces." It brings up stuff like how much you are being fed information using rhetoric without you even realizing. Also how your own personal opinion has way of being spread out to others threw like text messages or what you post online. In that they talk about how you can be misinterpreted and their job is to help you become a more effective communicator. They talk about how writing your ideas down and thinking things threw before you say them like a rough draft can be beneficial to helping you get your point across. The way thing look can also play a part in that like logos for a company like the = sign used for the LGBTQ.

What is talked about in issue one is what we talked about in class. It starts off with pointing out how rhetoric is all around us in our day to day lives. The News, Politician, and Commercials are all guilty of this. Than it takes a step back and talks about the history of rhetoric while talking about historical figures like Plato and Aristotle. Plato believing that if people taught rhetoric to everybody we would become a society that lies instead of telling the truth and Aristotle believed that day to day things like plays could have rhetoric in them to help people become more empathetic. Than it jumps into Ethos, Pathos, Logos and Kairos. Ethos using important people to persuade people. An example of this was when I was looking at an HIV testing video (not the one in class) and it had Magic Johnson to show the importance of it. It worked because he was the best NBA player of his time and his career was cut short when it was stated by him in an interview that he had HIV which shocked the world at the time. Pathos to use people’s emotions, In the same video it had people speak about how they did not get tested for HIV early enough and because of that they went into the next stage of HIV which is called AIDS which is essentially a death sentence unlike HIV. Logos to give facts, the video gave crazy statistics on the subject and how much your chances of getting aids increases if you don’t get tested early enough or the benefits of using protection so you don’t get HIV to begin with. Lastly you use Kairos and this is when you use time or an event to use rhetoric. The video I watched was a little older and talked about how much not wearing protection effected how badly the aids epidemic was. When you mention that point it makes people remember how scary of a time that was and makes them want to get tested.