Persuasion & Argument

A lot of this reading reminded me of Discourse and Discourse theory and so I was able to make a lot of connections because of that. For example, Ramage discussed that in order to persuade the audience, the writer has to mediate to their values, beliefs, ways of thinking, ways of doing etc. 

For a quick rundown, Discourse is a particular label that people identify with based on their values. The people who all fit under that label are a part of a discourse community. In order to be a part of a discourse community, they must share ways of thinking/ways of acting/value systems/beliefs/language usages etc depending on who they are and who they are interacting with. For example, I’d say this ENGL 450 class is a Discourse because we all value rhetoric to some degree, use words that have the same meaning to each other and we have a better grasp of what some phrases mean than some people who are not in the class such as “synthesis paper” and “canons of rhetoric.”

So, when I read things like relativism that say that it is impossible to talk to the audience without including some of their values within what we write, all I can see is Discourse Theory.  Pluralism also hinted at Discourse theory because it mentioned identity. One of things I found different in that inclusion of identity is that in order to persuade the audience, you must be able to identify with them first. I didn’t actually think about that before, but I feel like it makes sense. … Even if you are not a part of someone’s discourse community, you still have to find some way to connect with the person you’re writing to otherwise they may not be able to find what you have to say as credible, logical or emotionally sound.

In addition to identity, I also found the differences between propaganda and literature regarding persuasion to be interesting. It mentioned that coercion, which is a part of propaganda, is selfish because the writer attempts to persuades in order to meet their own needs/goals rather than including the audience’s best interests at heart. I didn’t actually think of persuasion in terms of categories. I just assumed that persuasion enticed the audience to act in the way that writer wants them to.

However, now as I think about it more: Can any persuasion not be deceptive? Is any of it straight forward? I guess I was thinking of my analysis endeavors like my capstone project for over this article and how the writers have used credibility in seemingly deceiving ways. Or perhaps that’s just my interpretation because that article was relying heavily on credibility to make their argument.

But in terms of literature, I wonder if straightforward is doing stuff such as including examples that actually relate with their topic instead of using semi-related examples to support their argument. Not only does literature use things like examples to be more credible with their claims, but because they are looking to spread knowledge between themselves and their audience, is that what determines “good?” Is being coercive what “bad rhetoric” looks like?

To be more precise with my previous paragraph, does good & bad rhetoric mean propaganda vs. literature in the rhetorical lens? Would Adolf Hitler be using “bad rhetoric” when he was trying to persuade people with his speech, then?

I still like to connect intention with what determines whether rhetoric is good or bad and so I feel like Hitler’s rhetoric can be good from his perspective, but in terms of the rhetorical lens, I wonder if his rhetorical usage would be an example of “bad rhetoric.”

Lemme just take a detour here and wonder about when a person acts as result of being persuaded: Does each action come as a result of a value/knowledge change? Can we be motivated to act without changing our opinions/views? I was thinking we can because, for example, if we see a poster about a car we really wanted and we go out and buy it, are we being persuaded? If the purpose was the remind us to do something, does that count as an argument and as an act as persuasion?

In terms of argument:

The discussion of premise was familiar to me because of my psychological statics class from a couple semesters ago. However, I had not thought about the stasis approach or defining the problem and determining the ethics behind the problem/reason before, but I found them to be interesting.

In class today I liked how we defined argument as “motive.” By defining it as “motive,” it made me want to connect it to “purpose” in which made me want to connect it to values. To be honest, I previously thought argument was just a statement that came as a product of our goals. However, as I think about it more depth, I think that our argument is constructed on the foundation of our values.

In class, I got a better idea of something: We discussed how an argument made with a “value judgement” wouldn’t win over an audience that that wanted opinions on parking. However, I think what we were getting at is that how we word our argument is dependent on who our audience is. I totally believe that we can’t remove pathos from our argument because then we’d be removing our motivation from constructing the argument to begin with. However, how we form the sentence of our argument is dependent on how our audience will interpret it and whether or not that interpretation will make them happy or sad.

Basically, I think that an argument’s idea not only was brought into existence from our values, but its outer appearance (sentence structure) depends on who our audience is, the situation and what our audience values within that particular situation.

P.S. Fellow group members, I just wanted to reiterate that Ashton has the first blog post for Monday (3/30) by 5 pm this upcoming week. :)

Project Proposal!

As most of you know, I started out with the idea of analyzing how the relationship between the maker and his/her object influences the relationship that the object has on its audience. While I think it's an interesting question that is worth investing research in, my brain hasn't generated a feasible way to approach this....maybe I'll utilize some aspect of that question in analyzing our class readings for the synthesis project. We'll see, but for this project, I have decided to ditch it :/

However! My brain did redeem itself by generating a new idea...one that I haven't really fine tuned the details or even the focus of my question, but I believe I have a solid starting point. My new idea: how does rap and spoken word poetry rhetorically and effectively integrate the balance of the logic and emotional binaries in the creation of their performative art? I know that there has been a preexisting debate on whether rap and spoken word poetry can be considered poetry and I know, at least the last that I've heard, it does. I think that the main difference it has from from written poetry, besides the fact that it is read aloud and presented differently, is that rap and spoken word artists are trying to create a successful relationship between integrating the emotional pull that poetry has and logically structuring it for an audience's engagement. To me, rap and spoken word seem more rhetorical in that they consider their audience more, in their writing processes, than most (not all, of coarse) written poetry. Rap and spoken word focuses more on performance while written poetry focuses on emotional reflection. I realize that other elements contribute to both forms of poetry like sound, tone, presentation, etc. and that these elements differ in rap/spoken word and written poetry and I would like to invest in that more. However, I'm primarily interested in the writing construction and process of these forms of poetry and how writers of both forms play around with the relationship between the binaries that we have thoroughly discussed in class.

I'm interested in this topic because I grew up in a very pious religious community that, to say this nicely, overlooked rap as art. I grew up calling it "rap crap" until I discovered a Christian rap artist (my church would probably consider this as a paradox) named Lecrae. His lyrics and the way that he performed them spoke more to me than any hymn or poem or really any creative genre ever did. I had an epiphany that I enjoy rap crap and that I and many people I know overlook it as art and especially as rhetorical art. For spoken word poems, I think they share a lot of similar features that rap shares in that their construction contains strong performative influences. I like written poems but rap and spoken word poems have always engaged and spoken to me more, yet their genres are overlooked in much of academia (I think it would be so sweet to have a rhetorical rap class....right??...maybe one day). Rap/spoken words are becoming more popular and I think that in analyzing, teaching, and considering them as rhetorical art, it could reshape traditional ideologies of what genres rhetoric can be. Before this class and my Digital Rhetorics class, I limited rhetoric to the academic field and I think that is a lot of people's first impressions of what rhetoric is. By showing that rhetoric also appears in genres that are more prevalent to audiences outside of the academic/writing comp. world, maybe more people would be interested in the topic of rhetoric and try to apply it to other forms of art.

How to approach this? Excellent question. I obviously want to research how much this topic has been discussed and what those discussions are. If I can, I want to interview some spoken word/rap artists about how they compose their poetry and how the fact that they know that they are physically performing it for an audience changes what they write. I also want to know how much of the emotional binary they integrate into their writing. I would also like to analyze poems written as rap/spoken word versus poems that are not and try to find reoccurring themes in their differences and similarities. I'm still trying to fine tune my methodology of this proposal but these are my ideas thus far.  Let me know what you think!

Truths in Narratives

In class we said that experience shapes values, while this book discussed that you can’t run from your identities/values and be truly happy in your choice to do so. I think that coming into contact with other narratives (which includes identities and values) shapes how you perceive the world and what you choose to believe in as a truth.  

In reference to Ashton’s second paragraph where she discussed the quotes briefly, my take on those quotes is that Dorothy had to tell herself the stories in dark situations in order to make herself believe them because those stories were also constructed based on her values to find happiness. By believing in those fictitious stories, she was able to take a lens that contradicted her situation with her father. She was able to believe in the truth that everything in her situation would be okay. And by believing in the truth she constructed, she was able to not crumble, but to find hope and a reason to move forward with her life. In essence, I believe that values that are shaped by our experiences can help to construct our narratives/stories regarding what we see and experience within our lives.   

Because the “truth” is constructed based on our values, narratives and experiences, I believe that it along with “objectivity" are both subjective and it makes me think of a quote my high school teacher told my class many years ago “if something is true to you, then it’s true and that’s all that matters.” This is where I wish to rant about Socrates. Even though he thought he was being logical/rational, he was still very much driven by pathos because he believed so strongly in his point of view. He failed to recognize that the “truth” he held on to so much was constructed based on his narrative’s interaction with other narratives. He failed to understand that his view was subjective because he held so strongly to his values and because he followed those lines of rhetoric like everyone else, he was still doing rhetoric, whether he cared to admit it or not.   

And I think I touched on this in my blog post in Digital Rhetorics with regards to Gorgias, but I did not like how closed-minded and arrogant Socrates came off to me. I disliked that he tried to “prove” he was right without listening/understanding the other side. I felt in that if he tried to understand the rhetorical point of view, he might have been able to bridge the gap a little bit more between him and the non-philosophical people.

Ramage made me see that in order to persuade the audience, you must be willing to befriend the audience and thus earn their trust. I feel like if Socrates or the other group wanted to get their argument across in a moment of persuasion, they needed to try to be open-minded to the other group’s ways of thinking and ways of communicating. If he was able to do that, then maybe he could try to lead them subtly into his way of thinking.

And something else that I also thought about after reading Dorothy’s text is that in order to persuade someone else, you must persuade yourself of the same thing. If you are not passionate or have faith in what you are saying or doing, then how can anyone else feel the same way? Perhaps believing in your own words and actions can give credibility to the audience as well.

I’m too tired in this instance to look for the specific page in Ramage that goes with the motorcycle example you posed, but Jared, I wonder if you felt like Ramage was being too stereotypical. If that’s the case, I respectfully disagree. I feel like he was describing situations in terms of how people see and experience their situations in which end up being dictated by their own values and the values of the people they come in contact with. That contact creates a structurally built in relationship with one another. In other words, the parties in a given situation know what happens and understand the language in those relationships/situations because they personally experience those relationships.

To elaborate further, the given identity that Ramage posed can be where when you’re in a friendship with a friend, you take up roles/actions/beliefs/interpretations that are characteristics of a friendship such as spending time together and doing things that you both enjoy. For the ready-made identity environment, you behave/interpret/think a certain way because of the rules/roles of the environment that you’re in such as a classroom setting because you end up taking up the roles of a student and teacher.

Stereotypes, however, are expectations/judgments people place on the situations that they themselves are not a part of. For example, some people may think that adolescents rebel against their parents at any given instant. However, this is a stereotype because what the outside parties believe do not necessarily align with the values within the parent & adolescent narrative/perspective.

Lastly, I’d like to say that I think it’s interesting how the identities that Ramage poses and the concepts of narratives remind me of values and the characteristics within a given Discourse. I suppose I should try to clear my understanding of how I know it thus far. I believe a Discourse revolves around the interactions & understandings between people in a given situation, identities are who we are in a given situation (and/or Discourse) in which allows us to understand how things are interpreted relative to our situation and lastly, a narrative is the lens we have that is comprised of both identities and Discourses.

... At least that's my interpretation of everything. I do not mean to convey a tone of authority (or a tone that suggests that I know everything). I just wanted to make that clear :).

Project Proposal- Montanan Drag Queens as Rhetoric

With the art of drag being pushed further and further into the mainstream through increased exposure in the media, there are still misconceptions and miscommunications about what drag is and what it aims to communicate. As Montana is still rather conservative, the rhetoric of drag is often misunderstood or altogether dismissed. I aim to bring clarity to an underrepresented community, and analyze the rhetoric of drag and drag performance.

I have a few core research questions in mind, and I expect them to evolve as the project moves forward.
1.What rhetoric is occurring between Montanan drag performers and their audience?
2.What messages are Montanan drag performers trying to send and is that message successful?
3.How does performance fit into rhetorical theory?

As a performer myself, I will be drawing on my own experience as well as interviewing drag queens from across Montana. I am expecting this to be a multi-media project, and the work will ideally take the form of film, photography, and writing. This is contingent on how the photography and film aspects of the project pan out, and on availability of performers to interview.

Truth and Power in narratives, and being a little hateful towards Ramage again. Less hateful, but still hateful.

From the discussion in class today, It sounded like most of us felt the same way about Allison's story. In light of how horrific the events that she went through are, I think we were quick to accept her truth, even though early in her story she says

"You believe me? I'm a storyteller. I'll work to make you believe me. Throw in some real stuff, change a few details, add the certainty of outrage. I know the use of fiction in a world of hard truth, the way fiction can be a harder piece of truth. The story of what happened, or what did not happen but should have-that story can be- come a curtain drawn shut, a piece of insulation, a disguise, a razor, a tool that changes every time it is used and sometimes becomes something other than we intended. The story becomes the thing needed".


So is this a true story? My guess is that it is, well... mostly. It seems like from the beginning she is offering up a disclaimer that things perhaps didn't happen exactly as she says. However, she also goes on about how nobody believed her rape, so maybe rather than writing a disclaimer, she is instead daring us to question her truth. But, I also wonder if perhaps the disclaimer is a way of protecting herself. She's used to people's disbelief, as she says the only person who believed her rape was her own mother. Regardless if her story is completely true, or half true, or altogether false, her story is completely believable. Why is that?

I think a big part of why we accept her truth so easily is the gravity of her story. Rape from an adult man to a child is unthinkable, vile, and horrific. It's a heavy topic. My assumption here is that because this story is so fucked up and sad, that we'd all be more fucked up to disbelieve her. It's a safer bet to believe these kinds of stories, because to deny someone's truth, especially when that truth is so dark, well, we'd be no better than Allison's Aunt who thought a five year old was "mistaken" about her rape. My guess (and I may be going out on a limb here) is that if her story was a positive one, we'd feel immensely more comfortable questioning it.

In you're conclusion Allison, you said something that struck me as odd. You said that "narratives are powerful when the author deeply identifies with his/her personal story". What personal story could an author not identify with? I'm trying to come up with a good example of such a story, but every time I start thinking of story from my past, I can bring myself right back into that memory, and identify with that 13 year old pock-marked face and bad haircut. Personally, I think a powerful narrative doesn't even need to be true, rather, I think it requires emotion and relatability. There are so many books that I have felt deeply affected by, and at least half of them are fictitious. To give the most relatable example, I began reading the Harry Potter series at a point in my childhood where I had no friends, felt disconnected from my family, and was bullied regular at school. Check, check, and check. Harry was just another awkward kid like I was, and his magical world where anything was possible and everyone adored him was greatly appealing. So for me, powerful narratives, can work as fiction and non-fiction.

I also wanted to touch on Ramage in his discussion of identity. I'm surprisingly starting to like him a bit more, but I still have to resist the urge to not nitpick him, because I think he makes ignorant statements sometimes, or maybe it's that he comes off sounding so pretentious, that I constantly want to knock him down a peg or two. His example of having a sex change to alter his identity had me a little peeved for transgendered people everywhere. It was mainly the statement that his "desire to change his sex would be strongly influenced by prevailing readymade models of gender". He's not all wrong, but having several transgendered friends makes me lash out at that statement. I just think it's a bad example for his argument. Transgendered people are influenced by the current social constructs of gender as much as the rest of us, but I don't think that's where the desire comes from. Gender identity is very innate, and trans people typically have felt stuck in the wrong body their entire lives. I guess I felt like he used this example in a mocking and ignorant way. WOW. So much for me not ranting.

Ramage DOES however, have some excellent examples on the subject of identity. My absolute favorite being the middle-aged, upper class, biker guy (I'm sure they're all offended at Ramage like I was about my trans buddies....). His point about those men basically wearing a costume that's influenced by the media and social constructs actually felt spot on for me. I've known many middle aged men that had zero "biker attitude" but still put on the leather and drive around acting "tough". The only critique I have about this example, is he does put bikers into a box, and then explain's how they typically become bikers out of a socially constructed view of masculinity. I've driven motorcycles with my family since I was a kid, and we all just did it for fun. No leather required. He get's a pass on that a bit, because his argument does center around that stereotype, so the result was a bit inevitable.

On the subject of how appearances affect our identity, I've always found a quote by RuPaul to be deeply insightful. He famously says "we're all born naked, and the rest is drag". Now He doesn't mean that everyone is a drag queen, but rather that in a sense, we all wear costumes every day. We communicate something about ourselves with every t-shirt and jeans, or jeggings and tube top we put on. Typically we're saying "This is me. This is what I want to be perceived as today" or on our sweatpants no shower days we may be saying "I can't be bothered to give any fucks today". DRAG is an acronym for dressing resembling a girl, and the point is that we are always dressing to resemble something, or some kind of person, and that image we create out of ourselves, is inherently tied to how we view the identity of each other.

#ENDRAMBLINGRANT

Project Proposal

Research Question:
Are there common sound patterns and arrangements within songs of the 1980s hard rock genre and why do those arrangements strike positive emotions from the target audience?

I feel like this research question will ultimately focus on values the hard rock genre Discourse and what about those arrangements strike positive/happy emotions out of the reader.

(Side note, I'll be using my ears for the analysis -- I won't be reading anything)

Interest:
When I first began this project, I focused primarily on academic and recreational interests. I really enjoy Discourse/discourse and I find the link between values and pathos to be interesting. I suppose in general I’d like to know if there are any commonalities between how the songs of a specific 80s genre are arranged when I hear them. I haven’t given it much thought to be honest – I just listen to the songs that I like, but I wonder if maybe there is a pattern within the songs somewhere. … I think that could be fun and cool to find out.

I suppose it’s a given that the songs within a genre should sound alike in specific ways, but some songs are a combination of different genres (at least Wikipedia says so) and so I think it would be interesting to see if there are common sounds among songs that may or may not be a combination of hard rock and another genre. I feel like maybe I could use those commonalities to piece together what a hard rock genre may sound like.

This may interest my audience because maybe it could help them understand why they listen to the songs that they do. Maybe they’ll realize that there could be patterns and similarities among the songs that they like. Maybe they'll understand more about any potential reasons for why they listen to what they listen.

Plan:
I plan to read up on Discourse Theory, read some articles that focus on values, maybe articles that focus rhetorically on values within music, read articles that focus on the rhetorical composition of music, read background material on my topic and collect/analyze about 40 songs within the 80s hard rock genre. I may read background material and mentoring material before I analyze because what I read could shape my interpretations of what I find, but I'm not sure right now. I feel like this is pretty vague for a plan, but I'm not sure how else to go about it right now -- I apologize.

I don’t know how I’ll present this …. I think it may just be easier to write a paper, but I’m curious about a video too. How long would my video be? Would it be about an hour or two? I really like the idea of a video because I think it could be fun, but I don’t know how to work with windows movie maker. I guess I can explore with it over break. … Maybe I’ll wind up doing a paper. I guess we’ll see. :).  

Blog Post....Narrative and Identity

Well...it looks as if our assigned blogger didn't meet the deadline this week so I'm going to jump in!

Doug's prompt is asking about the relationship between story, narrative, identity, identification, and believability. Dorothy Allison's narrative is very deep and beautifully poetic, and honestly, I'm not sure I understand all of the poetic images/devices she creates but, the more I reread her narrative, the more I understand in piecing together her story with her images (still some parts I'm unclear about). After I read Allison's narrative, I think my first question I needed to answer  was who she was intentionally writing to and what she was writing for.

 Allison starts her narrative by saying that it's her goal as a storyteller is to make her audience believe her story...which makes her writing seem rhetorical in that she is writing for an audience...and it's also published for an audience. However, repeatedly through her narrative, she claims she is writing for herself. On page 450, she tells the story of the last time her stepfather beat her on her sixteenth birthday and how she stood up to him. "It was a story to tell myself, a promise. Saying out loud, 'You're never going to touch me again'...I have told myself that story, the story about a girl who stood up to a monster. Doing that, I make a piece of magic inside of myself, magic to use against the meanness in the world." She claims that she tells herself her story to survive...to me, "surviving" in Allison's context is overcoming being "deeply broken, incapable of love or trust or passion" (450). She is also writing her narrative, this painful and difficult event that is hard to share, for emotional healing. She is also telling her story to disprove the one the world wants to hear, "I tell my stories louder all the time: mean and ugly stories; funny, almost bitter stories; passionate, desperate stories--all of them have to be told in order not to tell the one the world wants" (451). To me, she is saying that her narrative needs to be told to bring her experience of truth to a world of narratives that are not her own. She claims on page 415, that, "I am the only one who can tell the story of my life and say what it means." So maybe she is writing her narrative for the sake of her subjectivity in her narrative (she is the only one who knows and understands her experience)  to the other narratives that are not hers?

At the beginning of her narrative, she paints the picture of her telling her story to her sisters. It seems that Allison's family the women have had a tradition of physical, sexual, verbal, and emotional abuse by the men.While Allison is writing for emotional healing, it also seems that she is telling her story to an audience to prove that rape and abuse happens wayyy more than it should (it shouldn't happen at all) and it should not be ignored. It also seems to be told for women, like her sisters, who have been through rape and abuse. Allison's narrative is vulnerable. She is opening up her past to her audience for healing, truth, and clarity. I think that such a narrative encourages others, who have the same hurt, to do the same and start the healing process.

I think one of the primary reasons that Allison's story is so powerful is that she is so vulnerable. She's being vulnerable in retelling her stories to herself, women who endured abuse, and an audience that has not. Her story is huge on pathos in that she tells events of her story in how they happened and how the confusion of her emotions was a part of her narrative. Her story is one of how she overcame. Her story is one that offers the chance for our stories to relate/identify. Even if one hasn't been through abuse, I think pretty much everyone has been in a painful situation that seems difficult to overcome and that our stories can relate to hers because of those situations that we have been in. 

I was thinking as I read Allison's story, of how it blended the binaries that we have been talking about in class in a powerful way. Allison's work is telling a story for the sake of an argument to herself and her audience that she overcame and others can overcome. She makes her argument in a logical way...it is beautifully and thematically structured and she uses her emotional experiences of her narrative to prove her argument. I think people relate to personal experiences more than facts....that's why testimonials are a powerful rhetorical tool. Anyways, how she tells her emotional story is based on the logic of her storytelling and how her story makes sense to her.

I'm not really sure if I answered your question or if I just started to because this blog post seems to be everywhere. I think my main point is this: narratives are powerful when the author deeply identifies with his/her personal story (this creates vulnerability and an emotional identification between author-text) because this identification is one that encourages readers to identify with the text as well. Allison writes so connected to her narrative because she is sharing her identity to her audience....this connection, at least for me, encourages the identity of my narrative to relate my story to hers.