Using Music to Teach Ethos
Introduction
After teaching high school English reading and writing for four years, life led me to apply for a position teaching English at a state university. I was hired as an adjunct faculty member, but in my eyes, I was basically a utility man in the Major Leagues. The brief hour-long meeting with the adjunct coordinator was my first exposure to rhetoric and anything related to it. I knew what a rhetorical question was—don’t we all?—and I had heard people make comments such as “He might think he knows what he’s doing, but in all reality, his talk is all rhetoric.” Still, did I know how to teach this stuff to other people? On the college level? I sat down with the information the coordinator had given me and I found many helpful hints, ideas, and terms. I love terms. If I am given a list of terms, I can often use the definitions to find the common links and make the material teachable. I did an online search and found a Web site that broke down the various elements of rhetoric and included a list of terms. I was in heaven, rhetorically speaking.
This first exposure to rhetoric was, I must admit, dull and dreary, much like Latin seemed to be where I used to teach. Dead languages, dead concepts—were the Ancient cultures good for anything other than art, stories, language, and great food? I decided that this seemingly dry material would have to be souped up a bit to attract college freshmen whose attention spans run between 10 and 15 minutes. Then, as Red Skelton might say, I had an apostrophe. I realized that the compositions my students write are comprised of sections, each an entity unto itself which contributes something to the overall essay. I remembered my senior year at UGA, taking “History and Analysis of Rock and Roll Music,” and the lessons we learned about the different sections of a song and how those sections are merged to create one complete unit. After reading a bit more about rhetorical appeals—ethical, logical, and emotional—I realized that the songs we listen to every day can be linked to this previously unknown, dry material.
Writers use rhetoric to communicate their specific point of view or argument in a speech or text. A reader analyzes the writer’s use of rhetoric to evaluate the effectiveness of the given argument or point of view. In his “Interfaith Prayer Vigil Address,” President Barack Obama argues the need for more restricted gun control by using emotional appeals to compassion and paternalism, collective diction, and structure, which reflect the influence of a school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.
Rhetoric is the art of effective or persuasive speaking or writing, and its uses the figures of speech and other compositional techniques. It’s designed to have a persuasive or impressive effect on its audience.
The author begins his argument by retelling the story of his youth to build his ethos but the results are poor as it presents more questions on how he is a credible source on this argument as his only evidence is his own story. However, through the same means his pathos is built as his anecdote conveys feelings in the audience, making them more willing to listen. Graff finally, gives a call to action to schools to use students’ interests to develop their skills in rhetoric and analysis, which reveals the logic behind his argument. The topic about how students are taught rhetoric and analysis brings interest but with an average argument only built on pathos, a low amount of logos, and questionable ethos it can fall on deaf
Ethos: The credibility of Anti-Flag, as of right now, is growing enormously. All the other punk bands look to these guys and marvel at how much they are defending their beliefs. For example, a person is watching his or her favorite band play and he or she begins to talk of how great Anti-Flag is. Immediately one could pick up on that and want to get to know more about Anti-Flag. It is a chain reaction of learning about other bands through bands that he or she already knows. If Anti-Flag are respected by bands that were the original punk-rockers such as Bad Religion, NOFX, and The Clash, then they will be admitted into the fan base of such bands. As long as a band can get a well known band to show favor, the band will be more accepted by the fan-base community. This is ironic because the band does not have to make good music as long as a respected band likes them.
The impact and effectiveness of using proper rhetoric was a strategy of “good” writing that I was not aware of until my senior year of high school. While taking AP Language and Composition my junior year, my fellow students and I believed that we had survived countless essay workshop activities and writing assignments with emphasis on word choices, grammatical structure, syntax, punctuation and spelling. By the time we had entered AP Literature our senior year, we felt we could achieve success; we already knew how to write in the correct format and structur...
Sadlier, Rosemary. "Harriet Tubman." In Leading the way: Black women in Canada. Toronto: Umbrella Press, 1994.
“40th Anniversary of the All-Volunteer Force (ARMY).” Stand-To: The Official Focus of the U.S. Army. Stand-To! Edition. July 1, 2013. army.mil. n. pag. Web. 1 April 2014.
Clark (2016) suggests that rhetoric isn’t limited to oral communication, but currently has a permanent foothold in written works: magazine or newspaper excerpts, novels, and scientific reports. Not only written
Numerous are mindful of the considerable deed that Harriet Tubman executed to free slaves in the south. Then again, individuals are still left considerably unaware about in which the way they were safeguarded and how she triumphed each and every deterrent while placing her life at risk of being captured. She is deserving of the great honor she has garnered by todays general society and you will find out her in the biography. The title of this biography is “Harriet Tubman, the Road to Freedom.” The author of this piece is Catherine Clinton. ”Harriet Tubman, the road to Freedom” is a charming, instructive, and captivating book that history appreciates and is a memoir than readers will cherish. The Target audience of the biography is any readers
For the first part of this paper you need some background on how the draft worked throughout our history (as Americans), and how it was socially perceived amongst the citizen of this great nation. For more than fifty years now we have had a peacetime military draft. "President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 which created the country's first peacetime draft and formally established the Selective Service System" (about.com). We have been very lucky that the military draft has only been used twice now, once for W...
Women in History. Harriet Tubman biography. Lakewood Public Library, 20 Oct. 2009. Web. 6 Dec. 2009.
Harriet Tubman (known as Araminta at the time) was born into slavery in Dorchester County, Maryland in 1819. Like many other slaves she was raised in extremely poor and harsh conditions. She was whipped and beaten from very early on in her childhood. Before she was considered old enough to work she spent her childhood with her grandmother who was too old for slave labour since her parents were always put to work and couldn’t take care of her. When she was put to work at age six she did not tend to the fields like the majority of slaves commonly did, her master lent her to neighbouring families to work doing chores like basket weaving. She was moved around a bit for work due to her being disobedient or stealing al resulting in beating or whippings. At age 11 she was considered to no longer be a child and she lost her “basket name” and was then named Harriet after her mother. Not long after she suffered severe head trauma inflicted from a white overseer after assisting a runaway slave. She suffered black outs and migraines for the rest of her life due to this incident....
Harriet Tubman’s whole life story demonstrates her humanity, not just toward her family members, but also towards her community people. The problem is to present this philanthropic lady in a manner that honors her extraordinary work within the ordinary circumstances of her life. After all the research it can be said that she has achieved her objectives with a coolness, prescience, tolerance, and intelligence. Moreover, it is astonishing that how did an imprisoned female who was never been educated to read or write, discover nobility, determination and integrity inside slavery and how she was capable of frequently and so efficiently outthink and outsmart her persecutors?
Rhetoric is the art of effective speaking or writing, and persuasion. Most people use rhetoric numerous of times in their everyday life without their concern or knowing.
Shea, Renee, Lawrence Scanlon, and Robin Scanlon. The Language of Composition: Reading, Writing, Rhetoric. 2nd ed. Boston: Bedford St. Martins, 2013. 525-529,546-551. Print.