Essay: Nature of rhetorical analysis

What is Carroll saying about the nature of rhetorical analysis? How do the fundamentals of rhetorical analysis figure into your life, both as a student and as a citizen? Describe a pair of specific examples in which these concepts might play (or have played) a role in your participation in those areas.

Using at least one citation from Carroll’s essay, comment on the role of context in framing contemporary arguments. Is there enough contextual background on news stories, speeches, advertisements, and other areas of rhetoric in today’s digital information culture? How does the Washington Post’s proposed feature of the “Knowledge Map” (noted in the Shan Wang article) enrich the contemporary news environment.

Finally, in the second half of your essay, explain to your classmates the general features of your research argument. Using the taxonomies of reflection in the previous section as a guide, answer the following questions in your final four paragraphs:

What did you learn about your topic that you didn’t already know or that was surprising to you?

What is an area that you would like to improve upon as a writer moving forward, and which aspect of your research argument are you most proud of?

Finally, how do you see the subject of your research argument changing over the course of the next ten years? Where will it be in a decade’s time?

Discussion 1:

Rhetorical analysis is seen in everyday life whether we notice it or not, and media is a perfect example of this. Media is where we see it the most, on television, in movies and even in music it is all laid out there for us. Carroll mentions this when she states ”Media is one of the most important places where this kind of analysis needs to happen. Rhetoric—the way we use language and images to persuade—is what makes media work”. And I agree her, because with the rise of social media such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram as Carroll mentioned ”media is constantly asking you to buy something, act in some way, believe something to be true, or interact with others in a specific manner. Understanding rhetorical messages is essential to helping us to become informed consumers, but it also helps evaluate the ethics of messages, how they affect us personally, and how they affect society”. In an indirect way she is saying that with so much information out there due to media there is no reason to automatically take something at face value, for example, in the Axe body spray commercial for men it is understood that if a man sprays Axe body spray that women will be all over him. However, with research it is easy to discover that it is not scientifically proven that any form of pheromones has any effect on humans sexually, according to George Preti of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, researchers as well as fragrance companies have been hoping to find a human sex pheromone for decades, but so far, the search has failed. Essay: Nature of rhetorical analysis

However, I do believe Carroll is valid in her ideals about rhetorical analysis, she has some of the same ideals as me. In her reference to media, she is saying that the nature of rhetorical analysis is that the media is using it to push certain ideals to consumers, for example in Carroll’s essay she used a deodorant commercial that perfectly sums this up. In the example Carroll used she stated, ”in a commercial for men’s deodorant that tells you that you’ll be irresistible to women if you use their product. This campaign does not just ask you to buy the product, though. It also asks you to trust the company’s credibility, or ethos, and to believe the messages they send about how people interact, about sexuality, and about what constitutes a healthy body. You must decide whether you will choose to buy the product and how you will choose to respond to the messages that the commercial sends”. With the internet being so accessible though, as a consumer we have the power, and we can discern what the facts are and what is fiction. Propaganda is so easy to believe, but we have to be smart consumers, do our research, and understand context.

After I read that pheromones are not actually scientifically proven yet, it made me think about how rhetorical analysis figure into my life, I have been in stores and saw advertisements for lotions that contain pheromones to attract people, but it is all propaganda. Science says otherwise, and the only thing that can disprove science is science, so I completely understand what Carroll what is saying about the media being the biggest contributor and the biggest influence. Another example of this is what I call student propaganda, it is how students are told through their school career that college is the path to success, but that is not true according to research, in the times we are living in college is not needed to be successful. (The numbers show that 50% of students who start a bachelor’s degree never finish. And the average student loan debt for students in America is $30,000, college degrees are becoming more expensive each year. You must effectively mortgage your life to pay the price of a certificate, and the return on investment for these college degrees is often much below the burden of debt acquired. A college degree will not guarantee you a high-paying job, and it will not even make you a skilled leader with a shot at the corner office. Developing skills such as leadership, decision making, people and resource management takes real practice and experience. These are skills which cannot be acquired in the classroom). Therefore, research is important, and I liked that Carroll used media as an example, because we get fed so much propaganda we forget to stop and think about what we are consuming.

along with media, rhetorical analysis, and propaganda comes context, and context is like a main ingredient in a dish. Without the main ingredient the dish would be subpar and hard to swallow. Well, it is the same with context, understanding it can be the difference between making a valid argument and just making statements without facts. For example, in one of Carrolls citations she cited “The Media’s Influence.” Perfect Illusions: Eating Disorders and the Family. PBS. 2003.Web. 27 July 2009. She used this citation as context when she talked about the media influence of rhetorical analysis to make her arguments. For example, in this citation it states that all media images and messages are constructions. They are not reflections of reality. Advertisements and other media messages have been carefully crafted with the intent to send a specific message. Advertisements are created to do one thing: convince you to buy or support a specific product or service. This in its context which is the influence of media goes along with what Carroll when she stated, ”media is constantly asking you to buy something, act in some way, believe something to be true, or interact with others in a specific manner”. So although Carroll used context to validate her arguments, the media does not always do that correctly. For example, news, articles, and social media outlets have used their influence to spread a false narrative without context. An example of this is on Sunday, December 4, 2016, a shooting incident occurred at a pizza shop in northwestern Washington D.C. during the middle of the day, this was in a busy but peaceful shopping district, and the shop was filled with families. A man brought a rifle into the shop and began shooting. Fortunately, no one was hurt, and the suspect was arrested, but the motive for this crime and the circumstances that triggered it were shocking. The pizza shop, called Comet Ping Pong, had become embroiled in a strange situation due to an event that had occurred about one month earlier. There were false tweets widely spread on the net claiming that this pizza shop was the base for a pedophile sex ring involving Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, a former Secretary of State, and members of her campaign. The operators of the pizza shop began receiving threats from right wing activists who believed that the reports were true.