First blog…

So I started reading the book for Rhetoric. When I first bought it, I thought it was going to be boring but to my surprise, it was actually pretty interesting. The first chapter was pretty much an introduction to the course.. or to argumentative writing anyway. It talked about arguments in ways I had never thought of before. I learned about arguments that simply inform, like a hurricane shelter sign along the street. Although it doesn’t seem like it does much arguing, the mere fact that it is saying that there is a hurricane shelter up ahead is an argument in itself. Anyway, I went to Houston this weekend to visit my boyfriend and took me on a tour of his school. He goes to the University of St. Thomas so the tour lasted like 10 minutes but on the way he showed me something really interesting. The school is designed so that their chapel is on one end and the library is on the other. Between these two poles are the classrooms. The chapel represents faith, and religion, while the library represents knowledge and science . St. Thomas designed the school layout this way as an argument stating that everything the students learn is in between those two structures so that they can learn with the help of science and faith. The two are meant to go hand in hand and compliment each other. Because it is a private Catholic school people tend to think that it is geared around religion but in building the school that way, they made sure to explain their ideas of teaching in a mixed environment. This weekend I also saw a really funny T.V. commercial on You Tube. It wasn’t really meant to be funny but I couldn’t help and laugh at how ridiculous it was. O.K. so this girl chef is cooking in a restaurant and she is saying how she is probably going to become head chef, and how she got engaged but she won’t make it to the wedding cause she is about to be in a terrible “accident”… then she starts to pick up a big ass pot of boiling stuff while she says that she should have cleaned up the grease that was on the floor so it really wasn’t an accident… and as she says that she slips and spills all of the boiling soup on her face and then the camera zooms in on her face and you see her all burned up. The screen then goes black and these words come out that tell the audience to help prevent accidents and to visit their website. The reason I found it hilarious was because they tried using pathos to convey a message, but it was totally pointless. I mean how am I supposed to stop her from spilling grease and then slipping on it later. The commercial was so exaggerated and corny. It really had no logos or ethos either. It was pretty funny though.. So if they were trying to make me laugh, the sure did accomplish their goal. I almost peed my pants. I saw lots of other things that tied into the reading but those two were definitely the most interesting.

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