braytonwilds-blog

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Ethos, Pathos, and Logos Away

             The Decade Challenge is another internet fad that has surfaced on multiple social media platforms in the recent weeks. The challenge simply consists of posting a picture of yourself currently and putting it side-by-side with a picture of yourself from a decade ago. Something that is so interesting, is the ability to look back on the past and seeing how your past self has changed over time. In English 103, all though I have not been taking the class over the span of a decade, I have been taking the class over a full semester. Looking back on my work at the beginning of the semester I am very impressed with myself and my writing. I believe that I had a firm grasp on the concept of Rhetorical analysis from the very beginning, and sense then I have only been able to grow these understandings more. Rhetoric always came easily too me, being a student who spent most of his high school career on the Speech and Debate team, I knew what was required of someone to successfully convince someone else of an idea, or a belief. Reading back specifically to my blog post about the Indianapolis Colts, is one of my favorites I mention how much we use Rhetoric in our daily lives, and how in a time of high stress, the Colt’s starting quarterback used a lot of Ethos, and Pathos to convince the audience and fans that the team was going to be okay, even after losing one of their most valuable players. His talk still remains some of the most positive in the NFL even as the Colts are slowly losing their grip on a spot in the playoffs, Jacoby Brissett remains feeding himself and audiences everywhere spoonful’s of reassuring Ethos and Pathos. My strong understanding of Rhetoric was present since the beginning.  As time went on, I shifted a little further away from the ideas of Ethos, Pathos, and Logos and started to really dive into what was making me feel the way I did when I was part of a conversation where someone was trying to convince me of something. I feel like something I’ve learned throughout the semester is how to spot rhetoric where I wouldn’t have before.  I’m glad I know more now about the art of Rhetoric and hope I can continue to use it myself and spot it when it is out there in the world, for better or for worse.

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Trust The Process

             If you think about the number of things that are apart of our daily lives that our simply done/put together for us, it is quite mind boggling. I have never seen a car and ever wondered how many parts are actually in that car or how long it took to build that car, I just see the pretty, finished product. Art is very similar to this as well, when you go to see a play, what you see is the beautiful production put onto the stage with lights, and music, and scenery; what you don’t see are the hours that the actors and technicians put into creating that play for you to see. In writing, so much of the finished product is just fragments of what was originally a much messier and immature paper. This semester we were challenged multiple times with the task of showing the process that we went through when writing a paper. This is personally one of the aspects of the class that I did not succeed well in, as a writer I didn’t love working with patience, I didn’t want to spend time seeing the fruition of my work I just wanted to do it, but through the process I did find out how important it was to engage in the writing process. I have loved breaking down some of my papers paragraph by paragraph and just dissecting it to make it fully and more thought through. A big part of the writing process is taking the thing that you are analyzing and fully breaking it down, all the details that you can get just in order to be able to start. After you have all of the base information it is smart to attack to have an outline, an idea of what you want to write about, this was my most successful portion of the writing process. The sections that I struggle with the most were the drafts of the paper, I was told that you should have multiple drafts to your paper so you can go back and fix as many mistakes as you can, so your finished product is as clean as it can be. I will continue to and grow in my ability to be successful in the writing process so that I can have more “clay to mold with,” in my writing.

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Listening to Others vs

One of the only ways that we as humans can grow is by acknowledging our mistakes and our imperfections, a lot of the time it is difficult for us to see these imperfections as ourselves, and that is what our friends, family, peers, and teachers are for. They are there to help us notice things that we may pass over or misunderstand. Communication is key to growth, whether that be in relationships, work environment, or group projects, communication is necessary to progress through our work. Through English 103 we were blessed with a teacher that know a lot about what he is talking about and a whole room full of other college students who are taking the same path that we are, these are both great sources of constructive feedback. Feedback on my writing has been one of the biggest reasons why my papers have turned out as successfully as they have. I have gotten constructive feedback from both my peers and my professor and have taken the notes they give me and implicated them into my writing. A problem that I ran into often through multiple papers was my problem with moving too quickly from one idea to another, I would find myself excited to talk about too many things and the transitions of my paper were rough and messy. I found that the best way to address this feedback was to read the paper out loud to myself, this helped me find specifically where my transitions needed to be cleaned up. I often didn’t get as much significant feedback from my classmates but my professor often left me with new ideas to try out and ways to clarify my old ones. The feedback that I got on most of my papers came in very handy when we were given to opportunity to re-write some of our papers. I tried to put myself into the shoes of a reader of my work and see what they, not being me, would want to understand that my writing wasn’t explaining clearly. Finally, feedback was one of the best ways to have a secondary spellcheck. I would often skim too quickly over my writing and miss simple grammatical or spelling errors that the feedback helped me to address. It is always important to have more than one set of eyes looking upon art, because that other pair will often have something constructive and helpful to make your product as clean as possible.

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Krazy Kairos

When comparing and contrasting the concept of the Greek word “Kairos” it is important to know the origins, for if not understood, the concept will have little to no meaning. The word Kairos was coined by the Greek Philosopher Aristotle, he defined the word as “Kairos: The time and space context in which the proof will be delivered” Kairos to me is very similar, I would think of it in terms such as, Kairos is the innate human ability to understand the effect that time and place has on a conversation. Whether that conversation be based in an argument or whether it be based in pure conversation. If I were to have a conversation with my parents about why I should be able to make a trip to Chicago with my friends. I could choose to have that conversation right when my mother walked through the door coming home from work which would most likely be a big mistake, my mom would be more likely to either ignore me or say no. If I chose to ask her the question after dinner when we all sat down in the living room, she would be more relaxed and willing to say yes. This is Kairos, the ability to understand how the time and place of a conversation can affect the outcome.

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Far From Home

        Dating within the major is a big no-no, especially when you are involved in a department that is as closely knit as the Department of Theatre and Dance. My freshman year I made the mistake of dating within the department a couple too many times and those situations ended with broken friendships and awkward hallway interactions. When you spend as much time as this department spends together, it isn’t helpful for any striving couple. This summer I met an incredible girl who lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and we have attempted to work with long distance throughout the year so far. This has personally worked really well for me, because I am such a busy person anyway, so going on consistent dates doesn’t feel like a chore. We also differ from each other in how we handle social situations, long-distance allows for us to handle things the way we feel comfortable most of the time. My girlfriend and I have also realized that it is allowing our communication skills with each other to grow exponentially. Although something that I have to remind myself of, is that not everybody is going to have a similar mindset to mine.

            My friend was telling me the other day about how he can’t seem to find anybody here at school that he connects with well enough to want to attempt a relationship with. When I suggested to him that he contact people from back home, or from his summer job, he had a harsh response towards the idea of long distance. He didn’t want to be separated from one person for that long of a period of time, for he is someone who relies more on “physical tough” as his main love language compared to my “quality time.” For me I was confused as to why he wasn’t listening to me and my experience in a long distance relationship and following closely behind. We engaged in a discussion about why I thought long distance was the cure for every broken relationship, and if you are as busy as we are, it was impossible to carry out a successful relationship here on campus. This continued until he chose to remind me that I was a heavily biased individual in this topic. Which, I didn’t realize at the time, but he was right.

            In order to maintain a successful discussion with proper use of rhetoric, one must recognize when they are engaging in bias. Although it is very difficult to be in a discussion where people disagree and nobody is biased, it is essential to a fair and respectful “argument.” Bias, for those who don’t know, is prejudice in favor of or against one thing/person/group/idea. Bias deters a conversation to one side or another because one person or side is arguing for something that they have more knowledge on/more experience with. Because I am currently in a working long-distance relationship, I was trying to convince my friend that all long distance relationships are successful and work out like mine has. When he reminded me of my current bias, I was able to take a step back and realize where I was coming from. We were able to move forward in a conversation where I watched out for my bias and was able to give him the best advice, as a friend, not as a want-to-be full time leader.

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Everything is a Remix

        My freshman year at Ball State, I took a class called “Aesthetics,” which dealt primarily with the skills of script analysis and the study of theatre history, but a class that also dabbled in the history of the English Language and it’s formation. On the first day of class our professor showed us a video titled “Everything Is a Remix.” I found this video to be enticing and compelling and would reference this video multiple times throughout the school year, in and out of the classroom environment. The main idea of the video is that everything that we do, everything that we participate in, everything that we research has already been done. We may create a new branch off of an idea that somebody already had, but no matter what the situation, we are joining a conversation that has been going on for years and will continue to go on after we are done speaking on it. 

            When engaging yourself in a conversation with others, it is important to know the details of what you are engaging in, knowing that you are walking on shared, familiar ground about a topic that has most likely already been talked about and thought over throughout centuries. Rhetorical analysis is heavily based on knowledge and your ability to convey that knowledge to others. Key ways to approach conveying these ideas is through using the 3 main modes of persuasion: Ethos (showing your credentials, why are you a credible source,) Pathos (Appealing to the audiences emotions to make them feel what you want them to,) and Logos (Appealing to the audiences Logic, is your evidence reliable.) These terms were coined by Aristotle and have been used in the art of persuasion for centuries. It has always been suggested that the more trained and knowledgeable one is in the art of rhetoric, the more successful they are and will continue to be, and the less likely they are to be swayed my logical fallacies. To quote Praxis by author Carol Lee Clark “Argument is essential to human interaction, for it is through the interplay of ideas that we discover answers to our problems, try out new ideas, shape experiments, recruit others, and communicate.” 

           Rhetoric studies can be led back to 350 B. C with Plato who coined the term “Rhetorike:” A tool for practical debate: There is no full truth. And to Aristotle who said that Rhetoric is: The faculty of discovering, in a given instance, the available means of persuasion. It can be found in our body language, and what we wear, what music we listen to and what movies we watch. In conclusion, I believe, that in order to be able to accurately claim a statement on a subject, one must understand well the topic that they are discussing and have done an adequate amount of research to fully convey their ideas. Rhetoric is always at our door,  asking us questions such as, “What Next?” And it is our job to answer the, with an open mind.

Everything is a Remix: https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=everything+is+a+remix+video&view=detail&mid=073AFC8C561314237270073AFC8C561314237270&FORM=VIRE

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12... 3, 2, 1

            On August 24th, 2019, Andrew Luck of the Indianapolis Colts shocked the world when he made his retirement from the National Football League known over a post-game news interview. My father and I watched the game, but didn’t watch the locker room film, expecting nothing other than the norm. Andrew was only 29 years old and was reaching the prime of his football career when he decided to hop off the horse. Football fans everywhere were shocked at the retirement of this young athletic star, who seemingly left with no hints of doing so. When the Indianapolis Colts then took the next step and made Jacoby Brissett the new starting quarter back a lot of people were confused and untrusting.

             However now, a week later, Indianapolis fans are at a change of heart. Excited for opening day because of Brissett’s rhetorical presentation of talents and readiness for this next challenge. In an interview with Brissett and the Colts management, Colts coach said that Brissett has run more snaps this year in training camps than one would in a regular season, perfect practice makes perfect. Under a consistent and healthy direction from a new coach, Frank Reich, Brissett stated that he was more ready than ever to take this next step.  When asked if he was prepared to be a starter, Jacoby’s response “Since Day 1, I have always been preparing as a starter” Jacoby has been a back-up quarterback to both Tom Brady and Andrew Luck , in my opinion, two of the best quarterbacks to ever play the game, and he has been waiting his fair share amount of time to take what he’s learned and put them on the field.

             Just like this starting NFL Quarterback, we all use Rhetoric even when we aren’t doing it with intention. Brissett has most likely been focused on bettering himself and his team and was not focused on convincing the Indianapolis fans that he was ready for the challenge ahead. But, what we don’t notice is that, we have been using Rhetoric since before we could talk, walk, throw a football... Brissett’s stats in the training camp earlier this summer was an appeal to Logos (Logic.) Along with his past as a back up quarterback in the league which would appeal to the Ethos (his credibility)of football fans. These things allow the Indianapolis fans to be easily swayed in knowing that he is not a rookie to the game of football or the way that this team works.

             You could even say that the Indianapolis fans were experiencing the phenomena of “Columbusing” which is the of idea of "discovering" something and engaging with something that's existed forever in other cultures. Jacoby and this team have been working together for years and Jacoby and the game of football have been working together since he was a little boy. These fans are just now starting to dig a little bit deeper under the surface to understand that there is more to a person and idea than what is just to be seem or assumed. In conclusion, we see that rhetoric is used in our daily lives and has been forever, in what we wear, how he walk (body language,) the words we use and how we phrase them, and how we perform whether under pressure or a perfectly comfortable environment. Rhetoric is everywhere, and it is wise to try and spot when it is being used effectively, if even on purpose. Go Blue!!!

Interview: https://www.colts.com/video/locker-room-insights-jacoby-brissett