Ah, well, here we are again, another blog for Dual Credit English and discussing the effectiveness and importance of rhetoric in everyday life. The transition from in-person classes to online ones has been difficult, as you lose a lot of the little things that you might take for granted in school life, never thought I’d miss those cramped hallways filled with the talk of over a hundred students like I do now.
This week, I started to become increasingly aware of how a paper and proposal are similar, as I had been operating under the thought that they were very different. They are, at the core of both of these written works, trying to convince you of something by defending a claim with evidence. Both must contain all the various forms of rhetoric to be considered successful in the final production, although papers tend to focus more on logos. I just think it is interesting to see how both use different forms of rhetoric to eventually get to the same end goal.
This week, and all the weeks since we left school to be completely honest, have been difficult for me as I can’t seem to do much of anything, the quarantine has really made it hard for me. But, after a few things started going better for me and I could see tons of rhetoric all around. One example specifically that stood out to me was the rhetoric used by people who are leaving their homes during quarantine. This group of people predominantly use logos and pathos but not effectively as their claims are unsupported.
They attempt to use logic, by stating that if they go out to restaurants or something of a similar nature it will help boost the declining economy because they are spending their money or that by going outside, sick or not, they are boosting up their own immune system at the same time as boosting everyone else around them so that the virus won’t be able to spread much further. While at basic level logic, yes, they are technically boosting the economy and, yes, to some extent they are helping to boost their own immune system. But if one thinks a bit deeper into this, you can see that they are doing the reverse. By leaving your house, you could potentially spread COVID-19, which will lead to more cases, a longer quarantaine, and more businesses shutting down. These shut downs will lead to a prolonged economic decline, and so, no, leaving the house is not helping the economy long-term, though it may help pay the workers you interact with there.
The group of people advocating that they are brave for leaving home during quarantine are using a bit of pathos by trying raise an emotional response out of people to follow in their footsteps. They are using the word “brave” to convince people to view them in a positive light as brave has a positive connotation, so therefore if these people are in fact brave, then they must be doing a positive thing to warrant a positive word. In reality, these people are essentially coughing in the faces of the people among the population that cannot survive this virus for one reason or the other. The issue with leaving is you do not know who you will come in contact with, or who those people will come in contact with later that might be at a higher risk. Their fundamental logic is flawed, which is why this argument is unsuccessful.
Citations
CNN.com Wire Service. “Pandemic, COVID-19 and All the Coronavirus Terms You Need to Know.” The Mercury News, The Mercury News, 13 Mar. 2020, http://www.mercurynews.com/2020/03/13/pandemic-covid-19-and-all-the-coronavirus-terms-you-need-to-know/.
Liz Doolin, Lab Blog for English 