2015-2016: Quarter 1 Posts

Open Happiness

While at the movie theaters to see The Maze Runner , I saw a commercial that featured rhetoric. The commercial begins with a young woman named Jess purchasing two Coca Cola drinks in a convenience store. One has her own name on it, and one has the name of her friend Alisha on it. The cashier watches her forlornly as she leaves, hinting that he has a crush on his customer. Jess gives the Coke with Alisha’s name on it to her friend, and together the two friends drink them. Later, Jess, Alisha and two other friends come back into the store to buy more Coke, then leave and have a good time together. Jess keeps coming back to the store with more and more friends, each time purchasing Coca Cola with their names printed on the labels. The cashier smiles and watches, but it is clear that he wishes he was with Jess. Finally, as the cashier is closing the store for the night, Jess shows up at the door with a Coke that has the name Chris on it. She smiles and hands the drink to the ...

Marilyn Monroe's Shampoo

While browsing on Google I found an old advertisement. The ad was for Lustre-Crème Shampoo. It featured Marilyn Monroe, known for her beauteous looks and her parts in different movies. One of her movies was Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Lustre-Crème was attempting to sell their shampoo through the use of fallacies. By saying that Marilyn Monroe that tells you nothing about the actual product: it simply attracts you to the pretty face in the picture. Using this as an argument of why someone should buy your product is quite illogical. Just because Marilyn Monroe uses it doesn’t provide assurance of its abilities. They attempt using snob appeal by trying to make the audience believe that they could be like Marilyn Monroe if they use the same product as her. They use appeal to illegitimate authority by using Marilyn Monroe to promote their product. Although she herself is a customer, this is still rather irrelevant. She herself has no type of expertise in hair products and knows nothing t...

Is Hip Hop a Cancer or a Cure?

The speech I watched was a Ted Talk presented by one of my favorite music artists, who just so happens to be a Christian rapper. This rapper’s name is Lecrae Moore, but he just goes by Lecrae. Over the past five years or so, Lecrae has been able to break out of the small box that Christian music and Christian rap have been put in, and he has been able to get his music out to all types of crowds. So I was actually pretty excited when I saw that he had spoken at a Ted Talk in Nashville. The speech he delivered was titled, “Heroes and Villains: Is Hip-Hop a Cancer or a Cure?” In this speech Lecrae talked about how it is easy to look at certain people in history and label them as heroes or villains, but he talks about how not everyone views historical figures the same. Lecrae started off by defining where we get the words, “Hero” and “Villain”. Knowing the origin of these words really gave good context for what came to follow. He then went o...

Cultural Rhetoric

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