Cultural Rhetoric

I recently read a New York Times article titled "T.S.A. Trains Dogs to Stay One Sniff Ahead of Bomb Makers."  It caught my interest because I love animals, especially dogs.  Like every article, it was full of rhetoric techniques.  It was all about dogs being the best way to detect bombs and chemicals that could be combined to make bombs.  It expressed that training them to detect a bomb is hard enough, but now they have to be trained to detect individual chemicals that could be used in bomb-making.  The article went through how they train the dogs and all the situations that they are trained to be in. The author started by giving the reader a situation.  He set the scene by describing Ajax, a dog, sniffing around a furnished room early in the morning looking for explosives.  After a couple tries, Ajax finds the explosives and is rewarded by his trainer.  This was a good way to immediately catch the reader’s attention and engage them in the ar...

I found an interesting ted talk titled How Humans Could Evolve to Survive in Space. In this speech, Lisa Nip describes how the human body would have to develop in order to live soundly on another planet. I chose this speech out of my love for both biology and space; it caught my attention. This speech effectively used rhetoric- for good and for bad. She had successfully caught the audience’s attention by asking them whether or not they would live in the freezing outdoors for a couple months. She used this to lead into her talk about living on another planet in extreme weather conditions. This was a good introduction and a good use of rhetoric. She also successfully made her scientific terms understandable. Not everyone watching would be able to understand complex scientific words- so she always stopped to make it simplified. This made the speech interesting to more people. She did, however, have her downfalls. While her intent was to make the listeners inspired and i...

This Sunday my pastor gave a sermon about the wedding at Cana. It is a Bible story where Jesus attends a wedding with his mother, Mary, and turns water into wine. My pastor used this story to give us the message that we cannot just say that we are Christians; we have to show it through our actions. There were a couple ways that my pastor used rhetoric. He used a quote from an old movie called Jerry Maguire, which is about a sports agent. In the movie he says “show me the money” to a shareholder over the phone. He is demanding that the shareholder prove that he is trustworthy through an action, rather than just talk. My pastor used this quote to relate to the wedding at Cana. Mary told the servants at the wedding to just trust Jesus and do what He says, because he knows what he’s doing. Likewise, we should trust God and show that we are faithful Christians by reflecting him through our actions. This was good rhetoric because he used a relatable quote to get his message acros...

Every day for the past month I have seen one or more Acuvue contact lense advertisements.  I have seen them on Youtube multiple times; and they are all thirty seconds long and I can’t skip them.  Each one of them has a speaker talking about how they had a dramatic life change after they got Acuvue contact lenses.  One specific one was a high school girl’s story.  She got Acuvue contact lenses and could finally see her crush.  When she got to school she saw him and he happened to be looking back at her, which she had never been able to see.  She finally finds the courage to walk up to him, and they finally end up together. I found these advertisements to be unreasonable.  It is great to finally be able to see clearly, but the ads seem like they are promising more than that.  They prove how effective they are through various peoples’ stories and make it seem like if you buy the contact lenses and can see clearly, then you too will have sudden co...