Reflections on Internet Intoverts: Final Paper for Rhetoric and Composition

This paper wound up being very different from the project I initially planned on putting together: much more about introverted people and the magical rhetoric of the internet, much less about anonymity and social activism. I hope that doesn't make it less effective than I planned on it to be. To connect to my topic, have some related media I found while researching. In the interest of making my final project as full and fleshed-out as I hoped it could be, I'll begin with a blog post on introversion, which, although key to my topic, occupies too much of my paper for how little accredited research exists.

Most of the testimonies and valuable opinions I found online came from people other that scientists, people who were busy living their lives as introverts  running blogs, going to work, sharing their stories of frustration with their extroverted friends. One of my favorites, and one I would highly recommend reading if you have the time, is Carl King's 10 Myths About Introverts Blog. I found his blog enormously helpful in my research, although I am still debating about including it in the bulk of my paper, which otherwise contains exclusively scientific journals.

Similarly What Is An Introvert? seemed out of place in my essay. It was enormously helpful in crafting this essay and followed the pattern I had noticed in my own research: most introvert material came directly from the source: introvert users communicating and reaching out to one another through the internet. As I'm typing this, I have actually decided to go back to my paper and add a section regarding all of that information because it is simply too intimately tied to my final paper topic to leave out. You're probably laughing a little bit by now, but I'm still holding on to that old rhetorical rule: 1st person is a cardinal sin in a research paper. Silly me, thinking I could experiment like that.

Still, in an effort to continue incorporating elements of the internet (into my...God forbid...paper about the internet), I found two pieces I wanted to share with you and with whoever from class might read my blog in the future months. The first is the video that inspired this project. It got me thinking about introverted people, clearly using the internet as a tool for communicating and rallying together, explaining to other, introverted people that there was nothing wrong with them for not fitting into an extrovert world. I thought there was something enourmously beautiful about that...so I dedicated a research paper to it. Yep, English majors are real romantics, folks.

The second image was easily the most popular image response of Tumblr to the query "introvert" which I thought said something, particularly because it came with comments like "So true" and "my life." Also, a mellow and edearing look at what life is like for an introvert.

This next photo has nothing to do with introverts or the internet. I just thought it was thematically relevant to the problems we've discussed in class.

In closing, I sincerely hope you enjoy my paper and blog presentation. They have been fun to work on and the challenge of tackling a topic of my own choosing and one that I am close to and interested in has made a world of difference. Rhetoric and Communications has changed the way I approach writing and speaking as modes of communication and not nearly in the negative manner I feared early on in the class.

Watch: Hank Green explains why you need to vote

I love the vlogbrothers. That is all.

Visual Rhetoric

I feel like a lot of people will go this route, but the site I went to for visual rhetoric help was the Purdue Owl.
I also went to stanford.edu's analysis of their own advertisement and the things that make it effective. Stanford's approach featured more specific details, geared towards their own advertisements and their effectiveness. Purdue offered a broad examination of the themes and ideas that combine to create our knowledge of rhetoric.

With these readings in mind, I went in search of the most basic visual rhetoric I could find. I was looking for something even simpler than a structured photo. In this theme, I give you:

Effective Visual Rhetoric

Did you ever want to buy something from Billy Mays?

Don't lie. This man could sell dirt to a hobo. 

The point, though, is that he represents visual rhetoric because, at the time of his death, he was a brand. He was sought after for infomercials because he made them his thing. It was what he did and his face lent a different, more serious register to a product. That is effective visual rhetoric.

Ineffective Visual Rhetoric

Do they even sell these monstrosities anymore? The slogan will haunt me to the grave and beyond, I'm, sure.

Moral (and in my opinion, good) Rhetoric

I was going to use Nike as my example of effective but not necessarily nice rhetoric, until I found this. I've never seen a sport equipment ad featuring an overweight person before. They are almost exclusively the "after" picture people.

Good on you, Nike. Good on you. 

Bad Visual Rhetoric

I hope all of you remember this image from a few years back, but the reason it's on my blog now is because it is an excellent example of bad rhetoric. These advertisers are attempting to connect one extremely negative thing (gang rape) with one hopefully positive thing (don't you want to ooze sex like the people in this picture? Better shop Dolce and Gabbana). I actually believe this was a perfume ad, although why a woman would want a perfume that makes men jump her on rooftops is a little bit beyond me.

Really, Inexcusably Bad Visual Rhetoric

 Font is an important aspect of visual rhetoric and this ad uses a terrible one. Comic Sans should be outlawed for anyone over the age of 13 and heavily discouraged for anyone under it. Here, it would be particularly inappropriate, but it's right up there with Papyrus on my design font shit list.

Rhetorical Sitations

As in, situation governed by rhetoric, not situations that are, in and of themselves, well, you get the idea...

I feel like this was almost a set-up for me, because I spent most of my high school career in carefully structured rhetorical situations. I was a speech kid (not a debater. never a debater), so rhetoric was my thing. I didn't even have a name for it at the time, but everything in those events, from my interactions with my competitors and judges to my carefully paced and plotted speech was a rhetorical gesture.

My signature event was called Original Oratory. In OO, your relative success is entirely dependent on your ability to create a lasting, completely one-sided discourse with your audience (in this case, your judge, because you competitors have heard your speech a dozen times by mid-season and could probably recite it back to you, verbatim). You must convince the judge that, not only do you know everything there is to know about your chosen topic (Sexualization in media, rain-forest destruction, the family units of geese) your topic is of immediate and vital importance to the survival of culture as we know it (to this day I think that goose-family-unit-girl was secretly the god of orators. no other explanation for her success exists).

Your job, in other words, is to create a lasting and meaningful discourse with your judge about the worth and reliability of your information, delivered as emotionally rich as possible so that your budding professional relationship can outlast and defeat the relationship being built by your seven competitors in what is essentially a complex emotional/logical deathmatch. If you win, your judge remembers your topic and/or hair color long enough to place you first. If you lose, you dwindle slowly down the line of placings until you get to last...

Bitzer says that rhetoric is situational. OO is purely situational  because if you take away the context of the situation, you become some yahoo with a soapbox issue that no one wants to listen to. Maybe you have a niche group of activists. Probably not. In your situation, you can construct this facade of reliability by making yourself seem more knowledgeable and confident than you are or ever have been. You construct this fake persona to create your rhetorical situation to convince your judge that you are, in fact, the most talented rhetor in the room, in the competition, perhaps on the planet.

This is probably more than you ever wanted to know about high school speech and debate, but these articles spoke to the seventeen year old in me who learned to play the system before she knew what rhetoric was.

Abstract

My paper will examine the methods by which Clint Eastwood and Bill Clinton spoke to their respective political conferences so differently, but with almost unanimous success. It will examine the audiences to whom they were speaking, the atmospheres (political and social) in which they spoke and the topics addressed in their presentation. I will look closely at their individual speeches, the content and delivery of those speeches and what rhetorical strategies made these two very different strategies equally effective in their respective locations. The “multimedia” presentation will include embedded videos of both speeches, my real-time reactions to those speeches and a complete, follow-up analysis for both speeches based on the merits of their rhetoric.

The Essay Itself

Clinton and Eastwood: Metaphor, Appropriateness and Why the Audience Is God

Clinton Liveblog

Former President Bill Clinton, Democratic National Convention 2012

“Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow”

:47 "We are here to nominate a President and I’ve got one in mind". So do I, Mr. Clinton. So do I.

1:20 The road to recovery is, indeed, long.

2:17 Michelle Obama for President! Oh, wait, that’s not what we’re doing? Ooops. I came to the wrong party.

4:00 “The Republican narrative says we’re all completely self-made. … but, it ain’t so.”

4:35 Bill Clinton believes in the buddy system.

5:33 – ongoing Lots and lots of facts. Emphasis on the morally right and economically sound not being mutually exclusive. Nice to know I can be a nice person without becoming a panhandler.

7:37 we’re getting a little bi-partisan now. President Bush (both of them) and some of the things they did right and bi-partisan focus on solving problems. “what works in the real world is co-operation.”

9:32 “a broken clock is right twice a day” I hope I’m right more than twice a day. I mean, compromise is cool, but every now and then it might be nice to be completely correct.

12:00 Highlighting Obama’s commitment to bi-partisan communication as well as collaboration within different factions of his own party.

14:00 Yeah, that work with congressional Republican didn’t work out so well, did it?

17:00 We’re well out of any bi-partisanisms now.

18:00 The terrible economy is clearly still a talking point for both parties.

19:00 Yes. We call them the Republican Party.

19:30 We probably don’t miss your Presidency quite as much as you do, Mr. Clinton, but You miss it an awful lot.

23:00 “We’re all in this together” wouldn’t make a bad slogan, would it Mr. President. Maybe a little more moving that Forward. Just a thought.

26:00 Train people for jobs available, right now, in their communities? Heresy!

Also, I like the sound of student loan registration. It would be nice to not beggar myself to get a degree.

29:00 Also, healthcare. Healthcare is good.

32:28 A little off topic, but I spent a summer as an H.R. intern at the hospital in Great Falls and they HATE Obama’s insurance plans and the Affordable Health Care Act for the changes it will inspire in healthcare. We didn’t talk about politics much.

37:00 I feel you pain, Bill Clinton. I so often come up against the problem of people cheering too loudly for me to get a word in edgewise.

38:00 Romney vs. The Fact Checkers: The Epic Battle Continues

43:00 More about Mitt Romney's incredible, automatically-reducing tax plan to balance the budget. If nothing else, Romney might go down in history as the most successful man in the world to never learn basic addition and subtraction.

Eastwood Liveblog

Clint Eastwood, Republican National Convention 2012

1:02 Way to legitimize yourself, a renowned actor, as a reliable speaker, Mr. Eastwood. “A lot of conservative people in Hollywood.” “They don’t go around hot-dogging it.”

1:56 “These people are all like-minded. Like all of us.” I'm only two minutes into this speech and I'll put money down that everyone in the audience is not nearly as like minded as you seem to think...

2:00 Invisible Obama is shaking in his boots Mr. Eastwood.

2:55 Back to unemployment, “I haven’t cried so hard…” Transitioned from national hope to unemployment and how Obama hasn’t done enough. Clearly, then, Mitt is the One True Answer.

4:00 To the president: “How do you respond to (every possible allegation that can be levied against the government)?”

“Shut up?”

“I can’t”

That’s totally something the president would say. No doubt.

5:46 Why not bring the troops home tomorrow, Clint? Because that’s not how wars end. WWI? WWII? Vietnam? Korea? Any of these ringing a bell Clint? even the clean ones never just stop.

6:56 “Biden is the intellect of the Democratic Party.” Why, Mr. Eastwood, that’s the smartest thing you’ve said all night. Too bad you were trying for sarcasm.

7:25 “ I've never thought it was a good idea for attorneys to be President anyway.” “Let’s hire a bureaucrat instead” Oh, I’m sorry, you said “stellar businessman,” didn't you Mr. Eastwood. It’s easy to get confused.

8:58 “We own this country.” Not for at least four years, Clint. Oh, wait, your making some qualifiers.

“Politicians are employees of ours.” Clever business analogy there, Mr. Eastwood. Very nice. Oh. And “letting the President go.” Sneaky, sneaky.

10:54 We don’t have to vote for people be don’t really want in office.” I couldn't have said it better myself.

Romney Can't Smile and Obama Needs a Laugh Track

So...that was interesting. For setting's sake, I watched the debates with the freshman seminar class I'm TA-ing this semester, which made it even more interesting/frustrating. I didscovered that a large portion of the class either had almost no political bias or leaning or had so much that they could hardly sit still when the opposing candidate spoke.

All in all, I was surprised by how weel Romney debated. I fell like, particularly in relation to his tax plan, he outright lied a time or two, but in other areas (like pre-existing conditions) he held his own well and was generally well-recieved. However, he also came across a pushy and childish in his refusal to abide by the set turn system. He had the last word every single time.

Obama on the other had looked very, very tired. He aslo seemed calm, collected anc extremely well-informed. I felt like he kept his temper and emotions in check even when Romney began to get extremely agitated towards the middle. I do wish he had picked a topic other than pre-existing conditions to slam Romney for not having plans, because he did have a plan for that one thing and therefore could dismiss the other allegations without addressing them.

Paper Topics Post

Well, paper topic. Because I only have one. Get it? Yeah...

I know that ethos, pathos and logos have become my favorite buzzword terms in the last few weeks, but I really do think that those are the best places to start when analyzing a speech. I have been particularly fond of pathos as an analytic tool, but today I think logos is the more important aspect of these speeches to the National Conventions by Clint Eastwood and Bill Clinton. The credentials of these two speakers are impressive, but the unspoken aspects they bring with them pack more of a punch.

My paper topic: An analysis of Bill Clinton and Clint Eastwood’s speeches to the National Conventions with attention to the reasons they were chosen to speak, the topics they addressed, the audiences they spoke to and their individual rhetorical strategies.

Also, I am clearly the best at blogging. I did this assignment at 1 o'clock this afternoon and remembered that we needed to blog about it at 11:54. Student fail.

Why Every Woman in America Should Vote For Mitt Romney - Courtesy of the Republican Party

So I found this article on the internet and I just had to take a look at it, because my soapbox issue this election has been "Why would any woman vote for Mitt Romney?"

This article seemed intended to answer that very question. What it actually did is laud Mitt Romney's accomplishments (which had not impressed me to date) and explain, using enthymeme (and actual statement), why he is clearly the superior choice to President Obama.

The conversation went something like this:
Article: Women marry for Status.
Article: Mitt Romney has money, class and (because of his numerous sons and grandsons) superior DNA.
Ideal Reader: Clearly, Senator Romney should be the more attractive candidate for women because he can provide for every female in the country like a good, upstanding man should when elected to office.

To quote one memorable passage following the author's commendation on Romney's superior reproductive abilities (again, because masculine success in measured in male heirs - not stated but understood within the article):

Professor Obama? Two daughters. May as well give the guy a cardigan. And fallopian tubes.

So, to recap, this article doesn't even use enthymeme half of the time, it completes its own syllogisms in almost every case.

Women like powerful men. Romney is an alpha-male. Women should vote for Romney. (With an attractive side dish of: Obama is practically a woman.) (this also begs the question: By this logic, shouldn't Obama vote for Romney?)

The articles biggest misstep in my opinion: it assumes that I don't want a president with Fallopian tubes.

A Friendly Reminder From The Obama Campaign

Alternative title: The Quote That Will Haunt Mitt Romney To The Political Grave

Just some tidbits I found from here.

Advantages to a Digital Life

So, to reprise my piece of presidential rhetoric, I give you the Obama campaign's online voter registration tool.

For the p[purposes of Aristotle's definitions, I submit that this piece of rhetoric is representative of pathos on behalf of the audience and logos on behalf of the campaign itself. The widget has been popping up over a variety of websites I frequent (I took this screenshot from Tumblr) and clearly the response from the internet has been one of derision that Romney "doesn't want" their vote, while Obama is reaching out for it. I suspect that the Obama campaign wanted exactly this reaction, to encourage young voters to come out in unprecedented numbers for this election.

I definitely see opposites in this piece, although they are unspoken, that the Obama campaign is looking where the Romney campaign will not for voters.

Topic eight also applies (from varied meanings), although discreetly. The message is innocuous enough that even a young voter from a conservative household would find it benign and unassuming, because the alternative is to suggest that it should not be easy to register to vote and, at least externally, that is not an opinion anyone wants to tie their name to.

Overall, I like this piece of rhetoric for its unassuming nature and excellent message. Vote on, America!

Aristotle and the Great Question of Socrates

So, my reading question for Friday is this: How did this evolution of rational thought come about, from one philosopher to the next?

Possibly Socrates and at the very least Plato had some very clear and non-negotiable ideas about what rhetoric was and what it meant. How did Aristotle rationalize himself so far from his mentors?

If nothing else, is't it cool how they were learning and discovering at a time when it was still socially acceptable to out argue your professor in public and gain recognition for your discovery? I like it.

This was the ONLY reminder of Sept. 11th I found yesterday. No one said anything to me during the day, no one mentioned sacrifice or remembrance, but there's always that one reminder. Should we ever let it go? Is it healthy to keep thrusting these images back into the public eye? Does it help us heal or keep the wound open?

Also, it is now possible to register to vote online, courtesy of Obama for America. The Obama campaign could draw a great deal of strength from the young people on the internet and it is actively seeking and motivating them.

Also: Obama has a Tumblr! I would kill to be the intern in the White House in charge of keeping that up to date.

Okay, dear classmates, I've been scouring the depths of the internet for hours looking for something not too blatantly political. This is a sign that I have totally given up.

Enjoy!

Welcome to my Strange Designs

 I hope, for your sake, that you enjoy this hyper-condensed, book jacket blurb filled with the few things I can remember to say about myself that someone else might find interesting, at least more than I enjoyed writing it. Lord knows, it won't be hard.

Bio Draft 7,834:
Things about me you might find interesting:

1. I like to write. That, I hope was obvious from my major and concentration. Someday I plan on writing books. (or rather, on publishing books, the writing part isn't time sensitive).

2. It hopefully follows that I also like to read. I read almost anything and I like talking to people about the things I've read almost as much as I enjoy the reading itself.

3. I'm kind-of-sort-of athletic. In the sense that I am an athlete, I mean. I throw the hammer for our schools track team and I've been a member of competitive track teams for 10 years now. This also means that I work out a lot and don't get as much sleep as I probably should, not that I would anyway. So often when you see me I will be either cripplingly sore or sleep-deprived grumpy. Occasionally, I will be both. Handle with care on these days.

4. I do too much stuff. I get bored if I don't take on enough projects, so, to compensate, I take on too many and then try to make the best of it. Sometimes this means that in addition to being sore and grumpy I'm also stressed out. If at all possible, don't handle at all during those times. Later in the semester hysterical crying may ensue (although almost never in public). In these trying situations it is best for you to sit back and make yourself as small as possible. Sort of like a bear attack.

5. I really love all the stuff I do. Track and the writing major and Read This are all important to me. Sometimes, they are more important than sleeping. Like books, if I can corner an unsuspecting individual I will talk to them for hours on these subjects.

Beware and thanks for your time,
Mary

New Class, New Direction : Pre-Writing in English 450

Welcome to Succinct Obfuscation! I began this blog for an earlier class on digital relations and am recycling it for English 450.

Assignment 1: On Pre-Writing
I actually learned the most about pre-writing from my A.P. history teached in my junior and senior years of high school because his duty was to prepare us, not necessarily good English students, to write three rapid-fire essays in an hour and a half after a grueling standardized test. My past English teachers has given us standard pre-writing instructions that I still use for longer papers, typically tiered lists working downward with Roman numerals.
But this teacher taught us what remains to this day my favorite system of quickly and efficiently plotting an essay. I have used his method as a starter for long papers and routinely in times writes in every conceivable class. He times us, two or three times a week, with mock prompts and asked us for our best outline in three minutes. Everything we wanted to touch on, laid out in a basic list outline. The items we came up with were very big-picture, which was hugely helpful. The minutia came later, as we wrote the actual paper and the original, sketchy structure kept the paper from seeming too stream of conscious.
This method works well for me when I am stuck or suffering from writer's block because it ignores the finer points my other teachers stressed, like specific commentary on my points, in favor of a broad, skeleton outline that helps me to organize my thoughts. Once those thoughts are down on paper it becomes much easier to separate and organize my other ideas around them and then the entire essay seems to simply fall into place.
I like this method best because it is the most simple explanation I have encountered for organizing your ideas, probably because this teacher didn't expect us to like writing, or want to hear more about style and format. He wanted to give us the simplest possible tool for essay construction and because of its simplicity it has served me well ever since.

Question from the assigned reading:
What aspect of love as a motivator makes it a less deliberate fault to be lead astray? Why is it that if Helen abandoned her country for love she is still less at fault than if she left for another, equally deliberate reason? Obviously even in love she made a decision to run away with with Paris (as opposed to the rape-and-kidnap theory), so what makes her betrayal less stinging if it was done with love?