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.