September 22

For the Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students Reading, first and foremost I have always found it interesting that the long version of pathos was pathetic proof, considering it can be a very strong appeal when used correctly and our current primary understanding of the word pathetic, and thus I was glad to have it mildly explained in the beginning of the chapter.  Emotions are a strong thing, when played upon correctly they can move a person to do things where logic can only convince.  The trick is to know when your emotions are being played by say advertisers.  I think a major part of this is the idea that emotions make people care, but logic makes people keep caring, as exampled with the talk about 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Aristotle's ideas of knowing what the emotion was, who can cause it, and why people become emotional was interesting as well in part because I thought his list of causing emotions (indignation, anger, and joy) was a little short, and the cause is not always a who. 

The ideas of how to change the mind of someone emotionally invested also got my attention.  People do not change their minds unless given a good enough reason and a lot of the time logic may not be enough to combat the emotional attachment they have to their ideas, emotion is necessary to move someone to action; which somewhat relates to what the book was saying about enargia.  The use of specific language to incite a response intrigued me in that I have always found word choice to be incredibly important when writing anything because a single word can imply a lot about an issue; for example if describing something where the desired reaction in the audience is dislike one would not use a word like 'grand' or 'generous' to describe a large amount they would use something the audience is less likely to see as a good thing like 'excessive.'

I also found the Rhetorical Traditions reading particularly interesting in that the writing of letters has changed so much over time.  For example the long winded complimentary salutations they used to use we have replaced with Dear N___, at the beginning and Sincerely and the end; or Respectfully, Love, Your Friends, or some other closing appropriate to our purpose.  Nowadays we are so quick to finish whatever it is we are doing, we are so go, go, go that we rarely write letters anymore and even if we do we hardly raise them up into the realm of an art form.  Instead we write each other short, to the point e-mails, or post something on each other's wall on facebook, or text, the point is we do not take the time to really say much if anything and the way we write is by no means art.  That is not art unless you count it as being art to see how many words you can fit into 200 characters by using replacements such as '4' instead of 'for,' or 'u' instead of 'you,' or 'r' instead of 'are,' or 'b/c' instead of 'because,' etc; in which case texts can resemble a piece of art more than a string of words at times and almost need translation to decode at other times.