Day 2: Visual Rhetorics

All right.   Now that you've got an idea of what rhetoric is, it's time to start applying these new skills of reading and critical thinking.

So, let's consider this piece of rhetoric, which has its own argument, and its own way of making it.

So, it's an ad for Canadian Club whiskey.  And we can look at two triangles of rhetoric to think through this image, which has an argument.

What is the argument?  What is its thesis?

"You should buy Canadian Club whiskey."  Easy.

But then what?

Well, we've got two triangles.  The first triangle that you read about last night is The Rhetorical Situation.

This is the interrelated interaction that goes on in any form of communication.  You've got a text, an author, and an audience, even if you're looking at an editorial cartoon.

So, who is the author, the communicator?  Well, it can be a bit complicated.  There is the company, Canadian Club, the graphic designer who made the ad, and also the person speaking in the ad, which is the persona crafted in the ad who is speaking to us.  Any of these could be said to be the speaker.  We, of course, are the audience.  But most of you aren't 21, so are you really the audience (*snicker snicker mumble mumble)?  Who is the specific audience that this ad is geared toward?  And what is the message, the text itself?

 I mean, this ad is talking about your dad, and how he slept around before he had sex with your mom.  (That anonymous "you," which is the second person, works all the time to make "you" the audience.  Remember, "Ask not what your country can do for you?")  But back to the sex.  Most people don't want to think about any of this, so is the ad misguided?  Is it misdirected?  And then there's this curse word, "damn."  How many audiences would that offend?  So, what audience is this ad targeting, and which audiences is it ignoring altogether?  But there must be someone whom this ad really works for, right?

We said that the message was simple: "Buy Canadian Club."  But there's something more.  There is a particular logic to this argument.  Why should you buy Canadian Club, according to the ad?  Because your father drank it, and he was cool, even if you don't know how "cool" he was (and they're working from a particular definition of cool, one that some people--including Mr. Butts--might disagree with).  So, it communicates some cultural values about being like your father and being cool.

Plus, we could get into little technical details about the ad, like what does the white space do around the images?  And that yellow tinge to make sure that we know these images are old, are vintage, and are real.  Why do all of this to sell a bottle of whiskey?

How might you write about this ad?

Or this one?

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Tonight you'll also read about logos, ethos, and pathos (we italicize them since they are Greek words we are using in English), which function as a kind of second triangle.

These three things are known as the three artistic proofs in Aristotle's book called, On Rhetoric.  And, here might be a good time to remind you, if you're thinking, I'm a science major, how is rhetoric relevant to my work?  Rhetoric is sometimes known as the art of arts, which means that it's the big daddy of all the other subjects, because it contains them, because all the other subjects are wrapped up in language.  You know your science textbook?  It's all words.  It's rhetorical.  It's communication as much as it is testing.  So, that's why everybody has to take this class.

All right, back to the three artistic proofs.  Logos is logical appeal.  It's usually found very clearly in the thesis of a work, of an essay or whatever form of rhetoric that we're talking about.  Think of it corresponding to the message part of the triangle that we talked about earlier.

Then there's pathos.  Pathos is emotional appeal.  It's like when you see ads like this:

I don't think I need to say much about this, but you need to be able to describe different kinds of emotional appeals when you talk about rhetorical compositions such as happy, sad, nostalgic, frightening, or appalling, and so on.  Pathos might map onto audience from the first triangle, since the audience feels the emotion.

Then, there's ethos.  Ethos is not ethics, which we'll talk about another day.  But ethos is the persona that an arguer, a rhetor, a compositionist makes for him or herself.  These are artistic proofs, so they have to be crafted.  They aren't natural.  So, a good example of ethos is using actors to play doctors in drug commercials.  This builds credibility.  You wouldn't want a bum selling you pharmaceuticals in a commercial.  Doctors have credibility, so ad companies put good looking guys in lab coats and have them tell you about how awesome their product is.  What kind of an ethos did the Canadian Club whiskey ad have?  Ethos is important.  This is also why your professors don't come into class wearing sweatpants, or why you should dress up for a job interview.  These rhetorical approaches aren't lying; they aren't evil and manipulative; they're just the way to function rhetorically in different situations.  This leaves ethos to map onto author or communicator from the first triangle and completes our line of thinking for the day.

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Grammar Review:

Sentence Fragments:

A sentence always needs a subject and a verb (or a predicate).  This is the rule.

So, some sentence fragments are:

• When I went to the pirate ship.
• And I.
• Meatloaf.
• In the beginning when everyone was calm and grey near the old brick house at the center of town just after the war.

The first example is a sentence fragment because it has that "When."  Take it out and it's a perfectly good sentence.  The "when" makes it into a dependent clause, which can't stand on its own.

An independent clause has a subject and predicate, and every sentence needs an independent clause, but they can also use dependent clauses.

But here's a trick.

What about this sentence?

Love.

Is it a fragment?

No, because it could be an imperative verb, a verb that gives a command.  What's the subject though?

An implied "you."

(You) love.

And one last thing.  <-------  This is a sentence fragment, but sometimes they can actually be useful and used well.  Every grammar rule may be broken if you know what you're doing.  But your readers can tell if your consciously using a sentence fragment or if it's a mistake.  So, be very careful there, and don't use them in formal writing.  (But blogs aren't formal writing.)  So that's your first grammar review for the day.

Take care.


Your Daily Assignment:

Consider messages that you see around you every day and all of the forms of rhetoric, such as comics, ads, cinema, websites, and so on that bombard you and shape your experiences and your culture.  Find an interesting ad or picture that communicates something, and write up a little paragraph thinking through what it's communicating and how it's doing it like we did with the Canadian Club whiskey ad.  (And don't steal my ads, look for your own!  Maybe for a product that you like or don't like!)