India's Traditional Silence

A NYTimes article this week caught my attention about the changing gender roles in India and social classes leading to an increase in rape. There were many interesting implications from this article, especially when they mentioned that men felt threatened by women's increasing power in Indian society and react with urges to dominate through rape. Jim Yardley, the author, is a Pulitzer prize winning journalist who frequently documents social issues in China and India. His purpose is to pinpoint the causes of the increases of rape in India, like women's power increasing the vulnerability of women in weaker social classes. He also emphasizes the issue of hesitance to report a crime and the neglect of rape victims in India, as they are now tainted and unable to fit in again. One rhetorical element he used effectively was pathos. He focuses on a single victim, and young girl who was raped, and shows how the rape has greatly affected her life. He makes the audience pity the suicide of her father after he learned about the rape, and makes them pity the fact that the rape has caused her to be unsure of her future career as a doctor. I think that he was effective in achieving his purpose, which was to make the audience aware of such issues, but he didn't really do much to suggest what to do with the information. It did make a significant emotional impact, but didn't give any incentive to take action.

Presidential Debate #2

The recent presidential debate was full of some poorly used rhetorical strategies, mostly on Mitt Romney's part. I watched the debate to keep up with the 2012 presidential electron, which is the context of the debate. The intended audience consisted of 200,000,000 able voters who can make a difference in the outcome of this year's election, and even though I can't vote, I was part of the audience who kept up with the election to maintain my role as a responsible and informed U.S. citizen, and if given the chance, I can say with confidence that I would vote for Barack Obama to stay our president for the next four years, and for Mitt Romney, I would argue that anyone else in the world would make a better president than him. In an attempt to build his persona (using the ethos strategy), Mitt Romney not only repeatedly undermined Obama's statements mid-sentence, he kept interrupting the debate moderator. Romney also spewed a string of incoherent and invalid statistics or "potential plans." My favorite incoherent Romney thought was when he stated, "I would give the children of illegal immigrants the chance to earn their citizenship through military service." Not only was this a close minded and rude statement, he undermined his authority to speak on the matter by ignoring the U.S. law that guarantees citizenship for anyone born in the U.S. Obama then effectively played off of that by using pathos to rally support for his opinion, which was that he realizes that illegal immigrants are not bad people, they're just coming to the U.S. for economic opportunity to "feed their families."  Obama was able to effectively implement logos into his argument, and not only was he good with the delivery of his attempts to win over the audience (and voters watching from all around the country), he was also good at listening with a keen ear so he could effectively argue against Romney's vague and unsupported claims.  He was able to pull at the loose ends of Romney's tax plans, and I found that Obama was the winner of the debate. Obama and Romney had the same purpose of winning America's votes, but Obama was the only one who effectively achieved his purpose.

Vice Presidential Debate

This week's article is a close look at the Vice Presidential Debate and both Obama and Romney's intended foreign policies. Matt Zeller, a writer for the Huffington Post and former Afghanistan veteran, not only commends Joe Biden's passionate and informed responses, but also regard's Paul Ryan's performance as shameful and oblivious. He focuses on the candidates' responses to the situation in Afghanistan. The purpose of this text is to not only inform of the candidates' performances and campaigning platforms on Afghanistan, but to emphasize the future implications of a continued Afghanistan War. He states somberly that to maintain peace in Afghanistan comes at a cost of keeping troops and more military spending for the next 10 years. He wants these ideas to be known to anyone keeping up with the presidential campaign; he educates the audience so they can make a careful choice in the upcoming election. One rhetorical element that he used is parallelism, a strategy that linked the Bush administration to what the Romney administration could be, which he finds as frightfully arrogant and essentially ineffective. The rhetorical element succeeded in giving the author the persona of being a democrat, and also showing the Romney administration as inadequate. He also uses pathos throughout the text, making the audience fear the loss of American lives in different situations, such as the Afghanistan War and Libyan attack on the U.S. embassy. These strategies were effective and helped to achieve the purpose of making the foreign policy an immediate concern for the audience. 

Obama Miners' Ad

This ad is a short advertisement for the Obama campaign that reveals that Romney forced miners' to attend Mitt Romney's rally to be props in his commercial. The context of this advertisement is the 2012 Presidential Campaign, where Obama and Romney are the two primary candidates in the running for the president of the United States. The purpose of the commercial is to reveal the bad character of Mitt Romney. The advertisement says that Mitt Romney is "not one of us" for shutting down the mine without giving the miners necessary pay for the day. He made them feel like they would be out of a job if they didn't attend. The audience for this ad is all American citizens: those who would be able to make a difference in the outcome of the 2012 Presidential campaign. One rhetorical element in this advertisement is ethos. By disgracing the character of the other candidate, Obama establishes a “good-guy” persona. Another rhetorical element is pathos. It makes you want to pity the miners’ so the offense of putting them out of work for the day makes you angrier at Romney. This ad does a good job of building off of all the other “insensitive Romney” incidents and makes him look un-American. It also keeps building up the “Good-guy Obama” persona.