The rhetorical analysis assignment was to analyze one of three pieces of writing and their rhetorical devices. Mine was about a man and how his father shaped his childhood and his own parenting skills through many events involving alligators and fishing poles.
My process of working with the essay was very straight forward. I crafted my thesis after writing most of my essay and just included the things I talked about in my writing. I did a little bit of planning by marking up a printed version of the text and making notes on what I wanted to talk about. I was able to make changes along the way by using the peer review we did in class and the different drafts we submitted. I used the feedback I got to improve my essay and add to it. I added a lot more to my conclusion for my final copy as well as took out a lot of summarization of the text out of my intro and body paragraphs. The comments from my peers helped a lot. They helped me add to my writing and help it make more sense and support my claims. Reviewing someone else's work helped me look back onto my own writing and see what I didn't need in it. After I reviewed someone else's, I actually went and reviewed mine and found a lot of things I needed to cut and or add. The feedback from my student conference helped the most of all because it helped me understand the assignment more and what I needed to include. I really used the copy of my essay and the notes from that meeting the most when creating my final draft. I found that marking up a printed version of the text really helped me lay out my ideas and categorize them as well. I also found that setting aside a large chunk of time and getting a lot of the paper out of the way was beneficial because I didn't loose my train of thought and I was able to stay more on topic. I will incorporate thing into my future writing processes for sure. It really made writing my essay easier. I didn't loose my thoughts and it helped me stay on track. I would tell myself two weeks ago when first starting this assignment to not worry about it. It won't take that long and as long as you just sit down and get it done it's really not that much work. |
Safety: Not a Defining Virtue
Have you ever thought your parents were a little crazy? Or maybe their punishments seemed a little extreme? Was it all for the right reasons? Did it teach you anything? My Dad Tried to Kill Me with an Alligator by Harrison Scott Key might make you rethink how you viewed your “crazy” parents and their actions. The author in this piece tells a humorous story about how his father made him and his brother go back to find a fishing pole they had lost in alligator infested waters, then how he does something similar to his daughters later in his life. His targeted audience is anyone who needed a good laugh at his childhood misfortunes and how he got to influence his kids similarly to how he was influenced as a kid. The author uses humor, reflection onto his own past, and logical, personal thoughts to relay his own experiences to the audience in hope to show his daughters and the audience “safety should not be the defining virtue of their lives”. The author uses emotion, logic, and credibility to show rhetorical appeal. Just within this one quote, “What was he going to do with a stop sign? Hit somebody with it? Threaten the alligators with traffic laws?”, the author uses both pathos and logos. The more questions he asks himself, the more outrageous and humorous they get, hopefully making the reader laugh a little. This appeals to the pathos portion of the rhetorical devices by making us feel humor. He appeals to logos by asking logical questions about his father’s strange tools. Specifically, the first question, “What was he going to do with a stop sign?” makes us think logically about the situation and tries make us reason with the fact that he has those things with him. Another part of the piece that appeals to pathos and ethos is when he is talking about taking his kids out on the boat. He says “Every true thing has been stripped away by time and loss, but there's a thing I think I know, and it's this: fathers, when they are doing it right, often look like fools”. This appeals to pathos because it makes the reader feel a connection to their childhood and their own personal experiences with a father figure, whether that be positive or negative. By accessing the readers emotions like this, he can relate to them better, making his point come across much easier and more effectively. This quote also appeals to ethos. Now that the author is older and also a father, he can look back and tell his childhood experience with more knowledge and a better perspective. Because of this, he understands his father’s thinking a little better and can relate to his thoughts and actions more than he could if he was telling it earlier in his life. Since he can look back at his experiences with a father’s perspective, he has more credibility. In this piece, there are multiple sections that appeal to kairos: the consideration of history. When the story switches from the author’s childhood to him telling the story of his adventure with his own children, he said “When Pop died last year, we buried him beside a river near where I now live in Savannah, Georgia. I have no sons, only daughters.”. He uses kairos in this to give us the consideration of history and context. Now when he goes on to tell the rest of the story, we can use our previous knowledge of his past to help connect some of his thoughts and actions. In the quote “I allow them to climb trees when their mother isn’t looking, but never with buck saws, and I never take them hunting, because there are more affordable ways to bore your children.”, the author uses kairos in this to give us the history and dynamic of him and his daughters’ relationships. This helps us to put together some of his later thoughts and actions. Not only does the author use kairos in the section, but he also uses pathos to make a laugh a little and connect to the piece. The statement; “I never take them hunting, because there are more affordable ways to bore your children” is the peak of pathos in this specific section. Once again, the author uses kairos to get his message across to the audience. After his daughters expressed their fear of what might be in the water, the author tells us “I closed my eyes and tried to remember what it felt like to be scared in that swamp a thousand years ago.”. He uses this to help sympathize with his daughters and give us a sense of his history once again. Not only does this quote appeal to kairos, but it also appeals to pathos. It makes us think about his emotions back in the swamp with his father and also makes us think about our emotions when reading about it as well. The author used this to help the audience sympathize with the father as he kept going with his daughters in the boat and gets across his message. “Safety should not be the defining virtue of their lives” is the message that the author of My Dad Tried to Kill Me with an Alligator tries to prove to his daughters and the audience through humor, personal thoughts, and past experiences. The author uses emotions to make us laugh and almost concern us with his father’s actions to the point of humor. His own personal thoughts about his father’s actions and his own and the reasoning behind them give him credibility, while he uses his own past experiences and explanation of the present to give context and history. This makes us really consider the idea that “safety should not be the defining virtue of their lives”. |