Understanding Rhetoric
I
couldn’t find the article “Why Rhetoric?” but I did read “Writing Identities.”
In this particular reading, the cartoon was trying to get some point across
about how you have to present yourself when you are trying to make certain
points, or if you want to be a credible source.
One example given was that if you state that you are a college freshman
when writing on a blog aimed at teenagers applying for college, or stating that
you’re a freshman in college when trying to discuss peace in the Middle
East. You won’t be as credible in the
latter discussion. This has something to
do with rhetoric, but it got lost on me.
I didn’t quite understand what was going on in the story. There was a superhero, some lady doing a
bunch of wardrobe changes and some other guy who nobody seemed to pay much
attention to. I didn’t quite understand
how theses stories worked together.
There
was another story about how you come off to other people when trying to speak
with them. You don’t want to sell
yourself short, or oversell yourself either.
The example in the cartoon was when the girl wanted to get an internship
in a field that she normally doesn’t work in.
In order for her to get said internship, she had to sell herself as a
person who does work in that field. Her
first draft of her letter stated that she wanted to do the internship even
though it wasn’t what she was used to.
She undersold herself. The second
draft oversold her when she embellished a couple of things on her résumé to
make herself stand out. It wasn’t until
the third draft that she gave proper examples of things that she had actually
done that really would help her in getting the internship.
Karl, I totally agree with you that the cartoon makes the messages they are trying to give really confusing to understand. I think we aren’t the only ones that don’t appreciate this comic format to talk about a subject like this one. From what I’ve got from the story, the woman changing her clothes is kind of a metaphor for what the superhero was trying to “teach” us; so it represented the roles that people have in life and how we have to act according to each part. For example, the woman having specifics clothes to go to de gym and different ones to go to work. Representing that she has to be dressed in an appropriate way to every task she has. It wouldn’t make sense for us if one of our teachers showed up to the class dressed with gymnastics clothes, we wouldn’t take him/her seriously. I think that connects to the subject as a state of how we have to adapt ourselves to our audience. But I’m not sure if that was the author’s intention and I also have no idea what the other guy was doing there.
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