9/29/16- Ben Dottinger

The accomplishments of today's class begin with the finale of the "Literary Toolbox" presentations, where the final group (of Zabrina Branning, Nick Colaco, Elias Frieling, and myself) looked through the class examples of anadiplosis, cacophony, imagery, and parallelism. Overall, the objective of this presentation was to offer the entirety of the class a strong source of up to 24 brand new literary terms. Following the end of the presentations, the class continued to foray into 1) analyzing the similarities and differences between literature and rhetoric and 2) evaluating the various components of the rhetorical triangle. It was established that analysis is a fancy way to describe when you try to understand how the parts of a composition work together. Continuing on, we learned that we’ll be doing both literary analysis, and rhetorical analysis. The main difference between literature and rhetoric is that literature is anything that tells a story (be it Breaking Bad, Romeo and Juliet, or certain newspaper articles), while rhetoric is anything that is argumentative; it is meant to persuade someone to do something. It is important to remember that rhetoric is aimed at SOMEONE, because it is important to know your audience so you can pick the best tactics for efficient persuasion. Pieces of rhetoric are typically speeches or letters. Class today came to a close with a review of the rhetorical triangle. First, there is logos, the most important part of your argument. Logos refers to your logic in the essay, or the objective statistics. Following logos is ethos and pathos, which is your credibility and your appeal to the audience’s emotion (see the picture below to see the rhetorical triangle). It is important to include all three sides of the triangle in order to prevent a weak argument riddled with a lack of evidence, sophistry, and apathy (respectively). Anyway, that is all! Until next time.