Literacy

To be completely honest with you, the instances where I fully understand what my teacher wants me to get out of assigned literature are few and far between.  I blame the teachers, but even more, I blame American culture.  Perhaps blame is the wrong word to be using in this scenario.   Blame has a negative connotation.  The reason I hardly understand what exactly my teacher wants me to grasp is because I have been taught to reach for everything from a very young age.  I have been taught about so many different ways to analyze a single piece of literature that I feel it is a shame to just loommok at any work through a single lens.  In the article "From Silence to Words: Writing as Struggle", the author Min-Zhan Lu grew up speaking two different languages, English at home and standard Chinese at school.  Due to the fact that at school, Lu was assigned readings that were mostly communist manifesto, I can see why she began to read her assigned readings and her pleasure readings through different lenses.  But in present day America, the land of endless opportunity, I have learned the art of total analysis no matter what the literary venue may be.  I appreciate descriptive language and metaphors about roses and lilacs and the summer breeze even if it has been assigned to me by a teacher.  I take note of every excellent utilization of ethos, logos, or pathos in articles I read for business or for pleasure.

It is these reasons that I approach every piece of literature, school or home related, the same way.  I approach each for what it is, a piece a literature.  I take in everything.  I think of all the underlying meanings that could exist.  I ponder the possibilities of each subtle nuance of the reading.  And once all that is done, I think of why exactly I read the article or novel and react in the appropriate manner.  It is in this un-biased manner of reading literature that suits me.  I need to understand what the piece is saying before I can understand what my teachers are asking for.

I Love Stephen King

To continue along the topic of storytelling I would like to take some time out of my day and thank a man that has kept me entertained throughout my teenage and young adult life, Stephen King.  In my opinion Stephen King is a master storyteller.  The way he draws you into his creepy little world, has you sitting on the edge of your seat, and then throws a plot twist at you harder than a Roger Clemens curve ball.  Although I have never been required to read one of King's novels for any scholastic reasons I have read dozens.  Would you like to know why?  Because I love to read.  Would you like to know why?  Because of people like Stephen King.  Master storytellers that entrance us and bring generations together.  It is because of people like Stephen King that little kids begin to pick up books and increase their vocabulary, their imaginations, their creative minds, not teachers.  Teachers can lay the tools down for kids but through stories are how the human being learns to use these tools to tell stories of its own.  You don't even have to be a master storyteller to inspire.  Parents who pick up books and read to their children or tell them stories that have been passed down by generations past, are storytellers.  What I want from you, the readers of this blog, to do for me today, is to sit back and think of your favorite storyteller, and think about what they have done for you and how they have helped you grow.  Whether that storyteller is your favorite author, your mom, your grandpa, even your 1st grade teacher. Just sit back and creatively give them a little mental appreciation, it's what they helped teach you how to do.

The Donkey Lady

“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”  An excellent quote by Philip Pullman, one with which I happen to agree with.  Stories are dynamic.  They are told to entertain, to relate, to teach, to inspire, even to scare.  Although the stories told by different cultures vary, they are all meant to instill and reflect the values (some good, some bad) of each individual culture.  Today I feel like sharing a story that was told to me, and many other children from San Antonio, at some point in my childhood, that instilled interest, and that has stuck with me up to this point in my life.  It is the story of The Donkey Lady, and yes...it is meant to scare...children at least.  Here we go!

A long time ago, when San Antonio was only beginning to become what it is today, there lived in the rural country-side, an old lady.  While she was a sweet old lady, she kept to herself.  She had no friends, and any relatives she had left, if any, had stopped coming to visit years ago.  Her only companion in life was her pet donkey.  For many years they lived in solitude.  Everyday the lady would take her donkey over the bridge that spanned an old creek, so that the donkey could graze in the fields on the other side.  It was a peaceful existence.

As the years passed more and more people moved to the countryside and the lady and her donkey got neighbors.  The children of those neighbors would go across the bridge everyday as well and play in the fields where the donkey would graze.  One day two young boys got into a fight and one of them got a big bruise on his arm because of the scuffle.  The boy who caused the bruise didn't want to get in trouble, so he told the other boy to tell his father that it was the old lady's donkey that caused the bruise instead of him.

When the little boys father heard that the donkey had bruised the boy he was very angry.  He gathered up the other fathers and went to the bridge the next morning to wait for the old lady and her donkey.  As soon as the two arrived in the very middle of the bridge, all of the men jumped out and grabbed the lady and threw her poor donkey over the edge of the bridge.  Seeing as the donkey could not swim, it was swept away by the current and drowned.  The old lady began to weep and the men began to make braying sounds, taunting and making fun of the old lady.  As the men started to walk away, the old lady threw rocks at them, in order to cause them pain just as they caused her donkey pain.  This angered the men once again, so they went back to the bridge and threw the old lady over the edge as well.  She was never seen again.

Rumor has it that to this day, if you go to the bridge on Old Applewhite Road, past the Toyota plant, at night, and if you wait long enough...you will hear the old lady crying for her dead donkey, and if you start braying just as the men did...the ghost of the old lady will come to throw stones at you, and that donkey hooves will slam against the hood of your car.

An Elaboration on Texting and Driving

In my last post I spoke about how technology, at times, turns us into mindless zombies.  During the post I briefly mentioned that, sadly, this occurs while people are behind the wheel of a car as well.  Texting and driving is a topic of great interest to me, so I decided to look into other blogs that cover this topic, to find out what kind of rhetoric others use while trying to warn people about texting and driving.

The first post I read was from the blog of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD).  The post was a guest post written by Sandy Spavone, the Executive Director of National Organizations for Youth Safety (NOYS).  The fact that she is an executive director of a national organization already spoke to her credibility (ethos). Spavone began her post by sharing an intimate moment of her life, where she tells us her brother lost a child to drunk driving.  This immediately appealed to my emotions (pathos) and invoked a feeling of sympathy towards her brother, and scorn against the act of drinking and driving.  Once she had me on her side (as if I wasn't already), she got to the topic I had been waiting for.  The new threat of distracted driving due to texting.  Spavone then began throwing numbers and facts at me (logos).  She told me that, "while 97 percent of teens know texting while driving is dangerous, 43 percent of them admit to sending a text while driving, and 75 percent say their friends text and drive."  You know what that means...Yup!  People are much more likely to snitch on their friends than on themselves...but in all seriousness, this statistic clearly shows that more people need to own up to their bad habits and figure out how to remove texting and driving from their lives.  Spavone then increased her credibility further by mentioning that AT&T is taking an initiative to prevent texting and driving and even gave me a link to the page where I could make my pledge to not text and drive.  Here is the link  www.itcanwait.com I certainly hope you decide to take the pledge as well.

So what did I learn from that first post?  I learned it is definitely effective to utilize pathos at first when trying to get your readers attention, and to make sure they're interested in playing for your team.  After that, it is in the writer's advantage to gain credibility by quoting a more reliable source or spitting out some relevant facts to really draw the reader in, and make readers feel like the initial feelings they experienced during pathos were rightly felt.  After reading the first blog post I felt that all three rhetorical strategies were necessary to truly convince an audience, although, in Spavone's post, even during her pathos inducing story about her brother, her tone made it feel like a boring public service announcement or commercial...the second blog post left no sort of feeling.

The second blog was started by this family run and family owned company that is against texting and driving called, 'Don't Text and Drive'.  The post is an email that the company recieved from a reader.  It is called 'I wish I never saw it!', the author is anonymous.

When I began reading, I expected another short anecdote (I don't know why, the title doesn't appear to relay that) and maybe some facts spit at me afterwards...I received nothing of the sort.  This parent from London proceeded to tell me a gruesome story of how they work at a facility that handles wrecked vehicles before they are sent to the junkyard or sold to another facility for parts.  They said that plenty of vehicles come in with blood stains all over the place and that they were used to that, but one day they saw a van with a child's seat in it that, "was half its original width in the middle and was obviously twisted out of shape from the impact."  The parent then admits that they, "lost it right then and there i just sat down and cried."  Later the parent finds out from their boss that the crash occured because the mother driving was texting and ran a red light...

Holy smokes batman...the second blog post utilized literally no logos and little pathos, but evicted a much stronger reaction out of me than the first.  What it really goes to show is if you have a compelling story, tell it.  If you have some compelling facts, share them.  But in the end I believe there is an appropriate ratio of ethos, logos, and pathos for each and every situation.  It just depends on the scenario, and the audience you're trying to reach.

Blog 1: http://www.madd.org/blog/2012/sept/texting-while-driving.html

Blog 2: http://www.textinganddrivingsafety.com/dont-text-and-drive-blog/

My technology rant, fools.

The scene is set...it's a beautiful day. Birds are chirping. Squirrels are getting abnormally close to people as they walk by. Thousands of students are on their way to class at Texas A&M University. I myself am one of those students. I look down and notice that my shoe is untied so I kneel down to tie it. Several seconds later, I proceed to be kicked in the face by another student who was too busy "hash tagging" to watch where they were walking.

Sadly this is the scene almost everywhere. What's even more sad is that people do this in much more critical situations than just walking. Many a student, myself included, have absolutely wasted entire class periods due to our obscure obsession with finding out what homegirl is doing later tonight. AND STILL...the scenarios get worse. Every one of us has seen those horrendous commercials of that guy with no limbs that was texting and driving...ok maybe he had a couple limbs, but I for one would like to have all of my limbs.

I admit it, that last paragraph got pretty intense, so lets get into some of the subtle nuances of this technological invasion. I take it back they're not subtle at all. Have you ever been out to dinner with your friends or a certain special someone like your grandma, and after noticing silence you look up form your meal to find one if not all of your compadres nose deep in some app they just downloaded? I bet you have. Have you done that to someone else? I bet you have. Have I done that to someone? You better believe it. It's gotten to the point where I see people completely stop in mid-step just because they are so into what's on their tiny little screens. I for one am terrified. Terrified of a world of technologically dependent zombies that don't know or care whether they live in an alternate computer, Matrix like, reality because all they ever look at is their tiny little screens.

Who knows? We may be living there right now...

What is culture?

What is culture?  Can you even give it a single definition?  What am I even talking about?  I am talking about being cultured, embracing culture.  But what is one man's definition of such a broad topic?  In order to gain a true understanding of culture I believe it takes the collaboration of many cultured minds.

This whole time I've been speaking about two different things.  Culture and being cultured.  Culture, my best definition at least, is the lifestyle and daily actions of a group of people that share similar backgrounds.  I know, that sounds like the definition of a nation, I told you I was trying my best.  But when you think about it most people that share a nation share a lot of the same culture as well.  They go hand in hand, in my opinion.  It was put best by some hot shot author whose definition of culture I read.  I would like to quote him but I forgot to bring my book with me, I am sorry Dr. Melzow.  His statement went something like, "Culture is not the pre-packaged things you come to expect from an area but the subtle nuances of the population." Once again, please excuse my horrible etiquette, I will include an exact quote in my next blog post.

It is impossible to understand the word cultured unless you understand the word culture because, in my opinion, being cultured is having an understanding of many cultures besides (and including) your own. I am again incredibly sorry but I am about to quote another intellectual without any material.  "Being cultured is knowing the best things that have been done and said."  Or something along those lines, but irregardless it is a near perfect definition if you're asking me...oh wait, this is my blog...

You are asking me...