I have been reading post about animal rights and if they favor it or not, but is that really what we should be focusing on in English class? It is a very interesting and debatable topic but I don't believe that's what we are suppose to take from this unit. This unit emphasizes on the understanding of ethos, pathos, and logos. The use of animal rights passages just helps us understand these rhetorical argument strategies to write a strong persuasive essay. So if the articles were about technology would we all be think about that, instead of the intended purpose?
I understand some student can blog about animal rights and still implement the element of persuasion but I also feel that this is not what's happening. I think this lack of understanding has to do with us as students just focusing on getting our work done. We focus on annotating and getting our rhetorical précis done but don't realize the purpose of these assignments.
Rachel, I think you're right and I thank you for pointing this out. We could be writing about anything. The blog is useful for airing out ideas and trying out the means of persuasion ourselves; this is not a unit on animal rights.
ReplyDeleteAll ERW units are like this. Students DO tend to get wrapped up in content, which have to be meaty and engaging enough for us to find things to talk about, but the entire point of the class is to learn how to recognize rhetorical devices and persuasive appeals, and to use them ourselves as we craft strong essays.
Rachel I think you are completely right. We should focus more on the reason why we are doing these assignments, but all we worry about is getting all our work done and not truly trying to grasp the concept of the unit.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with you. It took me till now, reading your post, why I just wasn't understanding our assignment. I read the ethos, pathos, and logos article while focusing on the animal rights side of it all. Even with knowing how Fletcher and her class works from the previous year, I neglected to realize the true lesson from this all.
ReplyDeleteI feel like most of us undermined the whole point of the lesson mostly because it was introduced in the front of the articles. When I was annotating I found myself pointing out the obvious parts which is animals feel pain, when I should have been looking for the authors usage of ethos, pathos, and logos. I remember Ms. Fletcher always bringing up the concept of ethos, pathos, and logos, but I was so caught up in the whole animal rights aspect of it that it totally just flew past my brain.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you. I just got caught up with everything that we've been doing and I was just trying to get my work done. I overlooked what the real purpose of this assignment was, which was to look at the author's use of pathos, logos, and ethos, and instead of doing that I just talked about animal rights, which is an interesting topic, but definitely not what this whole assignment was about.
ReplyDeleteSome people do just rush through the work to get it done, everyone has done it before, but I feel like we should just look at the big picture. When we do our work we should get the purpose of it and not just do it for completion. These rhetorical appeals will make us greater writers, we need to take advantage of this learning opportunity.
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