Everything's an Argument Ch 6 Thought Piece

Robert Young

English 250

Section PN

2/5/14

Everything’s an Argument: Chapter 6 Thought Piece

This chapter was all about rhetorical analyses. To be honest, I have done some of these before, and I didn’t think they were much fun, but after reading this chapter I can see how some people could have fun with it. It could almost be like a game, making arguments back and forth, analyzing each other’s writing until one of the sides is defeated. I don’t know if I would like that very much, but I know that some people would really enjoy it.

I think part of the reason that I wouldn’t be good at something like a rhetorical analysis is that I am not very good at coming up with my own arguments. I think part of the reason for this is that I was forced to come up with arguments about things that I didn’t really care anything about in high school, like whether the drinking age should be lower than what it is now or not. I don’t really plan on drinking a whole ton of alcohol, even after I turn 21, so interest on this topic was very low for me, and I didn’t have a lot of fun. However, if we were arguing over something like the impact of violence in video games, I would be a little bit more help. I have played several video games, and a few of them were pretty violent, like Star Wars: Battlefront, or Call of Duty. Even though most of the games that I play aren’t really violent, I would still have more to do with that argument than I would with the drinking age. I guess what I am trying to say is that perspective matters. If you don’t care about something you are arguing for, your arguments will seem weaker automatically.

Anyway, on the topic of the rhetorical analysis itself, I don’t really see the point. I was told in my programming class that things go a lot smoother if you don’t try to figure out why everything works, as long as they do. That completely makes sense to me. If you tried to do a rhetorical analysis on every newspaper article you saw, you would go absolutely insane. We all know that advertisements usually try to get us to buy something, newspaper articles try to inform us, etc. As a computer programmer, I won’t really need to know why advertisements work unless I am designing them myself. I will have to write documentation on any program that I write, but I probably won’t ever have to analyze other people’s writing to see what exactly they are trying to do.