Post both of your precis and your rhetorical observations in the comments section.
Please post your precis in the comments below.
Sample: In his State of the Union speech delivered on January 12, 2016, President Barack Obama emphasizes the themes of hope and change with which he began his presidency in 2007 and argues that in order to move forward as a nation, we must ignore politically motivated negativity and work towards answering four specific questions. After pointing out the fallacies in Rebublican candidates’ “peddling fiction” in their criticisms of his administration, Obama highlights his accomplishments and lays out his suggestions for making progress in the areas of national economy, climate change, national security, and political discourse. By addressing criticisms and highlighting accomplishments, Obama highlights past progress and encourages present positivity in order to suggest that by working together as a nation and focusing our attention on specific issues, we can ballast our prosperity, security, and maintain our national strength and identity. Through his confident, hopeful tone, simple diction, and use of both logos and pathos, Obama addresses all Americans in his speech, but specifically targets voters who may be swayed by current political rhetoric and negativity. Click on this link to find the inaugural addresses for all the U.S. presidents. Choose one of the speeches and identify as many propaganda techniques as you can. How many of the seven tactics that McClintock discusses can you find? Write a brief analysis of your findings and share it in the comments below. Be sure to mention which speech you are analyzing by mentioning the year and the president who delivered the speech.
Watch both of the McCain ads from the 2008 campaign and use the techniques worksheet to sort out which propaganda techniques the campaign employs in each of the ads. Choose one of the ads to blog about. In your blog, write about the techniques you observed and the effect you think they had. Also include your observations about what you believe the campaign was trying to communicate through the ad.
In the space below, post your campaign website analysis:
Check out at least 4 presidential candidate websites (links on the assignment page). Choose two of the sites and, using the ideas we discussed in class (handouts are on the resources page), analyze the splash pages. Determine the effect that each of the candidates is trying to create through the look, layout, content of the page. Are the candidates targeting specific audiences? What types of appeals are they making? How are they trying to brand themselves? Write a one paragraph analysis for each page and a third paragraph in which you compare the two pages. Remember: You are analyzing the visual presentation. If the webpage contains a lot of text, keep your focus on how the text is presented visually and the words that stand out and seem poised to grab your attention--the headlines, the words/ideas that "pop" or recur, and the prominence of certain ideas over others. MS. FRATES' BLOG:
Capote's opening descriptions are hypnotic--as rambling and open as the vast, flat landscape he evokes. The town of Holcomb and the inhabitants he describes seem satisfyingly familiar, dusty, and mundane. Even his voice feels familiar, inviting us to participate in his descriptions when he uses phrases like "unless you include, as one must, the Holcomb School..." (4); it's as if we are riding next to him like guests invited to take in the scenery as he treats us to a verbal tour. And then he shifts gears: "But then, in the earliest hours of that morning in November, a Sunday morning, certain foreign sounds impinged on the normal nightly Holcomb noises - on the keening hysteria of coyotes, the dry scrape of scuttling tumbleweed, the racing, receding wail of locomotive whistles. At the time not a soul in sleeping Holcomb heard them - four shotgun blasts that, all told, ended six human lives." (5) That "But" at the beginning of the sentence signals a shift in tone; he jars us out of the comforting, lull of everyday sights and small town bustle with the uneasiness inherent in the piercing sounds of a coyote's "keening hysteria" and a plaintive "receding wail of locomotive whistles" in the dead of night while the town's inhabitants sleep. It's as if the sounds pervading the dark of night symbolize our horror, our grief regarding that unlit, unknowable part of the human soul that from time to time unleashes itself in acts of unexplainable violence which pierce our sense of security and challenge our understanding of human nature. While the citizens of Holcomb are not awakened by the four shotgun blasts, Capote's suddenly terse description --"At the time not a soul in sleeping Holcomb heard them - four shotgun blasts that, all told, ended six human lives"(5)--wakes us up to the pivotal moment on which rests the fate of the Clutter family, Perry Smith, Dick Hickock, the town of Holcomb, the key themes and questions of Capote's magnificent book, and possibly even our own belief in the rectitude of human nature. Post your own blogs in the comments section below. Be sure to type your name at the top of your comments. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
January 2016
Categories |