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November, 2012

  1. RCL #10: Visual Rhetoric

    November 29, 2012 by Taylor Kantner

    The piece of visual rhetoric I chose was this picture above of a person using a fork and a knife, but rather than using them as they are intended to they are flipped around and used as chopsticks. I think this picture would catch a lot of people’s attention because it is a strange thing to see, but also because of the meaning behind. Now that the world population is growing and China has become the largest country in the world, their culture could become the new normal. A study by Nation Geographic a few years ago even said the world’s most typical person is a 25 year old Han Chinese man. China also manufactures most of the things we sell here in the United States as well, so they have a lot power in that aspect. Chinese restaurants are becoming more and more popular today and I know for me anyway it’s one of my favorite kinds of food. I think the fact that this picture uses a fork and knife to demonstrate their point is interesting. Chopsticks could have easily been used to get the point across too, but I don’t think it would have the same effect as the fork and knife does. The fork and knife shows that our culture is changing and melting into theirs. Something that also caught my eye was the word integration on the left side of the picture. That word makes the point seem even stronger than just the picture and just in case anyone didn’t understand the picture at first, after reading integration now grasps what the illustration fully means. So this picture is definitely a good piece of visual rhetoric that could really get people to think and realize how big of an effect the Chinese culture has on us.


  2. RCL #9 – Analysis of a TED talk

    November 1, 2012 by Taylor Kantner

    http://www.ted.com/talks/patricia_kuhl_the_linguistic_genius_of_babies.html

    The TED talk I viewed was Patricia Kuhl speaking about “The Linguistic Genius of Babies.” Her talk was actually pretty interesting to me because some of what she said I didn’t know before. Some of her main points were that babies learned language and understanding words through statistics. So babies are actually pretty genius with understanding speech until something happens as they grow older and their brains don’t work that way anymore. Babies only a few months old, about 6-8 months, listen to humans talk and use statistics to gather the important words they need to know. This speech was actually pretty interesting for me. I learned a lot about babies and the way they learn to speak that I hadn’t known before. One thing that I think stuck with me the most is the results obtained from an actual human speaking to a infant and an infant listening to people talk on a TV. The babies in this experiment didn’t learn as much through the speaking on the TV as they did with an actual human being speaking to them. I thought this was a pretty fascinating point that was made. I think this speaker did a pretty good job with engaging her audience. She used visuals and examples of what she was talking about so it definitely helped people better understand what she meant by some ideas mentioned. I also liked how she showed the difference between an American mom talking to her baby and a Japanese mom and how the sound of each language was different. I never actually knew why the whole R and L pronunciation was so difficult, but after listening to the difference I could tell. She also wasn’t monotone the whole time and did use inflection in her voice. She made some jokes so it wasn’t just straight fact the whole time through and it made it more interesting. There is a difference between delivering a speech and giving a presentation. Delivering a speech is just a way of getting your word out there for people to hear and reciting something that had been memorized. Giving a presentation is a speech that also should engage the audience and keep them interested, using visual aids to enhance the speech. I think Patricia does a nice job with her speech/presentation. It was really effective and I feel like I learned a lot from it.


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