Rhetoric is power. As Mr. Plato from ancient Greece puts it, “rhetoric is the art of ruling the minds of men”. I heard this quote back in my tenth grade English class, and my chin jolted up in interest. Now, I may have zoned out soon after as my teacher droned on about logos, ethos, and pathos… but the important thing is that this was my first definition of rhetoric.  After nearly five years of learning what I was told to be “persuasive writing” and a consecutive three years of learning about “rhetoric”, I realized once we put out the fancy lights and cut down the term to its bare bones, rhetoric is really just an ability one can learn and develop.

Of course, I’m not trying to denounce the interpretations of other rhetors like Kenneth Burke who views rhetoric as symbolic action or even George Kennedy who claims rhetoric to be a form of communicative energy. To be honest, I also nodded my head in agreement as Michael Young eloquently convinced an entire english class that rhetoric is literally everything.

Additionally, the sophists viewed rhetoric as wisdom, something that they could teach and sell to other people. This idea was widely unpopular as it meant that they were teaching people how to get away with bad things. However, the sophists argued that wisdom had some sort of “truth” and that true rhetoric can never be “bad” as it reaches for the truth.

Plato called bullshit on this and so do I. Rhetoric is similar to a tool, or better an ability one acquires over time. It can be used for good and bad by the user, but in of itself, it has no bias. Let me demonstrate just how powerful rhetoric can be.

Last week a friend of mine came to me for help. She had forgotten to submit an important assignment and had been so occupied with her finals work that she did not reply to her professor’s many emails asking for it. From a student’s perspective? Understandable. From a professor’s? Unacceptable. Her professor was furious, and rightly so. He was determined to give her a zero on that assignment and that would mean she, a normally straight A student, would get a B in that class.

Infamous as a veteran late work submitter, she came to me for a solution and I had one ready. The art of submitting late work is really all rhetoric. Your goal is to persuade your intended audience to give you most if not all the points for the late assignment. First, you must start your email with praises and put the professor in a good mood. To make this rhetoric work it is necessary to hook the audience so that they will listen to the rest of your argument. Then sympathize with them for how stressful it must have been because of you. This is still part of the hook, but you are going a little deeper using pathos to develop an emotional connection with the intended audience. 

Then make them sympathize with you and explain your situation. Rhetoric is, in essence, a conversation, there is a give and take. You expressed yourself so allow your audience to express themselves. 

Lastly, and most importantly, make it about them, not you. Don’t show that you are desperate and anxious to get a good grade, tell the professor that you understand that you might not be able to receive late points and that’s fine, but tell them you want them to look over and give you feedback so that even if you don’t get the grade you still learn from it.

This is important because it sets up your ethos. You’re a good student. You care about the class. You care about learning, and you respect the feedback of your instructor. Show the professor that you have the credibility of a truly good student (even if you really don’t). 

Now, this is where your work will also shine. You used the foot in the door technique to make your professor give your work a chance, even if they intend to not grade it. Set up your logos by showing the professor how much effort you put in and how worthy it is of getting a good grade. Make your assignment so powerful and effective that the audience feels a desire to give you credit for such amazing work.

There we go! The rhetoric of getting away with late assignments. Now that is true power. Thanks Professor Young for unleashing my true potential! 

(P.S. I just thought it was really funny how I was explaining things in rhetorical terms. The last part of this blog post is basically a rewording of what I sent my friend through text.)

Okay, so it’s 3:00am and I am really not in the serious mindset so lets pick on something dumb and funny: Shipyourenemiesglitter.com. So this was a really funny social media thing back in 2015 (when I didn’t really use social media) and it’s constantly been recurring on Instagram and Twitter or whatnot for the constant new generations of social media users.

Now five years later, Shipyourenemiesglitter.com is still up and running and it seems to me they’re even profitting. I guess the occasional angsty teenager deciding to pay over $10.00 to have someone mail a pack of glitter for them is enough money to keep the site up and running. Yes, that’s right. It costs more than ten dollars to send the very basic glitter package to your enemy, friend, frenemies or whatever. I guess you could even send these to your boss but if you’re old enough and smart enough to work a job then you would have realized a long time ago that buying a pack of glitter costs $2.00 to $3.00 at Walmart and mailing them to someone at a post office like fifty cents.

Of course you’ll have to do the work of filling up your envelope with the glitter you bought, but that’s hardly any work and really doesn’t equate to around $7.00 which you could use to buy yourself a meal. Really the only marketable audience for this stupid business are dumb teens going through puberty or young people that are too ignorant and uneducated to understand how mailing an letter at the post office works which really shouldn’t be a problem because… well we have Google.

Additionally there are other services this website provides such as sending confetti, plastic penises, literal poop, and more for higher prices which really isn’t that better than the glitter themselves other than the actual poop because its pretty gross to be carrying your poop and putting it in a package and mailing it so it might be worth it to pay the $15.00 to send some cow manure to your worst enemy. Additionally, they offer a service of sending a “text bomb” for $2.00. Are you (excuse the language) ******** kidding me? You could literally do that with your phone or a phone app that hides your number.

But here’s the surprising thing. The reason this useless business made it on to Startup Central is this: the creator sold the website for $85,000 and claimed to have made six figures in sales. Matthew Carpenter, a self described entrepreneur and marketing professional pulled off an incredible media stunt that net him six times the yearly pay of a minimum wage worker within a few weeks of hardcore trolling.

Essentially what Carpenter did was this. As an SEO(Search Engine Optimization) professional and media analyst, he understood that the media loved and was desperate for weird ideas. On top of that he learned that media sourcing can be really lazy meaning news outlets were just outsourcing content from other sites and citing them instead of doing their own investigating. Using this idea he targeting platforms like Reddit and Product Hunt to blow up the website service and once that gained some traction he targeted news outlets by contacting them directly. Honestly, brilliant. This dude is a marketing genius.

 

https://shipyourenemiesglitter.com/item/Text-Bomb-64

Exclusive: How This Man Got the Media to Fall for ShipYourEnemiesGlitter Stunt

A few weeks ago I did a Startup Central blog post on Airbnb, and this week I have something very similar for you: AirGarage. Air Garage is a startup founded by three young university students in 2016. Like Airbnb, the founders of AirGarage Scott, Chelsea, and Jonathon, found a local needs issue that could be projected to a global market: insane parking prices at their university. Similar to the trio that founded Airbnb, they turned to local drive ways that were sitting there unused to pitch an incredible idea, “are you willing to rent your driveway to parkers in need?”

Many that first encounter AirGarage will dismiss it as another Airbnb targeting parking spaces, but the thing is this is a market that’s never been touched before. According to their official website Airgara.ge, “parking real estate is inefficiently used throughout cities”. According to Angel.co, a website evaluating startups, AirGarage is capable of turning empty parking lots and driveways into money making machines. Additionally, AirGarage is capable of repurposing 30% of the American city currently occupied by parking.

For example, how many times have you traveled to a city and learned that the hotel only offers valet parking which costs almost half as much as the room cost you’re paying for the stay? Then, after an hour of driving around the nearby neighborhood, you weren’t able to find a suitable parking space and submitted to paying the ridiculous fee for a night of parking. For many of us out there, money isn’t a luxury to spend, especially on fancy parking services, and the bigger the city is, the less likely hotels are going to have large parking lots for their guests.

This is a problem that many travelers face especially when some kind of event is happening and there are barely any parking space to go around for the residents themselves. What makes things even worse is that only the locals know where cheap areas to park are, and many hidden locations that could be used as a parking space is left untouched and travelers new to the city have to submit to the ridiculous parking prices of the official parking garages and valet services.

This no longer is a problem with AirGarage. They will literally dig into the city’s nook and crannies to find cheap and suitable parking locations offered up by the locals and you will be able to attend the conference, concert, or where ever you need to go without having to spend time stressing out about where you’re going to park your car.

According to Pitchbook.com, the startup has managed to raise more than $2.25 million from six investors and are looking into more deals to expand their horizons. Personally, I think this startup will make it really big and will likely be bought by a big company like Airbnb or an equivalent institution. Startup score: 9/10, definitely would invest if they go public.

 

https://angel.co/company/airgarageinc

https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/267107-59

https://airgara.ge/about

For this passion blog, I am going to have a throwback to my old theme on success psychology. Last semester a large focus all my blog posts shared was attitude and mindset and their affect on individual success and happiness. Well here is a quote from Confucius that I’ve heard numerous times during Learning Enrichment in High School where they basically branded certain students as gifted, and gave them to a bunch of resources and opportunities other students didn’t have access to.

 

“If you’re the smartest person in the room, you are in the wrong room.”

– Confucius

 

Although now that I am thinking about this, there’s a whole topic I want to talk about on engineering privileged children to be more talented and gifted than their peers, today I will focus on the enthymeme in this specific quote and leave that rant for a later post.

The major premise: You are in the wrong room.

The minor premise: You are the smartest person in the room.

The hidden premise: You should be in a room with people just as smart as you.

I think this quote is really interesting because the premises themselves don’t mean exactly what they mean. There are hidden meanings at play here and that’s what makes this so interesting. When I first thought of this quote, I thought I finally found the quote I was looking for. Since enthymemes have a hidden premise that links two ideas without explicitly stating it, this quote with a seemingly missing middle phrase was a perfect fit! However, as I started analyzing the quote and trying to frame it as an enthymeme, I started to question myself, is this really a enthymeme or am I just kind of… forcing it?

Okay, to be honest I am still not very sure, but if we pair each literal premise with the secret meaning (premise) it makes more sense.

The hidden premise:

You should be in a room with people just as smart as you.

(You can improve yourself by being with people you can learn from).

The minor premise:

You are the smartest person in the room.

(There is nothing to learn from the people here).

The major premise:

You are in the wrong room.

(You can’t improve yourself any further if you stay).

Now if we just put the two secret meaning premises corresponding with the literal major and minor premises: “There is nothing to learn from the people here. You can’t improve yourself any further if you stay.” – Reubens the Lees

Now that makes a lot more sense as an enthymeme! The implied premise is that you can’t improve if you can’t keep learning.

So to end this on a positive note, if you are not the best, that only means you are capable of getting even better!

 

(PS when I was looking for pictures to demonstrate this idea I found another enthymeme(refer to the frog well image at the top) with the unstated assumption: The well is smaller than the ocean.)

Looking back at the campus experience we were able to enjoy during the fall semester, some of the most enjoyable memories were of walking back and forth through the numerous greenery and architecture the University Park campus had to offer as we transitioned between classes. Accordingly, the mode of transportation was very different for us than the majority of people in the world. In many of my classes there was often a person who came rolling in on a scooter. As I walked between classes, I frequently saw students zipping by on smooth rolling electronic scooters, and on the rare occasions there were the students on self balancing electronic boards that made me think, about the first time I saw these back in 2015.

At the time, these self balancing scooters and boards were all the rage. Excitedly calling them “hoverboards”, many of us bought these state of the art technology as expensive gifts while others spent countless hours on their school issued laptops watching videos of wealthy people gliding around on these like some kind of sci-fi film. In fact these electronic transportation devices was supposed to be the next big thing, and we were supposed to be all utilizing them on a regular basis.

Now, however, 20 years later self-balancing technology has become the norm, and rarely will anyone get excited over seeing this kind of technology. In fact, many of us have decided that this technology is not “advanced enough” for us yet, and the inconveniences these boards cost us such as their relatively heavy weight, and bulky size outweigh the benefits of saving energy spent on physically walking around.

Here, I want to talk about Segway, a company that served as the flagship of the self balancing scooter hype, and how their potential to see huge success did not follow through.

Even now self balancing technology is a scientific marvel. Being able to measure balance through the gravitational pull, then up-righting that balance with a motor and moving the attached wheel in that direction just enough until another imbalance is detected and adjusting for that, while also having to rotate the wheel for forward and backward propulsion, all in real time is a technological feat that resembles AI technology. Similar to how our brains work, this software analyzes and performs multiple interrelated tasks in real time. When they say we can’t multitask, we can, we are doing it every moment of our lives.

The thing is, the technology wasn’t the problem, nor was the people using the technology. It might have been expensive but people were still buying it. The biggest issue, as Jeff Bezos put it when asked to critique Segway in its beginner stages, was that “are people going to be allowed to use it?”

A revolutionary technology and a revolutionary company missed its chance to grow further in the spotlight because of annoying governmental regulations. If you want society to continue to develop and present state of the art technology, please lift the ban on scooters on campus because honestly, its really annoying.