Tess Kehoe's blog

Throughout this semester, by learning and practicing how to analyze rhetoric and relate it back to current issues, it has changed the way that I now view texts. When I watch perfectly crafted speeches presented by politicians, I can’t help but consider how the author designed it for us to interpret the message. Word choice and transitions are everything when trying to create a convincing argument, which is crucial when the words are coming from a controversial figure. How people can take a horrible argument and make it seem so rational is fascinating to me. Back to my first passion blog post about the Peoples Temple and the Jonestown mass killing, Jim Jones convinced 900 people to kill themselves in the hopes of being united with the light. With manipulative rhetoric and years of brainwashing, he pulled off the second most fatal killing in American history. Obviously not all rhetoric is used in such a malicious intent, there are good uses such as the Red Cross encouraging people to donate blood and Presidents advocating for citizens to vote.  

In our first unit, it was interesting to learn that technically anything can be a civic artifact, from a Department of Justice memo to a perfume commercial. I never thought about commercials in that way before, that a ring or perfume advertisement would be perpetuating gender stereotypes and sexism. Without using direct words, they often objectify women’s bodies and set unrealistic beauty standards. The paradigm shift unit showed me that cultural changes must occur for policies to be enacted and accepted. For example, interracial marriage was federally illegal but states were independently making it legal, as more states legalized and the people accepted interracial marriage, the Supreme Court case, Loving vs Virginia in 1967 set a landmark precedent. In this semester, I have grown a lot as a writer and a public speaker, with a new understanding for how bodies of work are created.