ENG 103:01 Group 4

Just before the movie  Thank You for Smoking  was released, Charlie Rose (PBS) interviewed Christopher Buckley (the author of the original book), Jason Reitman (the script writer and director of the movie), David Sacks (who produced the movie, his first), and Aaron Eckhardt (the actor who played Nick Naylor). I find this interview interesting for a variety of reasons, some of which I will detail here. 1.  Buckley notes that Reitman had been screening the movie at college campuses across the country. Reitman recalls one particular showing at the University of California at Berkeley, which he says is an intimidating place to screen a "libertarian film" (more on that later).  During the Q & A session (after the film), one older lady stood up and starting berating him for not going after Big Tobacco for doing such evil things.  And the students starting booing her until she shut up.  Reitman is quite pleased with that response.  Why? 2.  El...

Rhetoric is far more intertwined within society than I could have ever expected it to be. I am looking for rhetoric everywhere I look, whether it's the news or at a department store. One thing I particularity found interesting was on how we can use it to sway people to exercise more.. Many people may know that I am trying to become a Physical Education Teacher, and it is part of my job to motivate young adults to adopt healthy behaviors for life. If I learn how to use rhetoric effectively than I am almost guaranteed to sway these young adults to achieve there health goals. Approaching rhetoric with Pathos is a method to pull emotion into why it is important to build healthy habits like exercise, and why achieving your body shape goals are achievable through hard work.

Now that our eyes have been opened to rhetoric I have begun to notice how rhetoric is used everywhere. I tend to specifically notice rhetoric in media, really just advertisements. Many advertisements will use a rhetorical appeal to build and construct arguments to sway consumers to pursue and purchase whatever product or service the company is selling. With advertisements in media, it's a bit different than the rhetoric we have been studying in class, in-class we only really see rhetoric in say a court setting, or someone talking to a group of people with there full attention. But with advertisements people aren't usually paying close attention to them, so ad companies have to find a way to get the important information across, while grabbing, and keeping, the attention of the consumer, all while within a thirty second to a couple minute time frame. So what advertisements are, is a simple version of rhetoric where a company is trying to convince masses to purchase whatever the...

In class, we've been constantly discussing how people do or don't have a responsibility to society, looking at that, what we need to think about is what each person's motivations are, and what leads them to do actions. As an example, take a wealthy public figure and imagine they did something to make the public or media mad, so next to get back on the good side of the public, they would make an expensive donation, or start a charity, or even just apologize to have the public and media back on their side. Now some would, no most would say that's just them that doesn't apply to the "average joe," then think of this, a complete random person, "your average joe" if you will, donates to a charity. Why did they do this? To be a good person or because they have a duty to society, no, they did this because, in the end, it makes them look better to the public, or even if it's an anonymous donation, they are still making themselves feel better by doing...

I was really interested in the first chapter of Thank You for Arguing because I thought it gave a lot of great tips on how to use it in your papers. I liked how it gave me a background on how rhetoric came to be. The ancient Greeks apparently created it and they thought rhetoric was an essential skill for leadership. They thought it was so important that they placed it at the center of higher education. Rhetoric helped create the worlds first democracies that later trained Julius Caesar, Marcus Tulles Cicero and many more famous scholars. I also like Aristotle's three traits of credible leadership because I believe that we can apply those to our everyday life and use them with good intentions.