Mandatory Response #1

Sorry this is late, I was out of town...is that a legitimate excuse? I fear not. (also, for anyone reading this not in our class, pathetic = use of pathos)

I don't really know what to make of the reading. It just seems so blatantly obvious. Like, yes, invoking emotions in your  readers will make you a more influential rhetor. Ok? Was that ever in question? Believing in those emotions or pathos, or pretending to, makes you more credible. Yeah, duh? I think this is kind of my problem with rhetoric. Employing logos, pathos or ethos makes you a more convincing narrator/author/orator/rhetor. Is this actually a concept someone doesn't understand? Maybe we're supposed to clue into the abundance of rhetoric in the deluge of "objective" media. It seems like a concept that should be taught in Kindergarten. "Anytime anyone wants you to believe something, they are going to use rhetoric to try to make you believe it." Rhetoric can be used to convey a point or argue a position, as well it should be. I guess it probably is worth while, though, to be reminded that those forces are at play all around us and to be aware of ulterior, or true, motives.

The creative piece we read by Scott Russell Sanders is pathetic. Even if he tried to write the piece academically, it would still be pathetic. From a human perspective, there is no way to present the facts (an alcoholic father, neglected and hurt children, a mother in shambles, and an untimely death) without appealing to readers' emotions. Not to undermine his piece, it is quite moving, but "rhetoric" is unavoidable in any piece of substance. Humans read for the rhetoric, the appeals and prods to parts of themselves that aren't on the surface. We want our narrator to have a credible voice through ethos, or we want to be convinced through logos, or we want to get emotionally involved in the case of pathos and Sanders.

Sanders uses rhetoric effectively, and therefore his piece is effective. When he says, "We had no way of understanding Father's drinking except as an act of will, a deliberate folly or cruelty, a moral weakness, a sin.", the reader immediately empathizes with a family struck by illness and pain. Dozens of other slices of Sanders' piece uses rhetoric to make the reader understand the piece on an emotionally relevant level. It is the use of rhetoric that makes Under the Influence a non-academic read.