Chapter 16 in Lundsford et. al 2009

Statistics and interview and evidence, oh my (this is a play on the Wizard of Oz when the main characters say "Lions and tigers and bears, oh my" in case you didn't get it). When putting together a legitimate argument with as few flaws as possible, one has to think about a laundry list of things before they even begin to gather information. What's the demographic of the audience, what evidence would appeal to them, which type of evidence would have flaws, what tone should one take, etc! It's enough to make one dizzy. Chapter 16 of Everything's an Argument drives home the fact that there are many different types of evidence that can be used to validate an argument but the type of evidence relies heavily on the kind of argument being made and the audience the argument is being presented to (Lunsford et. al 2009).



No matter what type of evidence is being analyzed in Chapter 16 of Everything's an Argument, the main point is clear: think of your audience and the point you want to make before you decide how to present evidence support your argument. Your personal observations wouldn't be valid if you're trying to make an argument about how an organization you are not a part of supports its members and gives them a stronger sense of self. Conducting interviews with the members of the organization would be a much better way to convince the audience of the argument. You may be able to gather every different type of evidence but many of those types could actually detract from your argument. For instance, I have a project to do in my linguistics class. We got to pick any topic we wanted that related to language. I chose to compare the handshapes of French Sign Language (FSL) to American Sign Language (ASL)because I knew ASL originated from FSL and I wanted to see if the languages had separated themselves in drastic ways. In order to make a case for my argument, I had to conduct interviews with people that used FSL fluently, watch movies, and analyze FSL dictionaries to gather in depth data on the language. I could make a graph showing how many signs use the different handshapes. It slightly relates to my topic but it doesn't connect enough for me to use it as evidence. Using might even turn my readers off of my paper because it's so random to bring up.

This is an fingerspelled F in FSL:

For my academic writing, the part of chapter 16 in Everything's an Argument that is most important to me is the part about secondhand evidence and research. So many of the papers I write, PowerPoint's I create and presentations I have involve gathering information from other sources. Lunsford and company provide many different ways for us to gather our secondhand information. Sometimes you can't conduct interviews with people that know what you need to know and many times being able to freely gather random information is what helps hone in on a single argument for a well thought out paper.

Re-evaluating Pan's Labyrinth

What argument is del Toro, the director of the critically acclaimed movie Pan's Labyrinth, trying to make with his part fantastical, part reality movie Pan's Labyrinth? Is he really trying to change our minds about what we perceive has real and fantasy, good and bad, right and wrong, obedience and disobedience? My previous argument about his movie was based on that very same assumption; that he was trying to rattle our cages and get us to think outside the box society has placed us in. But, as I look further into the movie, I wonder how I could have thought such a thing. His movie is purely an artistic expression, a form of entertainment. The world del Toro creates in Pan's Labyrinth is one that is black and white, and would never exist in reality, therefore it cannot be analyzed as an argument of any kind.

The messages about the inherent nature of the captain, Ofelia, Mercedes, and Ofelia's mother are painfully obvious: Ofelia, Mercedes and Ofelia's mother are all good and the captain is very bad. Ofelia hardly does ANYTHING wrong. Yes, she disobeys the faun by eating the fruit in the room with the pale man but she is immediately sorry. She takes no joy in disobeying like we expect a bad person to. Her disobedience isn't something that causes harm to anyone (the fairies being eaten don't count because they're alive in the end when she's being accepted as the princess of the Underworld). Mercedes does nothing wrong except inflict physical pain on the captain who is dubbed as the bad guy, therefore making him conceptually acceptable to hurt. Ofelia's mother does nothing wrong ever. The captain is evil inside and out. Everything he does exudes "bad guy". He kills innocent farmers, disregards his wife's health for that of his son's, and murders a young girl in cold blood. Nothing he does can be perceived as good because everything he does is for his own benefit; to uphold his ideal of perfection. There is no such thing as a real life version of these characters. That's not how the world works. Good people do awful things and bad people do good things.

For example, I have a friend in the army right now. His name is Dillon and he's overseas right now in Iraq fighting the war. Him and I video chat on Skype all the time. Like in a normal conversation, I used to ask, "Hey what'd you do today?" or "What are your plans for the day." Nine times out of ten, he couldn't definitively give me an answer. That made my mind wander. What was he doing? Dillon, this sweet, loving, passionate boy I met almost 5 years ago, could be killing people when he's not talking to me. Who are these people that he could be killing? They can't possibly all be bad enough to need death as a punishment. "Bad enough" for death doesn't even exist in my mind. I'm one of those people that doesn't believe in the death penalty or war of any kind or violence. What if those people have families to feed so they joined their country's army purely for money? Dillon is a good person but he is doing bad things.



That being said, obviously del Toro's world is a creation for entertainment and entertainment only. To try to use it as an argument to make people reevaluate their perception of good and evil, right and wrong, would be to assume his world is one that can be compared to the real world. If there is no way to compare the two, then there is no argument to be had.

Picture credits:
Army men - http://www.baseops.net/militarybooks/army_7.jpg

Purdue OWL Website

I love how tech savvy the world is. I remember when the original Gameboy came out and every kid wanted one. Then the first cell phone came out and every adult wanted one. Now, even the President is known as a tech savvy person. People sometimes complain about how technology is isolating people from each other but look at the good technology does. Without the Purdue website, there would be many students at a loss for what to do when they need help with their writing.

The website offers much more than I thought it would. Other OWL websites I remember seeing (back in the day when I needed to use one, which wasn't very often) weren't so varied in the resources they offered. Not only can you learn how to write using MLA format, which I'm sure most students go to this site to learn, you can learn how to write other useful things like a resume. I fear some college kids get lost in parties, socializing, and the immediate work they have to do instead of thinking about how their lessons will help them in the future. After college comes real life and a career. Learning how to write a resume is critical and it's awesome this website teaches you how.

My favorite part of the website is the link to learn how to write a creative piece. It's amazing to see that the site teaches about not only all the technical and academic pieces but the more imaginative ones too. I find that people forget they have imaginations after they've been shoved into the generic school system for the 12 or so years before college. We have to write about history, our goals, scientific experiments, classwork, etc all the time. When we finally get the chance to use our imaginations, sometiems even then we need a guide. The Purdue OWL website actually provides that guide.

I would certainly recommend this website to other GU students. This site teaches you how to write every important type of paper there is. It even teaches you the basic writing process! For those who need support, this site provides everything a writer would need. Each kind of paper is broken down and those broken down parts are explained in language that connects with the everyday person. There's no stuffy language to get tripped up on. That simple fact puts the whoever's trying to learn at ease because everything is laid out for them in a language they can understand.

Picture credits:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/

Pan's Labryinth: My Impression

For some reason I had this movie confused with another movie that had to do with a girl talking to fairies and being a part of an imaginary world. So when I began the movie, I had the plot of that movie in my mind. That movie WAS a childrens movie. This movie definitely isn't. Wow is it intense. Almost everything in the movie can be picked apart and debated about. Everything has multiple meanings. Was it real or imaginary? Did good or bad win in the end? Is disobedience always the answer? What IS perfection and why do people strive for it?

Let me tell you one thing: I really, REALLY hate the captain. He brings all of the violence into the movie. Even from the very beginning, you can see he's a time bomb ready to explode when Ofelia's mother doesn't want to get into the wheelchair he provides for her. She was like, "No I want to walk" but he pretty much demands it when he says, "Please do it for me." And the second after, Ofelia goes to shake his hand with her left hand but he roughly grabs it and says, "It's the other hand Ofelia." How rude! She slips up just once and his idea of perfection makes him totally act like a jerk. Very soon after, the true beast in him comes out. I couldn't believe it when he smashed that man's face in with a bottle and shot the man's father. They were telling the truth about what they were doing in the woods but before truely searching for the right answer, he killed them! Totally unnecessary. Why does he think his idea of perfection is the right one and what in the world does he think he'll gain from striving for it? "Perfect" sounds very boring to me. I've always loved people's imperfections and mistakes. They make you who you are! Maybe I shouldn't hate him so much...I remember him saying he wanted his son to be born into a "new, clean Spain." Perhaps his intentions are all wrong. He thinks his actions are for the good of his son when really he's destroying his soul with all his killing. Can we blame him for trying to do what he thinks is right for his son?

Something that really hit me was the fact that, by the end, Ofelia is the princess of the underworld. The underworld isn't usually associated with innocent, good hearted people. The underworld is a place wretched souls go so why does Ofelia, the girl that sacrificed her LIFE for her newborn baby brother, become the princess of such a place? This is the place we're rooting for her to get to but it's suppposed to be a bad place. I'm sure Del Toro did this on purpose to make people think about the difference between good and bad. You would think that she'd rather stay on earth instead of becoming the princess of the underworld...and it's such a bright place too. When she gets there, she's wearing red and white, the king and queen are wearing bright colors, and it's very well lit. Whenever I think of the underworld, I think of a dark, dank place similar to the inside of a cave. Del Toro really thought of every last way to make us reshape our ideas of good and bad.

Del Toro also played with my idea of normalcy and convention in the small detail of the story Ofelia told her little brother while he was still in the womb. Her mother asked her to calm him down with a story and the story she came up with was one that I would never tell a child. She told him a story about a beautiful flower that couldn't be reached because it was surrounded by poisonous thorns. Because the flower was unreachable, it wilts and dies. What a sad story! Normally, this wouldn't be a story told to a young child because the child would either get sad or not understand what's really being sad. I think that Ofelia herself shouldn't understand that kind of sadness...

Oh and one small thing: I think it's interesting the tree that Ofelia's white flower grows on looks like the head of the Faun. The way the branches split off look like horns...

And I really think all of you guys should read this blog: http://www.overthinkingit.com/2008/09/10/fixing-pans-labyrinth/

Picture credits:

1st pic of a version of the movie cover
http://jackasscritics.com/images/movies/pans_labyrinth_01.jpg

Captain
http://www.ugo.com/movies/best-death-scenes/images/entries/pans-labyrinth.jpg

Ofelia
http://www.overthinkingit.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/pans-alice.jpg

Rhetorical Analysis Take 2

When I think of the death penalty, I always think about how "an eye for an eye" is a horrible way to provide justice. But I never think about the officers who must carry out the death penalty in the states it is still legal. How do they feel? Are they cold, insensitive, unfeeling people? Are they able to live joyous and normal lives with friends and families? Being a person who doesn't believe in the death penalty, I worry for these people who are required to kill others. In Everything's an Argument, I found a particularly interesting article by Michael Osofsky called "The Psychological Experience of Security Officers Who Work with Executions". Through factual evidence, Osofsky provides his readers with an idea of what the officers must suffer through but his argument is lacking information regarding exactly what psychological changes and emotions the officers feel. With this hole in the article, his argument is a robotic regurgitation of information instead of the emotional roller coaster the article's title alludes to. Osofsky only barely scratches the surface of how the officers feel in the last three paragraphs of his article. This being said, Osofsky wastes time detailing the existing feelings regarding the death penalty and all the interviews he conducted with the officers, and in doing so, provides a weak answer to the implicit question of the article's title.

Osofsky dedicates his first three paragraphs to the explanation of the controversy of the death penalty which immediately turns me, as the read, off because this is not what the title of the article promised me. As a citizen of a culture accustomed to expressing it's opinion loud and proud, I already know what a touchy subject it is. According to Osofsky, "...a growing minority is horrified by the idea of state-ordered killing, regardless of the heineous nature of the crimes committed" (Osofsky 204). I know this. Most people know this. In high school, I had an ASL project where I had to pick a controversial topic to debate about. I picked the death penalty because I knew I could confidently debate anyone who was for it. So what is the purpose of explaining the controversy to an audience that most likely is already aware? The audience wants to know the officers feelings when they have to carry out the law in such a terrible way. Tell us about the emotional journey they have to go on Osofsky!

To waste more time before getting to the emotional aspect of the officers job, Osofsky explains the interviews and tests in agonizingly specific details. Yes, it is important to know how Osofsky eventually comes to his conclusion about the psychological effect on the officers but is it so important to know every last detail about the tests/interviews? To make things even worse, in my opinion, Osofsky tells his audience some of the problems the officers have with the death penalty such as the process taking too long. Why, oh why, Osofsky, is this important? The interviews and tests should have been briefly outlined. The main focus should have been the outcome of all the data, the conclusions Osofsky makes.

Finally, near the end of his article, Osofsky gets to the emotional impact the death penalty has on the officers but he states his findings in a way that is devoid of the emotion I would expect. We assume that having to kill people regularly would make the officers cold-hearted people who cannot function normally in civilized society. Yet Osofsky finds that "correctional officers become more reflective and take their job more seriously" (Osofsky 208). This is a joyous finding! The audience can breathe easier knowing the controversial issue doesn't ruin the personal lives and psyche of the officers required to carry out the duty. As happy as the news is, Osofsky continues to robotically tell the audience this. In doing so, he strips the joy away. I realize this article is for a research journal at Stanford but in phrasing his findings the way he does, Osofsky is generalizing the academic crowd as one without feeling. Stanford students crave an emotional connection with their fellow human beings just as much as the next person. Leaving out his stand on the death penalty and just slapping all the facts in the article with no allusion to emotion causes Osofsky to fall greatly below the expectation the title of the article demands. My question remains: what exactly is the psychological experience of security officers who work with executions?

Picture credit:
http://blog.lawyerahead.ca/canada-legal-news/death-penalty/

Rhetorical Analysis

When I think of the death penalty, I always think about how "an eye for an eye" is a horrible way to provide justice. But I never think about the officers who must carry out the death penalty in the states it is still legal. How do they feel? Are they cold, insensitive, unfeeling people? Are they able to live joyous and normal lives with friends and families? Being a person who doesn't believe in the death penalty, I worry for these people who are required to kill others. In Everything's an Argument, I found a particularly interesting article by Michael Osofsky called "The Psychological Experience of Security Officers Who Work with Executions". Through factual evidence, Osofsky provides his readers with an idea of what the officers must suffer through but his argument is lacking information regarding exactly what psychological changes and emotions the officers feel. With this hole in the article, his argument feels like a robotic regurgitation of information instead of the emotional roller coaster the article's title alludes to.

We'll begin the rhetorical analysis of Osofsky's article by establishing exactly who he is, where he stands and what his potential biases are. In a brief paragraph written, I assume, by one of the authors of Everything's an Argument, we learn Osofsky wrote his article while he was a junior at Stanford working under Philip Zimbardo (to the right is a picture of him). Wow. The second I read this, I was immediately impressed and ready to eat up whatever Osofsky said. I spent all four of my high school years taking psychology classes and learning about how important Zimbardo is to the field of psychology. Zimbardo was a psychologist back in the times when there weren't many restrictions on the kinds of psychological experiments that could be conducted. Back in 1971, he conducted the infamous Stanford Prison Study that put voluntary Stanford students through grueling experiments regarding how people act when split into an "us-and-them" setting. To learn more about this experiment, click on this link (for I have no time to explain it any further seeing as the experiment is not the focus of this blog post): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Zimbardo#The_prison_study. Anyways, providing this tidbit of information would make just about anyone who's ever dabbled in psychology want to believe Osofsky fully an completely. Yet name dropping may not convince readers Osofsky is convincing in this article.

To convince the part of his audience that he has not by dropping Zimbardo's name, Osofsky crams facts and figures down our throats. This is the part of his article I believe is missing the point. The title is "The Psychological Experience of Security Officers Who Work with Executions". So why spend well over half the article detailing the what was done and used to gather information, and how Americans feel about the death penalty now. Perhaps Osofsky was trying to drill into our minds how complex the idea of the death penalty is and how this fact would cause even greater suffering for the people who must carry it out. If that is the reasoning behind detailing polls about whether or not people support the death penalty, then Osofsky should have pointed that out. Instead, he seems to just drop that paragraph in there for no reason. Who cares about how America feels? This article is supposed to be about how the officers feel about their job requirements!

If Osofsky were to be put to the ultimate test of being graded by Dr. W, he would certainly fail. He completely ignores the pathos of his argument even though it is the most important part of his article. After reading his article, I have no clear idea the kinds of psychological experiences the officers go through. In the last few paragraphs, Osofsky does begin to explain that, no, the officers do not become less humane as I worried they would. Osofsky finally gives us the information we've been looking for all along. I didn't want to know all the tests they took and how long the interviews were. I wanted to know what information was gathered that related to their emotional adventure while having to carry out the death penalty. In this Osofsky fails. His argument is factual when it should be emotional.

Picture credits:
Celestiniosity.com (the death penalty)

https://www.skeptic.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Session_ID=0139d1171214fc100ae4b5c2b52c4f02&Screen=PROD&Store_Code=SS&Product_Code=av175&Category_Code=CSCI (Philip Zimbardo)

List of Things I Believe

• Reincarnation
• True love being more powerful than anything
• Karma
• Mythological beings (ghosts, the Loch Ness Monster, vampires, etc)
• Time traveling
• Make love not war
• Equal rights for all people (gay marriage, etc)
• Live and let live
• Happily ever afters for everyone
• Soulmates