Blog Post 1

1)

In the music video of “Estoy Enamorado,” Wisin y Yandel use rhetorical strategies to help the general public understand the pains that the immigrant community faces with some of the laws that have been passed. In the beginning of the video, a Hispanic couple and their young daughter are driving on a desert highway (most likely a Southwestern state), when they are pulled over after being profiled by some police officers. The father/husband is taken by the police and put into a holding center. This segment contains both ethos and pathos. Emotionally, this can appeal to any member of a family. The daughter and mother both look very frightened to be separated from their father/husband, as would many fathers, daughters, or mothers to which this appeals. Ethically, this appeals to anyone who would believe that it is morally wrong to separate innocent families. Later in the video, there are a series of clips where everyday human occurrences are happening, like a barista pouring a cup of coffee, a mother pushing a stroller, and a boy selling oranges. Slowly in the segment, these people performing these actions start to disappear, in order to represent what would happen if these immigrants were removed from society. This is a logical appeal because it is a visual and logical example of what would happen if these people were deported.

2)In the sphere of college football, rhetorical situations are present and severely intertwined throughout teams, players, officials, and coaches. Recently, in the immediate public sphere of FSU, accusations of rape were made towards the starting quarterback of the football team, Jameis Winston. The exigence of this rhetorical situation is the mere fact that Jameis was accused of this crime, and it certainly needed a solution under the law. Although it may seem that the audience of the rhetorical situation was the large base of fans at FSU, these people had little to no effect on the outcome of the decision on whether or not to take Jameis Winston’s case further. The true audience was the attorney general and other state employees who had power in the decision-making process. In the time it took for the attorney general to decide whether or not Jameis Winston’s case should have gone to trial, many facts arose about the case, including the knowledge of alcohol involvement, the discovery of another man’s DNA in the victim’s underwear, and many loopholes in the accusation as a whole. Since these facts are part of the reason that the attorney general decided not to continue the case, these facts can certainly be considered constraints on the rhetorical situation.

3) Rhetoric, filtered down to its purest form, is persuasion. Although there are many different approaches to rhetoric, to persuade is the main goal of rhetoric. It is important for us as students, and for us as society to study rhetoric because it is truly everywhere, and we must not be misled. Especially for we who live in Western culture, we live in a consumerist society. People everywhere are constantly trying to get us to buy their product, or use their service. Although many of us are highly educated individuals, it is important to study rhetoric because even the most intelligent can be drawn into the stickiest of traps because of intricate rhetorical strategies.