ENGL254 B1

For our first blog assignment, we were required to read both Rhetoric and the Audience and the lengthy Introduction to our NetSmart book.  While the rhetoric article provided a lot of interesting information, I don't necessarily think that the introduction achieved the same purpose.  The introduction was basically an overview of how technology is being used more widely to communicate.  While, yes, there are certain aspects of communication that my peers and I don't utilize, I believe the best place for this is in an entirely separate chapter.  The introduction is just that, and doesn't have to be the length of a full chapter.

Rhetoric and the Audience was a fairly interesting read.  One thing that caught my attention was the part about the Indirect Effects in the section about Publics.  To begin with, I was unaware of all of the different ways to identify publics.  The reason I was interested in the Indirect Effects was because the article pointed out that while a conversation may be private, it still affects the public because of the nature of the conversation.  This is because the conversation may usually involve things that affect a whole collective of people, rather than just the two.

I'd like to think of my conversations with my roommate over feminist issues as ones that can be characterized under the Indirect Effects section.  While, yes, most of these conversations are just between us, we are talking about issues that affect not only us (as women) but women in the state, region, country, etc.  Our conversations can be about anything from the media's portrayal of women to current issues in the political sphere concerning women.  Again, these "private" conversations are actually public in nature because we're discussing issues that would affect women everywhere, not just us.

I really appreciate that Ethics are mentioned in the end of the Rhetoric and the Audience piece.  This is because I feel that the Contrary Evidence section and the Lying by Omission section should be read by a lot of misleading groups.  Last semester, I completed a project over Comprehensive Sex Ed.  In my findings, the Heritage Foundation, a strongly conservative organization, was arguing against Comprehensive Sex Ed (CSE) because they believed it would encourage more pre-marital sex among teens and therefore lead to more unwanted pregnancies. HOWEVER--and this is the part that really irritates me--statistics show that CSE does EXACTLY what it was meant to do.  For example, Arizona, a state that had an abstinence-only sex ed program state-wide, was the state with the HIGHEST teen birth rate.  On the other hand, New Hampshire, a state that incorporated a state-wide CSE program, had the absolute LOWEST teen birth rate.  This directly coincides with one of the Lying by Omission details: "Often, speakers omit information unethically, such as when they don't refer to evidence
against their case."


Also, if you can't already tell, I'm choosing to center this blog over the feminist community.  This is partly because I'm a Women's & Gender Studies (WGS) Major, and also just because I find it interesting.