Guest Blogger

Oscar Veliz. 05/05/2008
Already the end of the semester has come leaving some gladness and some sadness. Gladness being that I'll get my Saturdays back and will be able to sleep in after the long week. Sadness being that I'm going to miss Prof. Ramirez's unique English class.

It is not very often that I'm shocked at what is in my syllabus because normally they all read the same. Quiz this day. Paper due that day. Test in a week. And Final on whatever future day. This class had something that I did not expect out of the gate, a blog. At first I was apprehensive with creating my own blog, thinking "What am I going write about?" All I really needed to do though was take the plunge and set up an account on Google. Once I started using Blogger and realizing how simple it was to use, the blog pretty much wrote itself. Visit my blog here.

Of course we had class as well with some required readings. Most of all of which were about rhetoric. Go figure. An actual definition of the word is hard to nail down because I have my own that I'm used for my research paper, as does every other member of the class. As a whole, we created a working definition that stated "rhetoric is an epistemic art created by a rhetor for the purpose of change." As a class we learned about ethos, pathos, and logos; which we've all learned about in high school but not nearly the level that we utilized it in this class. The easiest element for me to grasp was logos/fallacy mainly because I'm a computer programmer so I use a lot of logic to solve problems and write programs. Pathos and Ethos I still mix up from time to time even though Prof. Ramirez hammered them into my skull.

I think that the part of the class that sticks out in my mind is that we always used technology. Whether it was the simple use of a projector for notes or posting syllogisms on WebCT, listening to NPR to analyze an article's rhetorical elements, reading New York Times articles, doing research for our research paper, etcetera. We each created a video essay representing the change in our topic over time, for our research paper, using PhotoStory.

Speaking of research papers, mine is on Sherlock Holmes and how he is rhetorical. Surprisingly, even though Sherlock Holmes is found in the world of fiction, he is very much real to many people all over the world from the United Kingdom to the United States to Japan to India to Russia. There are Sherlock Holmes societies everywhere devoted to studying Sherlock Holmes Canon and have scholarly discussions regarding him. In the US there exists the Baker Street Irregulars (BSI), who publish a quarterly journal with various scholars submitting articles. I selected one of the articles in this publication to analyze its rhetorical elements for this class.

After the middle of the semester I'd started noticing that almost everything I saw, read, or heard had some sort of rhetoric in it. Whether it be bottle water advertisements or segments I'd seen on the news. More often, I started to question if everything I heard is valid. Normally checking a statement for fallacies or one-sidedness. In fact, I think I've always done that, but now I have a term, a definition for this analysis and I've come to begin thinking more critically.

As the semester comes to it's conclusion, I realize that this class has grown on me and that I may have grown because of it. Even still, I'm going to like having my Saturday's back.