Wrapping it all up!

Here I am writing the final blog in English 111. What are the most important texts I've come across in this class one might ask? Well, I can surely say that 3 of them have changed the way i look at things completely. "Gender Advertising" by Irving Goffman is one of them. In this text, Goffman focuses on how males and females are portrayed in advertisements ranging from social status to feminine touch. The way a man is always shown larger than a woman is something I would have never noticed if it wasn't for Goffman. All these commercials I see on television with women touching their silky smooth hair in a shampoo commercial is exactly what feminine touch is. Now when I look at an advertisement, I notice all these techniques used by advertisers to get their points across.
The second most important text I've read was "What Is Intelligence, Anyways?" by Isaac Asimov. Before I read this, my knowledge on what intelligence really was, was very vague. I figured being intelligent meant you were smart and that's about it. What this text made me realize was that intelligence is esentially dynamic because it's based on one's environment. In other words, you can be considered extremely intelligent in a certain area, but as soon as that changes, you can become less intelligent than everyone else. Being a pilot means you're intelligent in the field of flying planes, but if someone asks you to identify a strand of Deoxiribonucleotide, you wouldn't know a thing. I find this insightful because now I realize that when and if I fulfil my dream of being a dentist, I'll be aware of the fact that I'll be intelligent in the field of dentistry for sure, but maybe not as much when it comes to other fields.
Last but not least, the meaning of rhetoric is something I never thought I'd care about when it was first introduced to me, but now I've learned otherwise. Just like when you buy a new car and suddenly notice it when someone else drives by in it, as soon as I learned what the word rhetoric was, it suddenly started popping up everywhere I looked. Basically, Rhetoric is the art of using ethos, pathos, and logos in order to persuade. Listening to The President give a speech, or even a simple Boar's Head advertisement, I can see how rhetoric is used to appeal to the audience. Ethos, or the appeal to credibility, is a very important factor when it comes to persuasion. Why should I believe what this guy is saying? Well, he's got a Ph.D, that's why! Pathos is the appeal to one's emotions. This can range from portraying beauty to something such as age. Finally, Logos is the appeal using logic. Mainly, statistics are used to convince people. For example, a statistic such as "don't eat fish because statistics show that 90% of people who eat fish regularly won't live past 20" is logical because it obviously shows that people die from fish so you shouldn't eat it. Ofcourse, that quote I made up has no use of ethos, and that's exactly why you wouldn't believe it. This goes to show that ethos, pathos, and logos go hand in hand and if used correctly, will convince anyone to believe you.

Looking at your Meat

In The Omnivore's Dilemma, Pollan looks at eating meat from several different perspectives ranging from industrial, moral, and organic. Pollan has opened my eyes to these perspectives, particularly the moral side. I say moral because reading about the conditions in which most of these animals are slaughtered makes me sick. Thinking about how many turkeys have been killed in the past week for Thanksgiving; probably in the hundreds of millions, makes me wonder if any of them have been living in sanitary conditions and if they've been killed "correctly" instead of inhumanley as seen in parts of the video "Meet Your Meat" by Alec Baldwin. Lately, I've been contemplating on whether or not to switch to being a strict vegetarian and I blame it on people such as Pollan and Baldwin. It's hard to sit there eating a steak and not think about how the cow was killed. Although Organic is supposed to answer questions like such as that and reassure you that what you're eating was happilly running around in a free range farm, Pollan makes me think otherwise. According to Pollan, most of the "organic" meat you find is a lie because of less strict government regulations. For this reason, I've chosen to go with the moral perspective because it's the only one I can trust. For that same exact reason, It's hard to not be a vegetarian without thinking about whether or not you're doing the right thing by eating an animal that not only should have the right to live like you do, but should atleast be killed without pain.