Loud Words

Loud Words

Don Juan

Yesterday, I attended the English play "Don Juan". I arrived a little late so I wasn't able to see the beginning, I was a bit lost, but managed to catch up.

First of all I was very impressed to see how good actors students are! I would have never imagined. I laughed so much during the play. The funniest part was when the wrestlers were fighting against the thieves because one of the actors accidentally threw a stick, hitting the other one really hard on the head! Sorry I just had to point that out, priceless! Anyways,

The Lord of the Fallacies

Mahatma Gandhi is an inspiration and role model to many people in the world. I never knew exactly what he did or what his thoughts were, but after reading this amazing speech, I can consider myself one of his followers.

It took me a long time to find fallacies in Gandhi’s speech. So I decided to look in other people’s blogs to help me out. I managed to find a few.

Almost at the end of the speech, Gandhi posits: “Hence I gather that God is life, truth, light. He is love. He is the supreme Good. But He is no God who merely satisfies the intellect, if He ever does. God to be God must rule the heart and transform it. He must express himself in every smallest act of His votary. This can only be done through a definite realization, more real than the five senses can ever produce.”

In this quote I was able to identify some fallacies including misinterpreting the evidence. He starts the paragraph by telling us God is practically the essence of life, convincing the audience of it. But ending the paragraph, he tells us all the bad things that don’t make a God, which are hard to fulfill, making us confused.

            I was also able to identify in this quote the fallacy of ignorance. He doesn’t give us an example of a God, therefore, not convincing us that it exists.

Wow it took me some time to identify only two fallacies in a quote. I know there are much more than two but I wasn’t able to explain them. 

The Out-Of-Bounds

“The purpose of argument is to be persuasive, not correct.” (156) As this chapter says, sometimes we tend to go off topic and care about winning instead of persuading. Which is wrong. It only causes our audience to get mad, and it doesn’t get you anywhere. Heinrichs states that “when someone commits a logical fallacy, it rarely helps to point it out.” (156)

At the end of the chapter, the author came up with seven  “fouls” in argument, which I thought were very true. Here are some of them with examples:

1.                   “Refusing to hear the other side.” I would say that this is the foul that we most commit. When proving a point we think that we are the correct ones and don’t want others to change our minds. From minute 1:20 to 1:36 of this video, the man changes his mind about his order and the woman doesn’t let him explain and she just calls security.

2.                   “Humiliation.” In this video, the girl corrects her father for pronouncing a word incorrectly; instead of agreeing with her he laughs at her correction.

3.                   “Threats.” In second 0:29 of this clip, these two girls are fighting, just when one of them threatens the other by saying: “you have no idea what I’m capable of.”

The Terms

As we keep on reading this book, we keep on learning on ways to persuade people, but these two chapters have been the ones that I liked the most.

As I read the terms in chapters eleven and twelve, I felt completely identified, especially with the “techniques for labeling” in chapter twelve.

I thought that the idea of putting videos for defining the terms was a very fun way to understand them better.

Definition Judo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf5-Prx19ZM

This video was a perfect example of Definition Judo. Samsung is comparing to Apple saying that they’ve had things way before Apple did. Making them look bad.

The Commonplace

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERD2TnMNH98

Everybody believes that in France they all wear stripes and hats. That’s Cliché. This video shows all of these Clichés. You can use them to help you connect with the audience.

Babbling

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvj2aQlQusU

Babbling is a very good way to persuade your audience. If you repeat the same thing various times that’s what the audience is going to remember.

A good example of babbling is a song. Unless you’ve been to lyrics.com you usually know only the chorus of the song because it’s what is repeated the most.

For example this song, it keeps on repeating “you’re the only one” but you never really know what the rest of the song says.

It's all a Lie!

In this chapter, the author states that the “ethos asset combines selflessness and likability.” (72) I had and idea what these terms meant but wasn’t really sure, so I decided to look them up in the dictionary.

Selflessness: “having little or no concern for oneself.”

Likability: “readily or easily liked.”

The author then focuses on “disinterest” and “uninterest” and peoples “passion” for these, in which the point is “making the audience believe in your selflessness.” (73)

            In my opinion, all of these methods have to do with psychology. It’s all about learning how people’s minds work.

At the end of the chapter, Heinrichs describes three tools:

1.     The reluctant conclusion

2.     The personal sacrifice

3.     Dubitatio

Instead of describing each of them individually, in short words, they all go back to the title of this course: IT’S ALL A LIE!

In order to be good in rhetoric, you have to lie to yourself and to the ones you are trying to convince or persuade.