Assignment #3

For Unit three, my group and I are going to create our arguments around a debate going on right now around the country about men’s fashion. Many states are trying to ban the trend of wearing pants so low that boxers can be seen because it is considered indecent exposure. We are going to take the lawmakers and school administrations side and agree that this trend should be outlawed.For our first argument, we are going to create a newspaper article that has statistics included as well as a map of states trying to ban the trend.Then we will create an ad for a magazine or billboard that shows a picture of the style and has some creative slogan on it.Last we are going to write a letter to the editor in response to the newspaper article we are writing. This will have actual responses of girls we polled in it to help our argument.

Topic choice

I have decided to keep with my first choice of discussing Barak Obama's Vice president choice Joe Biden. This is a very recent issue so i was going to look in different magazines and online sources. Websites like CNN or MS NBC will have a lot of articles that deal with the upcoming presidential election. I also wanted to look at different newspapers because they have whole sections dedicated to political issues. I will have a good chance of finding at least one article on Joe Biden. The newspaper also has political cartoons which could be used as form of text for this assignment. It will be interesting to see what different sources say, because some authors who are democrat are going to look at the vice president choice very differently from someone who is republican. I also wanted to try and find articles from out of state. Texas tends to lean towards republicans so i think it would be interesting to compare and see the differences on the issue depending on state.

Topic for conducting a rhetorical case study

For my Rhetorical case study i thought of writing about Barak Obama's choice for Vice President, Joe Biden. I don't know very much about Joe biden because it seems there was more disscussion on Sarah Palin.
One of the key reasons people do not want Obama as president is because they dont think he has experience, so the person he picked for vice president was key to helping his campaign. I am interested to see what arguments people have for or against Joe Biden.
I also chose this because it is a very recent issue which means there will be a lot of different forms of text to help support the issue, and hopefully there wont be to many secondary sources. I am a little worried about only being able to find secondary sources. Politics always have so much controversy it is harder to get the original source.

assignment #2

My first big concern for this new assignment is finding a decent controversial issue. There have been so many controversial issues in the past five years alone, plus we are not really restricted to any particular time frame. There are some major controversial issues from prior history that would be interesting to analyze. That is where my second concern comes in.
The paper is about the arguments made by these controversial issues, so there is no way of knowing how good the arguments are going to be till you have picked the issue. I'm guessing controversial issues from longer than ten years ago are going to be more difficult to find arguments on.
My big question was how were going to explain certain arguments from resources others may have not seen or heard of. I suppose we will learn in class how to do that though. Once that is better understood and a solid issue has been picked writing this paper should not be to difficult.

Public space analysis

I really liked her description of the library in the first paragraph. Having never been to her library it was important as the reader to have some understanding of the place she was talking about. Although she was very descriptive in the first paragraph i found it hard to figure out what her argument was. I had to go back and reread to find out what she was going to be argueing and discussing in her paper.

I thought she had a lot of really great reasons to back up her argument. All her reasons were to much in list form though. It would have been better if she had minimized her number of reasons and then elaborated on specific ones. For example she comments in the third paragraph that the library has a very welcoming atmosphere but then does not really explain how. Some of her reasons were elaborated on and others were not.

I really liked her ending though. Her second to last sentence was talking about bringing blankets and living in the library , and then she tied it all together by comparing the library to Holiday Inn. It was a very clever way to wrap up the paper.

Rhetorical analysis

I chose the TCU recreation center for my rhetorical analysis. The recreation center makes numerous arguments but the one I feel strongest about is it argues the amount of money TCU has and how it is used to make the school look better to the public eye. This better look is what sells the campus to on coming students.
They have two floors of expensive workout equipment with televisions attached to most of them. A school lacking in money would not have that big of a gym for students, nor would the equipment be that nice. As a student looking into college or even as a parent preparing to send a child off to school walking through the recreation center would send the message that TCU can afford nicer "extras". It also sends the message that TCU uses the money to make a better looking university. TCU needs a consistency when it comes to applicants each year. By using their money to keep places like the recreation center running it becomes easier to attract new students.
It is possible that people simply see the building as a recreation center and not necessarily relate the building to how much money TCU has or the picture they are portraying. The intended audience is for on coming TCU students as well as the current ones; however it may reach out to anyone that is involved with TCU on a regular basis because this particular topic is dealing with money. This is a very logos based argument because; if a school is private and gets more money their facilities are more likely going to be nicer. This fact of logic might end up changing my hypothesis as I begin studying the recreation center.

entry 1

My name is Rebecca Burke and I am currently a sophomore at TCU. I am a Pre-major so right now I am taking basics to help figure out what I want to do as a career.
I have always enjoyed English, however; like discussed in class I enjoy it for the reading aspect, not the writing. Because I prefer reading I mostly take English writing classes, such as this one, because they are mandatory. I do however hope to become a better writer and build up confidence about my skills as a writer. Almost every job requires some writing abilities, so even though this isn’t my first choice for a class, I still believe it is important and necessary for my future.
With a lot of effort and struggle I can produce a decent paper. No matter how decent the paper, many times it does not make the endeavor seem worthwhile. Looking at writing beyond the aspect of school work though, I do tend to spend a lot of time emailing and or texting. Like many people today, I am addicted to the technological advances that our generation has. I have never been very confident with my writing skills; however, with the technology today I can at least have the benefits of spell check and allowing the computer to highlight my sentences that don’t make sense. These sorts of things help with confidence because I at least know my spelling and grammatical errors are taken care of. Whether I feel confident about my writing ability or not I would still much rather leave writing to professionals.
Having read about arguments and how they can be used in writing, I find that my second paragraph is an actual argument. I was trying to argue the importance of writing classes, and the need for writing in ones career. I discovered the importance of writing in society today and then briefly argued that it was necessary for me. Had I started stating facts about the use of writing in society today, my paragraph would have been more of a persuasion. Obviously this is my blog so it is a lot of my opinions, but I think that shows my personality as being someone who uses examples or facts to back up what I believe. It’s clear that there are many ways to express an argument through text however it is hard to argue without facts for support.


I understand and agree to the terms of our course syllabus.