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.