Dear Reader,
I have discussed
my topic as thoroughly as I ever will, so I must now leave you with a final
statement about effective persuasion and my project. When I began reading The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard
Dawkins, I knew that I was reading a book that I would enjoy for its
non-fiction and scientific qualities, but I did not know that I would find
something interesting that is unrelated to these qualities. I ended up taking
Dawkins’ attempt to communicate his ideas in general to be the foundation of my
topic, rather than using the specific topics he discusses. This surprised me
that I could take something out of a book that the author could not have
intended. However, I began to research communication and what makes a
particular type of communication, persuasion, effective. This research led me
to a surprising discovery that I used as the basis for all my genres and turned
into my golden thread: that effective persuasion is not necessarily logical,
but that it appeals to the personality and biases of the audience. I discovered
the human side of argumentation. I chose to use this as my golden thread
because it embodies the main idea that I wanted my project to convey.
I was pleased
with how my project turned out. Making the genres was a struggle for me at
first. I had just gotten the idea for my paper and the topic I would look into
when I started trying to write genres. Having not done much creative stuff in
the past, it was a challenge to try to be creative with my genres. So I started
with a narrative about qualities, since you showed us this in class and it
seemed a lot easier than coming up with my own ideas. I needed this guidance,
this little push to unlock my creative side. In my narrative, Persuasive and
Understanding attend the same high school, and Persuasive personifies the human
side of argumentation by having everyone believe that he is always doing the
right thing even when it may not be true. My second genre is a sort of welcome
letter creative piece titled “My World.” It’s meant to represent how the human
side of persuasion can be and is abused, and by setting it in the world we live
in, it serves to criticize the money-driven attitude that is prevalent in our
society. While unrelated to the topic, a similar criticism is also made by
Dawkins in his book. I also made a poem in first person where I am green and my
whole world is red, and I have a great green idea that nobody understands
because the idea is green and they are red. This poem is a metaphor for the
problems that most people run into when they try to communicate their ideas.
Many great ideas are lost because people don’t know how to convince people how
of their idea’s greatness. The green guy’s idea doesn’t appeal to the red
people because it isn’t red, so even though it is a great idea, it is rejected.
My final genre is a description of a broken cell phone that can still be
considered to “work” because it is a prop in a play, and the audience believes
that it works. This expresses the aspect of the human side of argumentation
that arguing is not always effective because it is logical because it is not
logical the phone still “works” even though it is broken. I chose to describe a
phone because phones are how most people communicate, and so the phone itself
is a symbol of communication too. Overall, everything I learned from this
project was surprising and not at all what I expected to learn. If I had to do
it again, I wouldn’t change anything but how long it took me to turn everything
in.
Sincerely,
Zach