Dear Reader

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