The gift of spin

So the most effective personal argument I have ever heard, believe it or not came from my son.  No not work, that usually ends with if the Captain wants it, the Captain gets it.  However my son, I think is spawned from Johnny Cochran himself.  He has the gift of spin.  Now he is seven going on 20, so everyday he is finding more of himself and his independence, but one argument does stand out against all the rest. 

This occurred earlier this school year.  My son was addicted and I mean addicted to this Star Wars game on the Playstation.  He loved to play it with his friends, with me, and role playing in public as a Wookie.  Well one day he got a note home from his teacher because he decided he was going to be a Wookie and do the Wookie talk all day in class.  Now, as a parent you laugh a little inside because you are like, yes the Wookie in the class is mine, then you laugh a little because you think of the poor teacher who deals with something like this all year, and finally you laugh because you need to get your game face on and provide the punishment.  So we took the Star Wars game away for two weeks.  The first night was difficult as he tried to call our bluff; the second day was a repeat but not as bad or long.  Then however quiet.  Day three nothing, day four nothing, he was a perfect angel and even got great notes home from school, and now you could see something plotting in his eyes.  Day five came and again nothing, just another good note home from school.  That is when he approached us.  My god you would have thought he took this class.  Being grounded for only 5 days out of 14, my son gave us a proposal to let him have his playing time back.  He showed us how he has learned his lesson, telling us he now knows that he can’t role play Star Wars in public and not at school.  Armed with three good notes home and a sticker from music and art teachers, he provided examples about how his behavior has changed.  Going for the Oscar award at this point, he even played it up on how much he loves us, how great we are as parents and how he will only use the game now to play on the weekends when he is bored.  There it was everything in this chapter: long term analysis-only playing on the weekends when he is bored, need for presence-he played to our hearts throwing that “I love you mommy and you are great parent”, he gave evidence of a changed behavior-I swear he bribed his teachers or something, because that week every teacher gave him a note home that was based on him being so helpful and good.

            Maybe it was so compelling because it was from a seven year old, but it left us speechless.  Our defenses fell so fast, it soon became a race to say “ask your…..”.  My wife of course won, leaving me as the only barrier between him and Wookie gold.  I’m sure you know how that ended.  Since then he kept his word, plus it helps that he moved on to Plants vs. Zombies.

OPS beware

So this unit’s reading was on proposals, basically using the lessons we learned before and applying them to a proposal.  This proposal should be able to not only speak to the reader but be able to stand against doubts and questions the reader may have.  Proposals are something that isn’t new to me since I have to request parts, money, and time for training at least once a month.  However, my proposal at work usually goes like this, OPS my budget request for my shop is 25,000.00 for the following reasons a, b, and c.  The reply most commonly heard is, ET1 your budget is 9,000.00 because I have no money to give.   Reading this chapter I realize that I have been going about my request totally wrong.  I never related to her interests, never backed my requested with cost saving options, and basically gave her no reason to say “no, work with what I can give you.”

            I am going to look forward to seeing the email with the subject line: Division Officers and Lead Petty Officers Budget requests due.  Armed with the basics provided by this chapter, I will do more then bullet type responses.  Instead, I will develop a detailed report.  Starting with finding the audience’s presence, I will illustrate to OPS how much she loves her job and how the economy sucks for finding a new one, then switching it up and showing how much she depends on a operational radar to keep the ship safe in high transit areas but also locating targets of interest.  Finishing it up explaining how maintaining this operational radar costs money.  That leads me perfectly to the chapter’s next example of natural conservatism or “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”  To change her view on this subject, I will show her slides and graphs detailing the preventive maintenance required on just one radio system and how I have to maintain 16 of them.  This will make it like an investment, the more you spend on preventive care, which is cheaper, the less we will spend in causality repair.  Next is the future, again, this chapter lines it up for me.  I will give her about a page or two detailing the consequences of operating on a very tight operational budget.  Long term cost analysis and graphs with pretty cool colors I think will be used to strengthen this part of my argument.  If all else fails I could use something with shock value.  Not going as far as the picture on page 321, but maybe like showing the ship running aground and sinking, underneath it saying “only you can prevent this from happening, give the ET shop money”   Since I’m in the military, she will probably most likely laugh and ask for a real request, but at least it will be good practice for me.

The Three Musketeers

Rhetorical Triangle? Logos, Ethos, and Pathos.  Kinda sounds like the three musketeers cousin or a cereal brand reject, but instead it is the building blocks of every persuasive writing or report.  I decided to write this in a way that helped me understand the three and maybe provide help for someone else who struggles with the concepts of English.  The three of them logos, ethos, and pathos; together they create a triangle that strengthens any paper written by the author.  However, by removing just one of those elements, you have a paper that could have been great but falls short.  I of course needed to find a way to incorporate these musketeers into my everyday life. So this is what I came up with.

            Being on my second underway unit in the military, we are taught fire is made up of the “Fire Triangle” or now called “Fire Tetrahedron,” chemical reaction was added.  The original fire triangle however, has the same principles as ethos, logos and pathos.  Oxygen, heat, and fuel together can create fire, but remove just one of them and you have nothing.  This is the simplest way and most effective to extinguish a fire when out to sea, just remove an element.  Funny this applies the same to writing just backwards. Remember keep it simple, be effective.

            Logos- described in our reading as the “quality of the message…consistency and clarity of the argument.” I remember it as oxygen because; oxygen is clear and the purer the oxygen the bigger the bang when it comes to fire.

            Ethos- described in our reading, as the “part of the writing that focuses the attention to the writer’s character as it is projected in the message.”  I came to think about this as the fuel.  Fuel is fluid and ever changing; it can be any color and have different smells.  These are things you find in your writers, hopefully minus the smells.  Every writer is different, from a different background and ideology.  Lastly, the writer’s thought process is also fluid and ever changing. (at least mine is when I write)

            Pathos- described in our reading as the emotional appeal.  Basically how is the writer going to connect to their readers?  This of course is heat.  The basics of human attraction is “heat”.  Yes it is very sexual but it makes the most sense.  The difference between a couple and lovers is their heat.  A couple, they are together but there is no sizzle no spark; but lovers there is more then an animal attraction, there is passion, lust, and heat.  This is the connection the writer wants with the reader.  The writer wants their undivided attention and the reader wants to have the feeling of being pulled into something greater.

Work Cited

Ramage, John D., Bean, John C., and Johnson, June. Writing Arguments: A Rhetoric with Reading. Pearson, 2010.

The hits just keep on coming

3 chapters of reading and I feel like I Alec Baldwin in Beetle Juice.  You know the scene where he is given the book “The Handbook for the Dead”; reading a couple of chapters Baldwin’s character says “this thing reads like stereo instructions.” Yep that was me.  I can speak on experience that, this was much worst.  In the military I’m an electronics technician, who specializes on Radars, Communication, and crypto systems; so for me stereo instructions would be so welcomed.  However, right out of the gate, page 61 of our assigned reading I knew it was going to take more then one time to read this and understand what was going on.  I counted seven words in Latin, (at least I think it was Latin) and for someone who struggles in English, Latin was not something I was hoping to see.  I learned early in school to get by, that words in bold, italics, underlined, or Latin were important.  So I knew this section was pretty important.  Knowing me if I didn’t understand that, I knew it would snowball from there.

            Chapter 4 was interesting, it introduced “The Enthymeme”, reading it I now know it is the core argument; but at first glance it sounded like some medicine that is used to cure a weird alignment.  I was expecting to read about side effects like, dizziness, bleeding, or a third eye that grows out of your shoulder.  Instead, I was treated to examples of claims, reason, grounds, what a warrant would be, how to back it and different conditions of rebuttal.  I almost had the previously named side effects.

            By chapter 5 and my third time reading though it, I was hoping that like most things people try and keep trying that it would sudden “click”.  Wait for it…wait for it, nope, still waiting and still reading.  Here I read about STAR, even I can remember that.  Way can’t all English terms be like this, instead of quoting Aristotle.  This chapter made the most sense to me, because I think it was the most straight forward.  I understand the principle of evidence and actually learned a lot about the strengths and limitations when writing a paper.  Box score of the reading book 2 - me 1.  This is probably seen in my papers too.  I can find evidence and I feel I use them well, but the Logos, Ethos, and Pathos; that is such a struggle to read and in turn it is a struggle in my writing to fully put on paper what I’m thinking in my head.

           

Works Cited

Beetle Juice. Dir Tim Burton. The Geffen Company, 1988

Lesser of Two Evils

So for this blog I chose to write about my essay I submitted.  Now even thou I’m in the military, I’m not a very political person.  In fact, I believe that we have lost sight on some things that made our nation great.  Now I’m not saying we aren’t a great nation, just saying I do think a lot of views on local and national policy are a little blurry and we  have slipped a little bit.  To show my own little sign of disapproval on how our government has been running, when I changed my state of residency moving to Florida, I changed my voting party to the Wig Party.  The lady of course gave me grief, I’m not sure if she even knew what the Wig Party was, so right there I went on a 10 min rant at the DMV, going on about the Republicans and Democrats, and how I was bringing it back to our roots.  At that point my wife giving that “why do I go in public with this man look”, finally saying please just change his party to the Wig Party.  I even got a applause from some of those sitting in the lobby, but that’s a blog for another day.  So in short I wanted to challenge myself and write about a topic happening today.

            Over the course of the last couple of weeks the U.S., has gotten involved in another conflict.  As of right now our role is that of a humanitarian presence, enforcing a strict no-fly zone and attacking land units that are attacking innocent civilians.  Well it appears that a new question is presenting itself, do we arm the rebellions and aide them rather in getting rid of Qaddafi?  We as a nation has already seen this played out twice using both scenarios of aiding the rebels and only enforcing a no-fly zone.  First scenario was when the U.S. secretly armed the Afghanistan people with numerous amounts of weapons that ultimately defeated the U.S.S.R., however this training and weaponry helped establish Al Qaeda and now we are dealing with dismantling that group as they turned their focus on Western Powers.  The other scenario was with Iraq, we established a strict no-fly zone, but again we eventually needed to send in troops and remove Saddam.

            As stated in my essay, by providing weapons and training to the rebels the U.S. could:

• End this conflict faster
• Enables a society as they strive for political change, providing a positive influence in the Middle East
• In this region we are already stretched very thin, using the rebels to remove their own leader, alleviates the U.S. from the burden of providing ground troops and restricting yet another Arab country.
• It could change the world perspective regarding the U.S. and Arab countries. As of right now we have the blessing of the major Arab leaders.

However, I do not believe that arming this rebellion is the best option.  First, unlike Egypt, who takes over after Qaddafi is removed?  Egypt already had a temporary government recognized by other nations, with Libya we do not.  In fact, one of the leaders of the rebellion is one of Qaddafi’s former top aides.  That’s great a man who up to last month was loyal to Qaddafi and all the policies he put in place with that country is now a leader of the rebellion.  Who's to say he doesn't fall into power and do the exact same thing.  Also there are some reports Al Qaeda may be showing up in some of the rebel groups.  This makes perfect sense since the country is very unstable.  Al Qaeda can use this to force their muscle and create another possible birthing ground for terrorist activity.  If we arm the rebels who’s to say that Al Qaeda doesn’t use those resources to attack U.S. forces later.  Lastly, thou removing Qaddafi is in the best interest of the Western world, this rebellion had nothing to do with us.  When did the U.S. become responsible for rebuilding every country that decides it wants to remove its leader?  We are already involved in two countries in the Middle East, and neither of those have an exit strategy in place.  Getting involved with another would stretch our forces even more.  The U.S. is already providing the bulk of air strikes as well; with this role we can be very “selective” on our targets.  As long as we can say that unit was hurting innocent civilians, we can make them a target, if this so happens to open the road to Qaddafi oh well.  I just don’t see the need for us to provide more support then we already are.  Especially with the so much uncertain.