Jina Satyal's Weblog

Since last semester starter I have wanted to go home because I was so home sick. I missed my mom’s cooking and my dad and me watching T.V. and joking around with my sister. I have always been close to my family and had never been away from them for more than a week so going a semester without their love and support to me was very hard. So, I was really looking forward to going home for winter break. I thought that for this time I could relax and watch movies and eat my favorite foods and not the cafeteria food. I thought that it was going to be great to just do nothing and rest. I was right for the first week it was great I got to see my family and friends and relax and do nothing, but then after that I was bored and wanted to come back here. I got so used to being able to do what I wanted and when I wanted that I forgot that when you go home you have to live according to what your parents want, which I was ok with but then there was the thing where I had nothing to do. My friends after the first week had gone on in their vacations and I had nothing to do. So, I needed something to do for three weeks. I needed a job. I could not stand not being able to do nothing so I finally ended up with a job. This was great because I needed some money and now I had something to do. That was how I spent my holidays. It was great to be home but I realized that now I am ready to be here and not be home sick anymore.

Part 1
1) Ethos (authority)- this is to establish creditability. This means that you need a good source and work needs to be cited.
Pathos (emotion) – this is when the writer connects with the emotions of the readers.
Logos (logic) – to write logically and make an argument with that is precise so that the readers can understand what the writer is writing about.

2) When writing a research paper it is a good idea to be as credible with your resources as possible and cite them. This will cause the readers to trust in authority. It is advantageous for you to get your reader to trust you as an authority because then you can persuade them to your point of view.

3) Some good strategies for appealing to emotions are by the use of sadness and grief. This can be used in a piece that contains natural disasters. One can talk about how many people suffered and died from the event.

4) There are potential disadvantages when using heavy appeal to emotion because the claim of the writer can be lost because the emotional part is to entertaining. The viewers of the work get so caught up in the emotional part of it that they forget the claim of the piece. An example of this are the coke commercials where there is so much going on that you forget that it is a coke add.

5) The ways you can use logos to build a strong argument by conveying across evidence and reason. This will support the point that the author is trying to get across. It is very important for the author to use logos when formulating a reasonable argument because if not the readers will loose interest.

6) Ethos, logos, and pathos are not separate from each other. Using them all in a paper can really grab a readers attention. An example to support my claim is that people will not read a paper if a credible person did not write it and they also want logic and emotion to be in it so that they can be interested while reading it.

Part 2
The article I real was by David G. Myers called “Do We Fear the Right Things?” This article I thought was very well written and interesting to read. At first when a reader reads the article it sounds like we are going to read about the different kinds of fear but in reality it is about something else. The article tries to tell the readers that we as people fear the wrong things because after 9/11 we have spent billions of dollars to protect the country but in reality there are dangers at home that kill more that terrorism itself like smoking and car accidents. The writer uses all of the three appeals. He uses ethos in the beginning as he quotes Oliver Wendell Homes. He also explains that many Americans feared flying even before 9/11 happened. Then he goes on to tell us how the Airlines have gone out of business because no one is flying anymore. The author uses pathos when he talks about all the people that died from 9/11 and he tries to prove that even though a lot of people died from the four crash a lot more have died from car accidents and smoking. He tried to appeal to the emotion this way. He also used logic when he says that, “Imagine, suggests mathematician Sam Saunders, that cigarettes were harmless—except for a single cigarette in every 50,000 packs that is filled with dynamite instead of tobacco. There would be a trivial risk of having your head blown off, yet enough to produce more gruesome deaths daily than occurred at terrorists’ hands on 9/11—surely enough to have cigarettes banned everywhere.” He tries to convey across that people should start taking on more concerns about how to improve on things that kill millions every year and not spend so much time on something we cannot control. He suggests that we should spend money to protect ourselves from terrorists but also as much on to save ourselves form preventing people to smoke and from car accidents. What happen on 9/11 was horrific to me personally and I would like as much protection form terrorism as possible but I also don’t want global warming so I think the author has a good point in his paper.

Part 1
Claim is something that needs support usually by an argument.
Supprort needs background information to support your claim. This is so that the audience believes that the claim is true.
Evidence is true fact that can be used to prove a claim correct.
Explanation is a clarification of the evidence that a writer presents.

Part 2

1. My immediate response to Crichton’s argument was that it made a lot of sense. It did make me think about the fact that in this world we do look for a higher power wether it be religious or something else. As I read the article the thing that stuck out the most to me was the point he made about facing our pasts and facing them squarley.

2. Crichton’s tone is a bit serious and filled with emotion. He feels very strong about the topic and he is trying to get the reader on his side by presenting facts and trying to get the readers angry about what is going on.

3. Crichton’s main claim is that people need to know the difference between fantasy and the truth. He uses environmentalism as a claim factor by giving examples of what is happening currentyl.

4. Crichton supports his claim by giving examples of predictions that were false that were made by biologists. The examples that he gives are statistical about how people would die of hunger or by a certain year some animals would be extint. Now we can see that these theorys were wrong because the years that these things were suppose to happen have passes; but we can see that people followed these biologists theories.

5. The reason that Crichton gives for not citing his sources is that he feels that no matter if he sites his paper of not he will not be able to change people views if they are set on them. I don’t agree with this if an argument is good I believe that people will give it a chance but I think that he should have cited his sources because without it I think it hurt his argument.

6.I think Crichton’s argument is strong but because he did not provide any sources it looses something and this is why i believe it is not a very powerful.